I wonder what spring sounds like
Outdoor Sound Installation
Duration 1:45 hours
Activated every second full hour: 11:00, 13:00, 15:00
Does the voice call us to listen more than other sounds? What does that mean for our connection to soundscapes around us? Do we consider ourselves apart from the (sonic) environment or a part of it? Can voice elicit a stronger connection with other sonic presences?
At the transition from winter into spring, this installation explores the sonic environment of Sibelius Museum through human voices. Sounds of construction works, cars, bells, helicopters and birds – familiar sounds – are here present but in unfamiliar forms. Being is sung.
This installation aims to connect with the sonic environment by actively joining it. In the atrium, recorded human voices meet bird sounds and other sonic events. They perform simultaneously, yet in an asymmetrical relationship. The singers learn about the sonic environment by vocal re-creation of it. The environment becomes voice. Voice becomes sound. Through an embodied listening, the singers in this work attempt to “become” something through voice that they are not. They transform their voices prompted by sounds recorded on site. This leads to an exploration of the possibilities and the limits of a human voice. The singers are not identifiable as they lend their voices to the re-creation of the sonic environment. However, their breath surrounds their voice like wings, reminding us, that voice is breath and comes from body.
What can expressing our environment, translated by bodies into vocal sound, teach us about what it means to be human?
When we listen to our surroundings, we might be tempted to ignore or filter out human-made sounds. “I wonder what spring sounds like” resists such dichotomy of nature and culture – investigating the relationship we co-create with our environment through our listening and sounding bodies.
Can we re-connect differently with our environment if voices bridge the path? How do we produce and receive sounds? Can the nuances with which we give attention to voice influence our sympathy for other sonorities?
A bird bath invites birds from the surroundings to visit the installation and the atrium space. The human voices might trigger their curiosity. It is their choice. If they don’t use the birdbath, they will have their reasons, and an empty bird bath offers a possibility to contemplate how the world we create may or may not invite other beings into a safe co-existence.
Through a re-creation of the sonic environment, the artist Mareike Dobewall aspires to expand our capacity to act towards lives that are uniquely present and emergent. This is not only an imaginative exercise; it is tied to actual reality. Her music starts from listening. Here at the Sibelius Museum, right now, the sonic environment is active and alive. The sound installation is like a memory of two days, a weekday and a Sunday, in March 2025. How the installation sounds, changes by how the sounds on site vary during the day, days, and weeks of its presence. Mareike Dobewall’s composition negotiates concepts and impressions of humans and their environment, and reconfigures relationships within the soundscape.
Singers: Aino Lehtovaara, Flora Kok, Veera Syrén, Mareike Dobewall
Sound Design support: Aino Lehtovaara
Technical support: Jari Suominen
Producer/Titanik: Micol Curatolo
Producer/Sibelius Museum: Johannes Juva