Audioscan: the alchemy of noise transmuted into music

audioscan is an artistic project conceived by Giorgio Sancristoforo, produced by AGON in collaboration with basemental. The project consists of a multimedia interactive installation and of a live performance combining music and video. Both are based on the sound mapping of Milan.

At the basis of audioscan there are 1.580 recordings and phonometric surveys gathered within the perimeter contained in the main ring road of Milan.
A process of meeting and exchange between contemporary art, music and environmental themes, a meditation on soundscape and the auditive dimension of human experience, both on an aesthetic and a social perspective.

An ambitious cataloguing work and an environmental awakening project through the transformation of a waste product of technological society – noise – into an artwork.

" [...] Essentially, noise is an ambiguous entity, setting up in a fluctuating reality, whose definition changes according to the coordinate system used to measure it.

Sounds can be sculpted. We can use noise as raw material to start with. Noise is at the same time “no sound” and all the possible sounds. Just as white light contains all the colours, noise contains countless sounds.

Therefore, instead of using musical instruments we have ground and crumbled noise in very fine components, building from these elements orchestras made up of roads and airplanes, people and cars. We have created music from a scrap of our society.

Everything is transformed. Nothing resembles anymore its former essence. Airplanes become microscopic percussions, cars are turned into metallic pianos and rubbery basses, hollow murmurs and waterish illusions.

Braking and tailpipes screeches become tides of the thinnest strings.

We have animated a deep transformation, resembling closely the alchemic processes: actually, we have performed the alchemy of noise transmuted into music.

The city, unaware of the transformations undergone, perpetuates its rhythms and mood intact. This is why those sounds, even if unrecognizable, still describe Milan, with its chaotic passages and deep breaths, with its syncopated rhythms and the feeling, peculiar to an ocean, of being constantly wound by countless mutations."

Audioscan (#1) MILANO - FULL by Giorgio Sancristoforo

"I listen to the music of Audioscan again, and I realize how much it’s melancholic.

Milan is melancholic. Not sad. A gloom which could belong to Calvino works, a blues pervading the streets, in the morning, creeping like a cat between porches and boulevards, between old mansions and post-war eyesores. The same melancholy that smoothes the cold when I stroll around, ravished by the decadence of Civic Aquarium or sitting on the lawns of San Lorenzo Basilica, while besides me the city keeps darting in sound tidal waves." - Giorgio Sancristoforo

[audioscan.it]