24 hours, 5 gardens and 1 digital recorder

What do you hear when you listen to the Earth?

The World Listening Project invites you to participate in "Listen to the Earth," a global event that happens during Earth Week. Listen to the Earth activities include listening to one's soundscape, field recordings, soundwalks, performances, other practices that pertain to acoustic ecology, and more.
 

http://act.earthday.org/event/listen-earth-2012


http://www.worldlisteningproject.org/
 

My answer :

“24 hours, 5 gardens and 1 digital recorder”

a series of field recordings in the seaside "Nea Paralia" of Thessaloniki.

Listen to the track 

As an inhabitant of a Greek city, I find it very hard to come across nature in my everyday life. Unlike other European cities with numerous vast parks like Munich, Stockholm, e.t.c. Thessaloniki lacks one, so the seaside is the only opportunity to Listen To The Earth!

On the seaside of Thessaloniki a new architectural project of urban regeneration is taking place. The architects of the project, Prodromodos Nikiforidis and Bernard Cuomo, succeeded in making a high quality urban space, even if parts of their design were not accomplished. The seaside of the city is a very strong limit between the city and the sea, man and nature. The design proposal uses as a first guideline the previous statement and as a second, the idea of appropriation; People feel free to use the urban space and express themselves as they pleased.

At the present time, April 2012, the design is separated in five gardens (the other ones are under construction). These gardens have strong natural elements, which I would like to highlight using my field recordings as an approach to the main question, What do you hear when you listen to the Earth?

The field recordings held during the night of 20-21^th of April and during the midday of 21^th of April. After selecting the ones I found more interesting, I reorganized their sequence in order to match the architectural pattern of the gardens. First you will listen to “the garden of music” during the nighttime and afterward during the daytime. The second one is “the garden of water” which has by far the most natural elements combined (also nighttime and midday), third is “the garden of memory”, forth “the garden of roses” and last “the garden of sound”. During the final minute you can listen to the seaside being resonated by the strong wind.

As a result I would like to stress how powerful listening is and how intensely you can experience the architectural environment through that sense. Moreover, considering the different natural elements, space qualities change drastically between day and night (birds during the daytime, frogs during nighttime, windy days, e.t.c.). These changes occur in such ways that traditional means of architectural design cannot predict.