Submerged beneath the waterline, mariners rest below deck between watches – their cradle song is the aching sounds of a ship against water. A nautical soundtrack transports wayfarers to a vast and veiled world – a subaquatic acoustical mirage. By the Sound of Things by Kate Davies uses sound to take passengers under the sea to experience a subaqueous acoustic landscape. Featuring deep sea hydrophone recordings depicting the marine ecosystem disrupted by man-made ship noise, this hypnotic binaural sound work tells the story of the journey of a container as it travels from the surface to the bottom of the ocean. An accompanying film focuses on the world above water presents a collision of the extraordinary and the banal that defines the image of global sea trade – an absurd narrative of ordinary things. Containers loaded and unloaded, the rhythmic motions of cranes performing an industrial-scale ballet, the transporting vessels of the global shipping industry forge sonic trails across oceans to bring us our things; the necessary and frivolous, the coveted and the disposable.
