Soundscape 2 Singing Sand, Somewhere Close To Us BirkBeck & Duffy
The Sand Project is an ongoing artistic investigation by the artists Birkbeck & Duffy into phenomen aassociated with Singing Sand. Singing Sand, Somewhere Close to Us is the first in a series of collaborative exhibitions concerned with the visual and aural re-imagining of ‘dune song’, the sound emitted by sand during avalanches.
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“Somewhere, close to us, in an undefined direction, a drum was beating, the mysterious drum of the dunes; it was beating distinctly, sometimes more vibrating, sometimes weakened, stopping, then taking again its fantasticbearing.” ?Guy de Maupassant (1883)
Using the language of the writer and explorer as a starting point, the works created examine this enduring phenomenon that has captivated travellers for thousands of years with its seemingly supernatural song and has since become an ongoing controversial area of scientific study.
The observation of the controlled scientific experiments into the natural phenomena of singing sand, whilst undertaking a residency at the Morphodynamic Lab Paris University 7 have allowed the artists to merge the qualitative with the quantitative, shifting and intertwining the aural and visual focus in order to reveal resonances and echoes of sublime qualities ingranular friction. www.singingsand.org