Tomáš Šenkyřík
Soundscapes of Brno, Human And Non-Human Sounds

The exhibition consists of a 4-6 channel sound installation based on a time-lapse sound survey of Brno parks, corners and pavilions in the spring-winter season. Graphically rendered spectrograms with decibel amplitudes will be projected on the gallery walls, linked to sound that combines non-human sounds (nature, technology) with human voices. In a smaller side space, the voices of people who are connected to certain places in Brno, such as parks, stations, streets, or even the House of Arts itself, will be available on headphones. In the interviews, they will talk about how they perceive a given place through sound, what soundscapes mean to them. There will also be interviews with homeless people who spend a lot of time in these places at different times of the day and seasons. The installation will highlight how noisy our civilisation is, how civilisation sounds overlap with nature sounds and how they interact with each other - for example, a plane or a truck passing through the Brno ring road forms a harmonious accompaniment to the spring song of the blackbird. The aim of the exhibition is to lead the listener to listen more carefully, to "open" his ear, to find sonic beauty where it is not there at first hearing, to record the interaction of sounds between geophony (sounds of rain, wind) and anthropophony (sounds created by humans).

Tomáš Šenkyřík studied musicology and aesthetics, worked as an ethnomusicologist at the Romani Museum in Brno, and is now the deputy mayor of Židlochovice. He composes electroacoustic music and makes field recordings mainly of natural environments. He focuses on sound phenomena of the interconnected cultural and natural spheres. He is a member of the group called Skupina and the international network CENSE.