Calindros, a sound envelope of two cities, is a project conceived as acoustic cartography that merges two iconic sounds: on one hand, the chimes of Berlin and, on the other, the cilindreros —also known as organ grinders— of Mexico City. The project was born as a collaboration between two sound artists, each taking the audible material of their own city as a reference, where both chimes and organ grinders play a particular social role. Their recordings become the source of a virtual soundscape that visitors can walk through and manipulate from an abstract visual interface that reveals the timbral similarities and relationships between both groups of sounds.
The roughly four hours of recordings were automatically segmented into thousands of fragments, and audio descriptors were extracted from each one to build a database for timbral similarity search. In each exploration a “territory” of a thousand timbrally close sounds is generated and scattered in 3D space. The chime sounds are associated with cones and the organ-grinder sounds with dodecahedra; the colour of each object follows the average pitch of its sound, from red for low sounds to yellow for high ones. A third group of cylindrical objects plays fragments previously processed with sound synthesis. Headphones are recommended.
Recordings in Berlin and audio processing: Ana María Rodríguez (DE). Recordings in Mexico, graphics and programming: Hugo Solís (MX).
