Light and Sound Installation, 2009
Neville Street, Leeds, UK
LEDs, Polycarbonat rods, loudspeakers, electronics
100 m x 5 m

As a part of the renovation of the Neville Street tunnel under Leeds' central railway station this installation was created to change the appearance of a heavily used city passageway for many thousands of inhabitants every day. It is a tunnel for cars and pedestrians, so it has quite a high sound level, due to the car traffic. It was decided to install sound-damping materials at the walls, which reduces the traffic noises and take away the reverberation and echo of the site. The sound installation responds to this situation, by adding a constant 8-channel piece of music, that is at about the same level as the traffic noises and by this almost not audible at hight traffic situations with many cars passing, well audible in quiet moments and generally filling up the aural space between the cars, The result is a calmer acoustic situation. A computer picks randomly between 1 and 5 compositions out of a complete number of approx. 500, decides when each piece starts and stops and mixes the pieces with random level settings. This way the sound in the tunnel will never repeat. People going through the tunnel in the morning will hear something different then in the evening and tomorrow something different then today. The program is laid out that it will never repeat the same combination.

Parallel to this soundwork there is a lightinstallation with approx. 3000 LEDs along one wall of the 100 m long tunnel. The LEDs are laid out in vertical and horizontal lines and a computer decides randomly which lines at which lengths shall light up, creating a pattern of vertical and horizontal lines. The pattern changes once a day in the early morning hours and also these patterns will never repeat.