unheard
FREQUENCY
INAUDIBLE / SUB / 18HZ
INAUDBL.
SUB-AUDIBLE
WAVES
PHYSICS INVOLVED
Below twenty hertz a wave stops being a sound and becomes pressure. The ear registers nothing; the chest, the water and the ground carry it for hundreds of kilometres.
Field note: attenuation is what makes it useful. Low frequencies lose almost nothing over distance, so the signal outlives the animal that made it.
1.00.50.0 52060 PRESSURE / FREQUENCY HZ
UNHEARD SIGNAL
Silent nature sounds like an oxymoron, but the quietest landscape is loud below the threshold of hearing. Storms, wingbeats and moving water all push air at frequencies the ear cannot resolve. It carries anyway, unheard in plain air, addressed to whatever is built to receive it.
ATTENUATION OVER DISTANCE / 4 STATIONS
PROPAGATION AT DISTANCE
FIG 01 / WAVE FIG 02 / BAFFLE
Infrasound has given the landscape a second range. Birds, elephants and whales answer signals we cannot detect, and the source is often already gone. It sits outside the usual limits of a soundscape: nothing is audible to the naked ear, and the recording only opens up once it is sped up, which adds a surreal element of surprise to the listening.
MIGRATION
zero decibels
zero silence
with zero audible
trace
ZERO.
Pressure below the hearing floor
HIDDEN MESSAGES
RECORD THEM
Sound is a medium of communication, a coded language spoken by those built to hear it. Pushed below twenty hertz, those codes get more mysterious still. Calls and warnings travel all around us, silently carrying narratives or simply marking territory. The low band operates under the radar, a soundscape rich with its own meanings and unspoken rules.
The signal sits well under the hearing floor, so a windshielded microphone and a long recording are enough to uncover it. Reading it is the harder half. Ordinary meters ignore the band entirely, and the methods that do resolve it pick up every truck for miles.
UNHEARD
Field
26
FIELD RECORDINGS MADE ON A PHONE
18 HZ
EXPERIMENTAL / CONCEPTUAL POSTER
UNHEARD FIELD, EDITION 26
ALL SIGNALS SHOWN BELOW 20 HZ
UF
TRK/00188827/26/SUBHZ/0/BX/3   0000-3651-HZ
PHYSICS INVOLVED
DETECTION AND RECORDING