Cryptic

Composition (Etienne Legast, Simone D’Ambrosio), Concept (Yannick Guéguen)

Invisible Places | Sounding Cities, Jardins Efemeros

Cryptic offers a parallel audio reality in real time that responds to the listener’s movements through the city. This interactive composition of forms and sounds works in harmony with the listener’s surroundings and the structure of each site. This project reimagines the city, enriching it with a creative, audible, sensory experience.

The project involves the placement of geometric shapes in open spaces such as parks, woods, and parking lots – spaces that are significant to the area. These shapes are generated using a programme we have developed and may be accessed through an iPhone application that is available free from the App Store. They will be generated by a series of geolocated points to form circles, triangles, squares, rectangles, straight lines, and a combination of these shapes that will blend in with the aesthetic organization of the area in which they are situated, reflecting its geometry, dialoguing with it, or offering a new formal proposition that contrasts with the existing one..

This project addresses environmental questions around ambient sound, atmosphere, tone, and the act of listening to city sounds in general. It has a certain utopic element, allowing the listener to reconfigure the city with a new audio reality, modifying his or her movements to create the sound texture of his or her journey. Defying urban geometry and producing a new order of sound, these geometric shapes offer a new way to experience the city! Through workshops, performances, concerts, soundwalks and sound installations we intend to transform Viseu into an acoustically conscious city. For this time, it will be a special place of intersection between art, science and life.