Cristian Subirà /sound documentalist/










 



Signal Extraction

Investigation Phase
Sound Design 
Kone Foundation Grant - 2025
Sipoonkorpi National Park, Finland

Signal Extraction is a sound art project, aiming to elucidate the one-sided interspecies communication provoked by the widespread dissemination of sounds in our hyper-industrialized era.

By utilizing trees as receptors to collect frequencies for subsequent manipulation, the project delves into the intricacies of arboreal communication networks, drawing inspiration from historical experiments such as General George Owen Squier's tree-based radio connections. While tree communication experienced a brief resurgence during the Vietnam War, its mainstream adoption became anachronistic with technological advancements.

This initiative serves as a critique of extractivism, emphasizing the importance of listening to and through 'the other' in a world where non-human entities are often marginalized. This form of listening is symbolic, as trees do not have specialized organs to perceive sound like our sense of hearing; instead, they have sophisticated mechanisms to detect and respond to vibrations at the cellular level. Avoiding animistic beliefs and idealizations of nature, the project examines the impact of human influence on the environment, particularly through the lens of noise pollution and the ambiguities in its legal and environmental dimensions.

As the Earth's soundscape undergoes perpetual transformation due to industrial overdevelopment, understanding the complexities of our acoustic environment becomes paramount, especially in managing non-audible frequencies.