Timeless Space

Discovery wheel stop reimagined by Chow Ow Wei.

"This space-themed sound piece is inspired by the alteration of time dimension. Two concepts are considered in space: duration is stretchable and thus the perception on earthly sound events is brought to a new view; electronic communication via the wave signal is the primary cognitive means of facts and resemblance of existence in space traveling. 

The sound piece is constructed in a simple form. Each segment is marked with the entrance of print/ dial tones and audible speech such as ‘Beginning’, ‘Wheels On’, ‘Discovery Welcome Back + A Great Evening to the New Beginning’. Apart from the provided sound sample by NASA, sound manipulation in my work involves only two samples of a dot-matrix printer and a dial-up modem with which I created a number of variations mainly by digitally altering the sound properties of pitch, time and reverberation. All perceivable melodies, harmonisation, and ‘instrumental’ timbres are extracted and operated from these samples, as if time disappears and the sounds have almost lost their gravity in space. Therefore, the idea to imagine the so-called inaudible being of space is that we ‘hear’ the most delicate pitches clearer in such a dimension when time is virtually absent."

Part of the Space is the Place project - for more information, see http://www.citiesandmemory.com/space