Matthieu Saladin

La capture de l’inaudible (publication)

2019

Software Edition on SD card and silkscreen booklet, including a text by Jonathan Sterne

That which is inaudible is here understood to mean that which belongs to the realm of sounds that cannot be heard because they are below or beyond the spectrum audible to the human ear, or masked by other louder sounds emitted simultaneously or almost simultaneously. However the word is also used to refer to that which lies outside the hearing, or rather the understanding of a group, a community, or even a society, in so far as it is socially, culturally and historically constructed, in other words that which cannot be heard because it remains unintelligible to this group, this community or this society, according once again to the impact of thresholds and masking effects. Thus a political meaning is added to the phenomenological sense of the inaudible, without it actually being possible to draw a clear line between the two, especially when one approaches listening as a sense conditioned by the apparatuses used to facilitate it (as indeed all the senses are), or in other words “aided” listening even where no visible device is used.

The software acts like a reverse mp3 encoder. Where a classical mp3 encoder removes inaudible frequencies to reduce the size of an audio file, the reverse encoder gives these frequencies to listen, removing what the mp3 format usually keeps.

More info here: https://artkillart.org/la-capture-de-linaudible/