ANH-00

In a forest, vocal organisms such as birds, insects and frogs may have evolved to partition frequencies and time so that their signals do not mask one another. Soundscape ecologist Bernie Krause proposed this idea as the Acoustic Niche Hypothesis.

ANH-00 brings this hypothesis into physical space through artificial life. Five units placed throughout the venue listen to their surroundings through microphones and return the voices of evolving digital agents to the environment through speakers. Each unit contains more than one hundred agents that communicate with one another through sound. A sound emitted by one unit reaches the microphones of the others, influencing the agents’ evolution across the boundaries of the hardware. As environmental sounds and other agents’ voices occupy portions of the frequency spectrum, the agents alter their vocalisations towards the openings that remain within acoustic space.

Their evolution unfolds in real time throughout the exhibition. Some of the resulting sounds extend beyond the range of human hearing, and the acoustic environment is continually rewritten by activity that no human listener can perceive in its entirety.

The work does not reproduce the sounds of nature. It neither plays back a recorded forest nor composes harmonious music. Instead, it introduces digital agents as a new population inhabiting the acoustic space of a place, creating the conditions from which an artificial acoustic ecosystem can emerge through interaction with its existing environment. Here, the ecosystem is not an object to be contemplated, but an instrument that continually recomposes itself as it sounds.