The Sound of Copper Being Refined

Louis d'Heudières developed a new sound composition for the exhibition If a Tree Falls in a Forest and No One Is Around, Does It Even Make a Sound? Hearing Pinkish-Orange, Soft, Malleable and Ductile made audible the invisible relationships between copper mining and processing and the individual emotional experience of sound. In a mixture of field recordings and self-written and sung songs, d'Heudières told the multidimensional story of millennia-old liquid magma in the earth's core, circuits, cables and loudspeaker membranes as well as his own experience as a composer, artist and consumer of music.

To this end, d'Heudières also made recordings at the Veddel site of the Hamburg copper producer Aurubis. Using a spectrogram, he converted the audio data into visuals so that the temporal sequence, volume and frequency spectrum of the acoustic signals became visible. D'Heudières transferred this sound image into ten drawings by hand. Yellow tones signal a high volume, while blue and purple refer to quiet moments. The lower picture space is dedicated to low tones and the upper one to high tones.