Julien Clauss
DIAPH (2018)
soundwalk with headphones and map device
ca. 30’

DIAPH is a soundwalk device consisting of a mechanical headphone that composes site-specific acoustic transformations. It looks like a headphone but it has mechanical valves instead of speakers. The user’s ears are covered by motor-controlled diaphragms inspired by the photographic shutter. Programmed and written as a musical composition especially for the route to be taken, the diaphragms rotate to modulate the ambient sound.

DIAPH offers a physical-acoustic, aesthetic, and techno-critical reading of the urban soundscape to visitors, who embark on their soundwalk with the aid of a map. Mostly drawing on continuous and broad-spectrum noises, the headphone creates singular non-naturalistic soundscapes. Listening to the distances, spaces, silences and spatialities of traffic in the city, a dense aesthetic world of stimulating complexity and spectral beauty emerges.