The OTONOUMI project is a collaboration team of artists and scientists. In June 2013, we performed four sessions about the relationship between what can be told and what disappears without being told, a relationship which often arises when large-scale social events, such as natural disasters or wars, complete themselves as a tale handed down to future generations.

Otonoumi (the sea of sound) is a sensory sound system through which the whole soundscape is autonomously developed through interaction with people and the environment; it is an artificial life form without a body. There are two different zones surrounded by a total of eight 3D sensors in “Otonoumi”:

One zone is the “The Life Zone,” where people can be involved in sound selection and change the soundscape. Another is “The Death Zone,” where the sound files which died after not being selected by the people in “The Life Zone” are chopped up, re-assembled, and fly around the inside of the space.

In the Death Zone, the group of sounds moves autonomously on the inside of the space, and becomes responsive only through the touch of people and objects. The harmony generated from the time structure of these two sounds enables the structure of the world to be heard.

How has “the relationship between what can be told and what disappears without being told” on the historical front stage influenced our present individual and collective consciousness? We link this concept with the system structure of “Otonoumi,” which is a soundscape generated by chains of selection, in interaction with that which is discarded from selection.