_Only Expansion

Only Expansion is an immersive audio experience in which participants walk through a physical site with sounds overlaid. With their pair of headphones and a guidebook, participants are invited to explore the city, choose their own route, and experience our tangled ecology through sound. Participants hear the sound of rampant wildfires in the United States, the crumbling cliffs of England’s east coast, rising seas around Norway, and the eroding windy dunes of the Northern Sahara. In this site-responsive audio tour, participants will be prompted to observe their environment in both immediate and geologic timescales, bringing attention to how the landscape might alter under climate collapse.

Using real-time audio software, Only Expansion remixes the actual sounds of the city  with recorded sounds of rapid environmental change in progress. By picking up ambient sounds through the microphone and applying real-time modulation of these sounds, this piece uses a variety of audio techniques to build and release narrative tension. In this way, in bringing the sounds of climate change to an urban space,Only Expansion evokes a sense of immediacy to a future of planetary crisis.