SENTiMENT is a project that explores the elements of the soundscape of the city of València, which interprets and visualises how the city is transformed during the Fallas season, and how these changes define us, give us identity and make us think about the city through listening.
The project invites you to visit two complementary devices: the Centre Cultural La Nau of the Universitat de València hosts an immersive sound installation called SENT; MENT is a second artefact in the form of an interactive light installation located at the Valencian Museum of the Enlightenment and Modernity (MuVIM).
SENT is a sensory, hearing and sensitive exploration of the mascletà as a central element of the sound identity of the city of València. This serves as a trigger for the display of a deconstructed and reconfigured soundscape with which we can reflect on how we feel the mascletà beyond the event, as a vital sound symbol of a festivity such as the Fallas.
MENT, on the other hand, explores, from the absence of sound and from the visualisation of data, how the city of València sounds the rest of the year and how the interim state of the Fallas serves to catalyse a new way of feeling the cities. A form of graphic and quantitative rationalisation, with data that generate a visual and urban landscape that seethes with activity.
SENT
Reactive Sound Installation - Loudspeakers, programme and lighting
The installation recreates on a sound scale a mascletà made up of diverse sound samples that are articulated in a generative way to create a new way of experiencing this event that is part of the city's intangible heritage.
The work unfolds in a space of sensory deprivation where the spectator and listener is surrounded by darkness in order to sharpen the sense of hearing, capable of making us travel and vibrate with the emotional power of this pyrotechnic act.
The soundscape that unfolds in the exhibition space is the result of reconfiguring the sounds and pyrotechnic structures of the mascletà and other soundscapes linked to the Fallas and their sound and musical reinterpretation.
The sounds that make up this sound installation come from recordings of the urban soundscape of València throughout the month of March. These sounds, which are intangible heritage, are intermingled with a whole plethora of sounds and sonorities that allude to, reinterpret or add layers of meaning, metaphor and fun to the Fallas soundscape as a whole.
The authors of the proposal have used information from the València City Council's open data portal as graphic scores. The set of this data is the DNA that draws the sound of this act of civic communion, the data and the graphics that draw them turn out to be sound scores.
The piece has an interactive element that transforms the sound piece and adapts it to each visitor in the exhibition space, feeling its presence through an electronic sensor system.
SENT seeks to change the mascletà and reinterpret it from a contemporary perspective and conceptual, musical and sound deconstruction, thus making us reflect on its place in society and how we build tradition, legacy and collective identity through listening.
MENT
Visual and Light Installation - Projectors, microphones, data and software
MENT is an interactive installation that builds a visual and abstract landscape created using sustainability data from the València al Minut portal of the smart city of València. This data contributes positively to the challenges of green cities such as cycling, the use of city buses, the reduction of road traffic, the improvement of air quality and waste recycling.
MENT has three elements. On the one hand, we have a large digital timeline that shows the above data displayed in a large abstract landscape, which is affected at the same time by a constant and permanent element in our daily lives: the soundscape. This large mural of the city presents us with an abstract landscape created from data and the real-time interaction of visitors.
On the other hand, there is a neighbourhood system, which generates a series of light works that are pictorial abstractions of every corner of the city.
The last element of MENT is a system that listens to the immediate environment to capture a key element of the soundscape: the speech, languages and tongues spoken in our city. This capturing system generates a flow of text where we can appreciate the cosmopolitan richness of a city like València in the middle of Fallas.
MENT is like a small brain that analyses and brings us back to the visible field how Valencians live the city and make it vibrate in a positive way. These data and their unstoppable dance, at the same time, are altered by the constant and invariable flow of the urban soundscape, always present, changing, chaotic and unpredictable.
