Leonie Roessler

Sound Installation

“Stop en Luister, Den Haag! is a series of six pieces documenting six different, sonically interesting locations in the city of The Hague. What does The Hague sound like? Are there sounds that we can find all around the city, defining it sonically and distinguishing it from other places? Will it sound different in five years, in ten years, in twenty years?

I carefully record my environment, sometimes returning at various times of the week and day, to be able to record all that a place has to offer. I select the most typical and interesting sounds, sometimes out of hours of material collected, and arrange it into a musical composition for the listener. I detect rhythms and patterns and layer them. I cut my sound files and use volume changes and panning, but never any effects. The goal is to provide a work that is artistically interesting while creating an authentic portrait of a place. I am preserving something that might be gone sooner than we expect. (Will there be drones flying through my recordings in the future? Will the trams be less characteristic once replaced with more current models? What will transportation sound like twenty years from now?)”