Voice of God
Communing with higher powers
London, 2016: For this year's Merge Bankside Festival, Bompas & Parr collaborated with Hilton Bankside to present an audio-based installation so powerful it appeared to connect guests with the supernatural.
An epic carnival-sized sound system, built into a structure designed to evoke the look of a gothic cathedral, broadcasted infrasound at 19 hertz – a frequency below the threshold of human hearing – but the resonant frequency of the human eyeball.
Inspirational investigations
Such low-frequency vibrations can cause the eyeball to distort through pressure rather than light. These infrasonic vibrations are considered by some psychologists to explain the odd sensations that some people attribute to religious and supernatural experiences, especially when powerful pipe organs generate loud music in churches.
