On Sunday, it will have been 25 years since the Berlin Wall dividing East and West Germany was torn down. To commemorate the fall, SoundCloud is partnering with Grey Advertising to launch The Berlin Wall of Sound, an acoustic art project meant to give you a soundscape representing life around the wall.
It’s a rather intense and grueling listen, if a bit abstract., but there are are a number of thoughtful design points to make it more than just a tense sound clip.
The piece is 7 minutes and 32 seconds long, which is equal to the time it would have taken a sound wave to travel the length of the wall. It’s littered with shouts from border guards, sounds of gunfire, and quotes from authorities responsible for the wall. The Soundcloud sound wave even reconstructs the wall’s shape.
Instead of SoundCloud’s usual community discussion along a clip’s waveform, the ‘comments’ presented are representative of the victims who died while trying to cross the wall.
It’s not just a thoughtful gesture from the company though – SoundCloud’s headquarters are located in Germany, next to where the structure use to stand. The Wall of Sound will be on SoundCloud’s homepage from today until Monday.
➤ The Berlin Wall of Sound [SoundCloud]
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