From the Archives: Auralex® Acoustical Treatment Solutions Employed at “Silent Room” at South By Southwest 2016
Posted by Auralex on 11th Jan 2024
#AuralexThrowbackThursday
From the Archives:
Auralex® Acoustical Treatment Solutions Employed at “Silent Room” at South By Southwest 2016
This #AuralexTBT features the contemporary art installation by Dutch artist Simon Heijdens, who created the “Silent Room” commissioned by the 2016 South By Southwest (SXSW) festival in Austin, Texas. Located in the heart of the festival’s main attractions and events, the Silent Room was an anechoic space filtering out any sound or color and offered a break from the sensory overload of the festival surroundings. Silent Room was developed by Heijdens throughout 2015 in collaboration with the Acoustics department of the University of Texas at Austin and Auralex Acoustics, who advised on and supplied the acoustical treatment solutions necessary for the room’s anechoic effect. Auralex products used in this installation include SheetBlok™ Sound Barrier, U-Boat™ Floor Floaters, Mineral Fiber and StopGap™ Acoustical Sealant.
The room, a 40-foot-long matte black building, made fully soundproof and anechoic through an acoustic decoupling of spaces, allowed visitors to pass through the space lit by a sole monochromic light, “excluded from any other visual or audible manifestation but themselves – a rare, completely unmediated state. Eventually, as ears and senses adapt, the visitor becomes the sound in the monochrome silence,” as the artist states.
The work had its first exhibition at SXSW Austin, Texas, in March 2016, after which it was exhibited in Washington DC in January 2017, IFFR in January 2018, and ART Rotterdam in February 2018. Simon Heijdens has additional works in the permanent collections of MoMA New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, Boijmans van Beuningen Museum Rotterdam, and the Victoria & Albert Museum London, among others.