TRACEY FAHY

This diptych appropriates Stephen Gill’s Audio Portraits (individuals wearing headphones with their musical choices as captions). The images are layered with spectrograms** of the tunes they are listening to, concealing the person’s identity and symbolising the desire of the individual to maintain a sense of privacy by creating a ‘mobile sound bubble’ that turns urban streets into private contemplation zones. (2016)

“…..as users become immersed in their mobile media sound bubbles, so those spaces they habitually pass through in their daily lives may increasingly lose significance for them and progressively turn into the ‘non-spaces’ of daily lives which they try, through those self same technologies, to transcend.” – Michael Bull

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*Named after Michael Bull’s book Sounding Out the City (2000), which augments our understanding on auditory experience of self and place.
**A spectrogram is a graphic representation of the frequency, intensity, duration, and variation with time of the resonance of a sound or series of sounds.