What if the sounds of the past could be heard?
What if these sounds could be captured & shared?
What would this sonic history tell us?
SHSH asks the audience to reconsider history - and their place within it - as an infinite tapestry of tiny, interconnected moments
“There’s magic brewing in a tucked away spot… conjured by some of the most exciting downtown artists.”
— TYA Today Magazine
SHSH is…
Interactive Installation
Invisible layers of history come alive as audiences browse a vast sonic archive – shelves of glowing jars, each containing a unique “sonic specimen” from the neighborhood’s past.
Hold them in your hand and check the label to discover details about who, or what, has existed here before.
Participatory Performance
Audiences learn how these eternal frequencies are found and preserved. Led by Sound Scientists equipped with ‘sound hunting’ technology, audiences are led in a participatory excavation - or ‘sound hunt’ - to locate, extract, preserve, and catalog sonic specimens within the event site.
Audiences work together to identify and capture sounds into jars, transcribing their findings onto field labels and adding them to the growing sonic archive.
TeamSHSH.org
The sound hunt continues at home as participants pull up the SHSH website on their devices. A unique archive access code - handed out by SHSH scientists on site - unlocks the Sonic Archive in the digital realm and invites users to submit sound samples from wherever they are.
Sounds from their own neck of the woods are added to sonic artifacts from around the globe.”
“A secret interactive play-space where the forgotten stories of the surrounding neighborhood come to life.”
- TIME OUT NY
Production History
UP CLOSE Festival, New Ohio Theater, NY, New York, December, 2019
The Listening Lab, Trusty Sidekick Theater Company, Astoria Performing Arts Center, Queens, NY, November 2021
Theater for Young Audiences/USA Festival and Conference, Childsplay, Tempe, AZ, May 2023
Recipient of Write Now Dorothy Webb Award 2023
Future Development
Completion of virtual interactive experience extension (TeamSHSH.org), September 2023
Babble Lab (Center for Digital Humanities Pedagogy and Research), Pace University, New York, NYC, expected spring semester 2024
