Sonification of Soil Contamination Data

Sonification of Soil Contamination Data renders environmental degradation as acoustic landscape, drawing from Ministry of Environment datasets documenting soil contamination across South Korea. The work layers field recordings of earth being dug with data-driven sonification and traditional Korean instruments, creating a sonic terrain where scientific measurement, physical gesture, and cultural mourning converge.

The field recordings capture the material act of penetrating soil: the scrape and shift of earth disturbed. These sounds anchor the work in bodily labour and direct contact with contaminated ground, establishing a textural foundation that resists abstraction. Over this base, contamination data manifests as synthesised frequencies, with different pollutant types and concentration levels mapped to distinct timbral characteristics that accumulate and interfere as toxicity rises.

Traditional Korean instruments enter as emotional counterpoint, their tones suggesting the earth's response to industrial violation. These instrumental passages don't function as decoration but as articulations of grief, embodying what environmental data cannot convey through measurement alone. The instruments carry cultural memory of relationships to land, making audible the rupture between inherited practices of care and contemporary patterns of extraction and disposal.

Sonification of Soil Contamination Data positions environmental crisis as something that must be encountered through multiple registers at once: as measurable fact, as material encounter, and as mourned loss. Scientific documentation alone cannot account for what has been damaged. The work creates a listening space where these dimensions coexist, where contamination data becomes inseparable from the physical labour of extraction and the cultural memory of what the soil once held.