Sjöbyskolan

Sjöbyskolan, located in the small community of Horred in western Sweden, have students from kindergarten to grade 6, and here, in 2007, Audiotechture created its first classroom installation.

     The basic starting point for the audio backdrop was to remove the border between outside and inside, and its purpose was twofold:  to create a pleasant sonic environment inside the classroom cancelling out a noisy air conditioning, and to create a loudness reference in the classroom aiming to be both self-sanitizing and normative.

     Referring to the latter, the teacher could select an element in the 6-channel surround sound system as reference and say: "When you're not able to hear the frogs above the bookcase there is too much noisy talking in here." To make this work in practice it requires a multichannel system, partly because it creates a sonic transparency allowing the total sound level to be minimized, and also to make isolated sound identifiable and easy to distinguish from the rest of the sounds.

     And to cut a long story short, the students quickly learned to detect the critical noise level thanks to the frogs and the teacher spared herself a lot of nagging.

The project was evaluated continuously during the spring semester of 2007, and as a result the classroom did get quieter and a better working environment for both teachers and students was achieved.