The Sonic Kayak is a sound installation and a musical and scientific instrument with which to investigate nature. Kayaks rigged with underwater environmental sensors generate live music from the marine world, providing the paddler with an extra dimension of senses with which to explore the underwater climate, while enabling citizens to gather important climate and environmental data. The system is fully open source and equipped with sensors for water temperature, water turbidity, underwater sound, and above water air particulate pollution, all recorded continually with GPS, time and date, enabling fine-scale mapping. All the sensors are sonified in real-time to the paddler, meaning that they can hear changes in the environmental data as they happen. As part of Gaudeamus CCU presents the data that has been captured over the past months during the exhibition Gardening Amelisweerd and new data captured in the waters surrounding the Werkspoorkwartier.
The Sonic Kayak is a commission by Creative Coding Utrecht (CCU) developed by creative technologist Mathijs Hasebos. The kayak is based on an open source system initiated by Amber & Dave Griffiths FoAM and Kaffe Matthews. is a transdisciplinary network working across art, science, nature and everyday life. Kaffe Matthews is a sound artist who works live with space, data, things, and place to make new electroacoustic compositions.