“From the Mara to Monheim”, 2023
Grove at the Wanderparkplatz (hikers’ car park)
The project of the English musician and sound artist Chris Watson plays with the idea of meteorological temperature inversion (also: reversal weather situation), which carries sounds of an equatorial soundscape from a river woodland in the Masai Mara, a nature reserve in Kenya, into a small inner-city grove near the old town of Monheim am Rhein.
A temperature inversion is a weather phenomenon that occurs when air temperature increases with altitude and colder air near the ground is trapped by a warmer layer of air above. Under these conditions, sound waves are reflected from the boundary layer back to the ground, causing sound to travel much farther than usual.
