Hyundai Olympic Pavilion Sound
WINNER 2018 | Category: Soundscapes & Ambient Sound
Entrant
why do birds GmbH
Abstract
Hyundai believes in hydrogen mobility which can be “The Seed of a new society”. For the Olympic Games 2018 in South Korea they wanted to bring this groundbreaking technology to life in an on-site pavilion. Our mission was to transform the Pavilion into an immersive experience through acoustic staging. We have installed soundscapes in all rooms.
Project description
Hyundai believes in hydrogen mobility which can be “The Seed of a new society” – a society where people have unlimited access to renewable, clean and affordable energy. This unlimited access will enable people to meet people, to experience new places, and to open up new opportunities.
As an official partner of the Olympic Winter Games 2018 in Pyeongchang, South Korea and a pioneer in the field of fuel cell technology Hyundai wanted to bring this groundbreaking, complex technology to life in an on-site pavilion. The pavilion delivers a journey on Hydrogen and water.
Our mission was to transform the Hyundai Pavilion into an immersive experience through acoustic staging. We have installed soundscapes in all rooms. You can hear underwater shots of finest bubbles, powerful sounds built on a scale that never stops rising. A sound passing through the building like a warm wind by means of convolution reverb technology.
The pavilion is composed of a super black facade, made using carbon based on nano-technology which absorbs almost all visible light. It is the darkest building in the world. The only things visible on it will be a 3D illuminated star field which will appear to be suspended in infinity, symbolizing the unknown potential of the future, like the night sky above us.
Water droplets in the Pavilion represent the seed of hydrogen. Visitors are interacting with the water and experience the “seed of the future”. 25,000 drops per minute are shot through the room by tiny water pumps to form a lake. The atmosphere is energetic – at the same time very quiet.
Four rooms focus on telling the story of how fuel cell technology works. Electric energy, water extraction, fuel cell stack technology and back to water. For the electric energy-chamber we created the illusion of an ever-rising tone symbolizing the charging of a car-battery. We extracted the smallest element out of a sound wave – a grain of sound – representing the separation of molecules. We applied wave form synthesis to merge a piano tone with the sound of wind, creating an etherial sound, representing the vastness of space. We produced underwater recordings with a hydrophone in order to translate the purity of H2O. The entire concept is held together by the Hyundai brand sound universe, creating a holistic, immersive brand experience.
3,500 enthusiastic, inspired and thrilled visitors per day visited the “darkest building on earth” and experienced the future of renewable and clean energy. The building provided visitors to the Olympic park an impressive, playful and expressive space to interact.
Project video