Wellington Mayor Celia Wade-Brown at the Sonic Well in Lower Cuba St, which will be unveiled on Saturday and allow people to talk to others in Canakkale and Sydney.

Cuba St revellers will soon be able to chat with Turks and Aussies round the clock through virtual sound wells.

Sonic Wells, an art installation by Australian Allan Giddy, will open on Saturday, connecting Wellington with Canakkale in Turkey and Auburn in Sydney.

The Wellington well will collect ambient sounds, which will be transmitted live and emitted from its sister wells overseas, as if via virtual holes through the earth.

The audio from each well will be clear enough that people will be able to hold conversations via the internet from one location to another through waterproof microphones and speakers fitted inside each well.

Wade-Brown said it would be a bit like Skype. Hopefully without the static.

​Canakkale on the Dardanelles is the closest city to where the Gallipoli landings took place, and serves as a base for those wanting to visit the battlegrounds of World War I.

It's the third time Giddy has linked cities through wells. In 2008, he trialled a sonic link-up between a bustling Beijing station and Sydney's relatively deserted Olympic Park Station during the Beijing Olympics.

Live audio from the street outside the Beijing station, combined with audio recorded inside, was streamed into the empty Olympic Park Station, where rail users found themselves surrounded by the bustle and hum of the Beijing station.

The second time, Giddy's wells connected Sydney to Cobh, a coastal town in Ireland. The Irish well was outside a popular pub, where patrons took liberties singing songs and telling stories into the well.



Turkish ambassador Damla Yesim Say will sign a memorandum of understanding with Wellington Mayor Celia Wade-Brown on Saturday, joining the two centres as sister cities.

"Beijing is a [Wellington] sister city that we're doing a lot with in the current economic cultural field but [with Canakkale] we're looking back, it's honouring more of a retrospective relationship," Wade-Brown said.

"People who have been to the Gallipoli Peninsula say there's such similarities with Wellington, and I think Canakkale is one of the greenest Turkish cities."

The Sonic Wells will open in all three locations at the same time on Saturday, April 23: it will be 6pm NZ time in Wellington, 9am in Canakkale, and 4pm in Sydney.

On Anzac Day, a minute's silence will take place at each of the wells: at 6am in Wellington, 8am in Auburn and 3pm in Canakkale.

The wells will remain until July 24.