Twice a day, 450 speakers around Hobart are broadcasting a soundscape that is eerie, dark and beautiful. Would Melbourne or Sydney get away with that?

It’s a clear evening, just on dusk, days away from the shortest day of the year. We are in a helicopter flying above the Derwent River, into the Hobart sunset.

The pilot gets a phone call with clear instructions: at 4:44pm he’s to drop lower and make his approach towards the city.



Attached to the undercarriage are speakers that have been painted black. When a signal is triggered from a mobile phone on land, held by artist Hannah Fox , there emits from the speakers on the chopper – and 450 similar speakers attached to buildings throughout the city – a strange and beautiful sound. It’s a woman’s voice that sounds part keening, part opera, part dirge and part call to prayer.



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We make a circuit of Macquarie Point, then over the Hobart CBD. From above we can see a thread of gold: car headlights signalling rush hour. We fly low over the wharf towards the Grand Chancellor hotel, which has a bank of speakers on its roof.

The song lasts around seven minutes – the time it takes for the sun to fully set. The work happens every day at sunset and also at dawn during this year’s Dark Mofo, the city’s annual midwinter arts festival.

Siren Song, a sound work made by Melbourne sound artist Byron J Scullin and curatorial team Supple Fox (Tom Supple and the aforementioned Fox) is a unique collaboration that impresses not just as work of art but also as a feat of logistics, planning and cooperation with local government and business.

It also highlights the extent to which Hobart has embraced the experimental Dark Mofo. It is hard to imagine the city councils of Melbourne or Sydney agreeing to rig up their CBD buildings with speakers blasting siren songs at dawn and dusk.

On the face if it, the work is understandably objectionable: it’s loud, it travels across the city into the sleeping suburbs, and no one signed up to it.

good 🥚 egg (@2kuu_co) The siren sound is playing through Hobart and someone walking past just yells "SHUT THE FUCK UP"

A small number of letters to the local paper the Mercury register objection. One person wrote in this week saying that work was a like gateway drug to the acceptance of Sharia law – once you adjust to the Siren Song at dawn and dusk, they reasoned, it’s a slippery slope to the call to prayer. But that complaint – and criticism more broadly – is very much on the fringe.

I spoke to more than a dozen Hobartians this week about the effect the work has had on their city, and their faces lit up. They try and set their watches it to, so they can get outside and hear it. It will be missed when its gone, a builder in North Hobart tells me.

A few days earlier, watching and listening to the work from the ground at the wharf is reminiscent of what a religious visitation or UFO sighting might be like. People register the spooky sound, look around to see where it might be coming from (it seems to come from everywhere; it seems to come from the sky itself), then clock the helicopter coming towards them. The scene also carries echoes of that famous moment in Apocalypse Now: the helicopter flying low, with Wagner blasting.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘The buildings act as a reverb and the sound bounces off the water,’ says Tim Supple, explaining the differing harmonies Siren Song produces. Photograph: Dark Mofo/Lusy Productions, 2017

Scullin says the project is original: “There are other parallel projects but they are not art works.” The closest example that he could find was in North Korea; his brother, a tour guide, came back from a trip there with a sample of music that played each morning in the capital. “It was a really strange and eerie sound, and had connotations of the authoritarian state.”



But the music in Siren Song, voiced by female vocalists, is deliberately delicate, soft and ethereal – think Julee Cruise in Twin Peaks.

Vocalist Carolyn Connors, who recorded several songs for the work, told Guardian Australia: “The grand scale of this project is very interesting for me. It takes up the whole city. It’s very humbling to hear my voice across such a large stage.”



Scullin, who had created another sound work for a previous Dark Mofo (“a huge volume of low-frequency sound that physically massaged people’s bodies”) said Siren Song “started with my interest in sound as an aesthetic material: what does it feel like to be inside this massive sound? It’s coming from the sky. How do you make that happen? What are the technologies that you employ?”

After teaming up with Supple Fox, Scullin approached a company in the US that uses speakers for ground and riot control, as well as wide-ranging public address and emergency situations. But the company wasn’t interested in supplying them for an artwork. “It’s a roll of the dice,” says Scullin. “Sometimes with these military guys you’re going to get a boffin. Other times you just hit a brick wall.”

But then they met Hobart pilot Roger Corbin.

“When we first started figuring out how to achieve the sound, we approached Rotor-Lift – an emergency services company based in Hobart,” says Scullin. “We were expecting a ‘no’, or some insane costs, but Roger, the senior pilot there, said, ‘Oh yeah I’ve been wanting to do this for a while. I got some speakers on the chopper I brought from Japan and I’ve been wanting to fly out around Hobart pretending to be a Christmas sleigh or a UFO.’”

The creators were thrilled.

“Roger just went above and beyond,” Supple says. “He completely engaged with the idea from the get-go. He even got the speakers spray painted black to fit with the theme of Dark Mofo.”

The hundreds of speakers clustered on the tops of buildings around Hobart have been sourced from the Melbourne Grand Prix, where they’re used to make announcements from inside the track.



“If we were to play a rock band from these speakers it would sound very distorted and very tinny but they are optimised for voice – such as public addresses. They are trying communicate over a large space,” says Scullin.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Speaker stacks (bottom left) playing Siren Song in Dark Park, Hobart. Photograph: Dark Mofo/Lusy Productions, 2017

With all the logistical feats, it could be easy to lose sight of the work itself, which is a beautiful marking of time and light each day.

Each site has its own sound, which means the work is different from whenever you are in the city.



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Harmony is created in the air, Supple says. “When you go further back in the city it starts reflecting around, and you hear this shimmer off the water. The buildings act as a reverb and the sound bounces off the water. It’s a really nice marriage between this beautiful soundscape, and this technical thing that’s really difficult to achieve.”



Scullin says: “All those authoritarian connotations are embodied in the buildings … And when people saw all the speakers on the buildings, some thought, ‘Oh no – we’re going to be subject to a sort of sonic assault.’”

Instead, people stop in their tracks, looking up to listen to something beautiful and eerie.

“Just hearing that first note, and [watching] people look up at the sky at the helicopter – it’s incredible,” Fox says. “We’ve seen some people listen to it with tears in their eyes.”

• Siren Song continues at Dark Mofo until Sunday