Programme Information
Date: 6 Mar 2026 (Fri)
Time: 6pm - 6.45pm
Venue: Oculus, B2, ArtScience Museum
Stridulations is a site-responsive, multi-channel sound installation by Vienna-based sound artist Robert Schwarz, devised for the Oculus at ArtScience Museum. Adapted from Schwarz’s long-running research into insect and arthropod communication, the work takes its name from stridulation — a process through which sound is produced by friction between chitinous body parts.
Drawing from over two decades of ecological field recordings and sound experiments, Schwarz transforms these tiny, often unheard signals into an enveloping listening experience. Chirps and pulses drift through the space, forming ever-shifting sonic patterns that mirror the rhythms of insect life and the collective energies of the swarm.
Composed as a looping work for long-duration listening, Stridulations invites a mode of listening in which distinctions between the natural and the synthetic, the individual and the collective, begin to blur. Sound moves around and through the listener, suggesting an acoustic ecology that exceeds human scale and familiar ways of perceiving.
Presented as part of Forms of Life, ArtScience Museum’s wider seasonal focus on insects, ecology and more-than-human intelligences, Stridulations frames listening as a cross-species encounter and foregrounds sound as a medium of relation.
For more information, please visit: https://www.marinabaysands.com/museum/plan-your-visit/artscience-encounters/stridulations.html