Lotte Geeven: Crowdsourcing the Songs of Sand

Of the samples of singing sand that the Amsterdam-based artist Lotte Geeven is soliciting from desert residents around the globe for her latest work, four batches have made it to Geeven’s doorstep without incident. The rest are languishing—at Dutch customs and police stations, a bus station in Brussels, another office in the Western Sahara—or lost. “Roaring sand is not just something you can buy,” Geeven tells me. For this project, she is prepared to be patient.

Singing sand, a rare variety of sand that emits a thunderous hum as it slides down certain dunes, is a phenomenon exclusive to the planet’s nooks and crannies: spots in Nevada’s Mojave Desert, Chile’s Copiapo, and Mongolia’s Gobi Desert, among others. For The Sand Machine, Geeven, in collaboration with two French acousticians, will assemble twelve machines to amplify the sounds of twelve types of singing sand, allowing these typically distant musics to resound in public for the first time, with an exhibition planned for the Hague. Anyone may send a sample to the address listed on her website by the September deadline; the artist promises to reimburse the costs of shipping.  

The Sand Machine from Lotte Geeven on Vimeo.

Resembling a helicopter flying overhead, the sand’s voluminous song maintains an uneasy relationship with its granular source, as though the two had barely met. Each machine, a circular drum a meter-long in diameter, will contain a rotating blade that pushes the sand forward, simulating the environment that permits this peculiar acoustic property. Though the sand has been more difficult to come by than Geeven envisioned,