ID#: 395

cubiculum soni (2024) ; 6:33

by Benoit Granier

Coventry University, College of Art and Society

Commissioned for the City is Full of Noise 2024 festival, “cubiculum soni” is both an homage to and a transformation of the Herbert Art Gallery & Museum. This composition does not seek to describe the gallery, nor to tell its story outright. Instead, it listens. It listens deeply to the creaks of the floorboards, the hum of the climate control, the distant echo of footsteps, the murmur of visitors. These fragments — these incidental artefacts — become the raw material of the piece. The title, cubiculum soni (“sound chamber”), evokes a spatial metaphor: each moment of the work opens a new chamber, a new room of sound. The listener is invited to move through these sonic spaces as though walking through the gallery itself — not guided by curatorial signage, but by texture, resonance, and memory. There is no linear journey here. Instead, the piece unfolds as a shifting architecture of sound — immersive, abstract, yet uncannily familiar. Sometimes the space feels close, intimate, even claustrophobic; at other times, it expands into reverberant vaults of sound. The listener is both visitor and participant, constructing a personal and ephemeral version of the gallery through auditory experience alone. In an era saturated with images, cubiculum soni proposes a different form of portraiture: one made of echoes, atmospheres, and absence. It asks not what a place looks like, but what it sounds like when no one is watching.