The Acoustic Appraiser

Silkscreened cover
THE ACOUSTIC APPRAISER is named after an antique, portable audiometer. Audiometers are used to detect our way of hearing according to a set of carefully selected tones and noises. The Acoustic Appriser, which stems from the 1980ies, consists of sine tones corresponding to the different frequency bands of the human ear. Furthermore the machine comes with masking tones, pulse generator, hold and slope functions, and a German speech test tape. In the sound work made by Sandra Boss, The Acoustic Appraiser is used to explore the borders between scientific and musical sounds. Furthermore, the malfunctioning sounds of the machine are also incorporated as sonic features. The sound work unfolds as a minimalistic hörspiel that forces the listener to listen to his or her own hearing, and at the same time listen to the act of listening, that is, the act of making sense out of the heard