Jesse Budel, sound artist. Supporting organisations: Country Arts SA, City of Mt Gambier Council, Naracoorte Caves National Park, Telstra Store Mt Gambier.

This stream is one of three streams used in the installation, Strata, a site-specific sound art installation, developed for the Sir Robert Helpmann Theatre Courtyard as part of the associated Country Arts SA Artist Residency in October 2019.

The work involves audio live-streams from the Naracoorte Caves being projected into the courtyard, and will involve two complementary components, the field component and foyer component. The field component is a set of three microphone kits, which will be set up at the Naracoorte Caves at different levels of geographic strata: underground, at ground level, and in tree canopy. The foyer component is a counterpart three-tier vertical speaker array installed in the Sir Robert Helpmann Theatre courtyard, arranged into three distinct levels of low, middle and high. Each speaker level will stream sound from the correlated microphone kit in the field.

The audio streams will additionally be live-mixed and processed under the influence of BOM weather data, sourced from the Naracoorte BOM station.

Strata encourages us to attune to the layers of sound in our local environment, in this case that of the Naracoorte Caves on the Limestone Coast. Bringing together the soundscapes of different geological strata that are usually separated - the bat caves, the ground level and the tree canopy - we hear in realtime the ecological relationships between these environmental layers over days and seasons.

Strata is made possible thanks to Country Arts SA, Naracoorte Caves National Park and Telstra Store Mt Gambier.