Sinfonia Meccanica is a project aimed to highlight the noises and the sounds typical of the letterpress printing process. The tracks were first premiered as an audiovisual installation wihtin the walls of Archivio Tipografico on 11th of September 2019.
Starting from a series of sound recordings of the printing presses housed in Archivio Tipografico and through digital manipulation, five tracks were composed, one for each of the chosen machines. These constitute the sections of a sound composition that, together with visual and typographic elements create an organic whole capable of valorizing the soundscape of a printshop, familiar to the printer as a friend’s voice.

“Every mechanical instrument produces, as a by-product of its operation, a noise, a vibration sustained and propagated by an elastic medium. Noises, sounds and voices are perceptive distinctions, machines speak but you need to know their voice to understand what they say. Work instruments emit sounds that speak of their age, the time that has passed since they were new; they warn when they work too hard or rhythmically confirm they are functioning correctly. We’ve tried to collect these noises, distinguish sounds and recognize voices. The goal is to give them importance and to assign them a form. The sound is the starting point, the form is the vehicle, the voice is the result. The message, let’s not get confused, could be hidden everywhere in the project: in the shapes, in surfaces, in colors or in the overall experience.”

Sinfonia Meccanica is a collaborative project born from the encounter of Francesco Ameglio, sound designer and co founder of SØVN records, and Studio 23.56, the graphic and type design studio working with, for and within Archivio Tipografico.

To fully enjoy the experience you can visit this website while you’re listening to the tracks: 2356.it/sinfonia-meccanica/