"This work appears as the physical projection of an otherwise concealed, yet primary force that underlies the activity of listening – not only spatially but also culturally and temporally.... Frequencies are perceived here as a hidden yet founding element of everyday life: like the change of light during the day, the flow of water, the shifts in the weather. And yet this is not a demonstration of acoustic laws: it puts each listener in a heightened relationship with the aural phenomena and inevitably – like all the forms of sound-making focused on the environment, on the passing and reverberations of time – it prompts deep considerations on how we relate to what moves us and in spite of us; to the shape of what we hear, to how this shape changes and melts with the everyday, how it anchors each listener to the here and now of their listening. Rooted in timeless physical laws, this work nonetheless gains resonance in the contingent, changing laws of individual perception."

Daniela Cascella, Frieze Magazine

[Wynne's installation practice] "captures the inherent promiscuity of sound to cross over between inside and outside environments, ultimately creating a sense of immediacy and also intrusion. Wynne subtly underscores how sound and listening may create points of unexpected contact, sudden awareness, and charmed resonance, to undo the lines between what we imagine as public and private. His [work] delivers a considered noise that puts disparate elements into ambient conversation."

Brandon LaBelle, Journal of Visual Culture

Click for a recording of the installation.

Bear in mind you will not hear most of the low frequencies and some of what you hear are the effects of the low frequency vibrations, such as rattling windows.

"John Wynne's installation has the elegance and subtlety I've come to expect from his work, but as a listening experience some moments are pretty damn intense. It's very physical, as if the room's air is being corrugated while you wait. An aureole of twinkling glitter, and then silence returns. Or rather the Lower Clapton Road, home to a hundred bus routes, reasserts its constant urban racket. At first this traffic noise is a distracting background, but after a few minutes' listening it sinks back into a natural role within the piece itself."

Clive Bell, The Wire Magazine

"Wynne does not consider eliciting any specific emotional responses from the listener and prefers to leave his works open, not prescriptive. And yet, rather than only employing tones acting on the resonant frequencies of the room, Wynne also mixed in newly-synthesised frequencies reflecting specific sounds from the outside, that he heard while preparing the piece. 'The effect is to make the walls of the space seem acoustically translucent', he says. The critical shift in this installation is from apparent mimesis to a subtly unfolded artifice: permeable and open, prompting hesitation, the space created by Wynne does not display the purity of acoustic phenomena but points to the singular, changing engagement with sound that occurs at different times for different listeners. And so does Installation no. 2 for High and Low Frequencies appear: a complex block of raw vibrational forces, slowly eroded by a sfumato of elusive reverberations, on the frayed edge between abstraction and contingency, between knowledge and experience."

Daniela Cascella, Frieze Magazine