A Sculpture of Silence

This project is part of Sismografías, a research endeavor where graphic design becomes a tool for reading shapes as if they were sounds. In Hush, the challenge was to focus on a very specific sonic gesture: the hiss. That “ssshhh” we use to ask for silence. A sound without word, without verb, yet carrying a clear social intention.

I wanted to know if it was possible to construct that sound visually. Or rather: what form would silence take if designed through its sonic negative?

Design as Mute Resonance
To do so, I worked with a set of parameters extracted from the spectral analysis of the “ssshhh”: high and low frequencies, timbre, duration, etc. These constitute the margins of the sound. From there, geometries were defined that could potentially recreate that type of wave—though translated into “body-form” and “sonic void.”

Each figure was designed as if it were a wind instrument. Not to produce sound by itself, but to be interpreted by an artificial intelligence system that reads its morphology and generates a .wav file in response.
In other words, there is no mouth that blows. The sound is not produced, it is computed.

I worked with AI models that interpret formal bodies as though they were acoustic inputs. The resulting audio file is not a faithful reproduction, but an auditory speculation: what would this sound like if it were a breath?

Instruments Without Function

The outcome is a series of wooden pieces suspended as a wall sculpture.
They are not meant to be played. They have no sonic function in the physical world.
They are, at best, silenced organs. They embody the gesture of the instrument, but not its use.

Here my interest lies in working with design as structural fiction. Form follows rules, yet does not serve direct utility. As Vilém Flusser once wrote, to design is to “deceive entropy”: to give form to what escapes. In Hush, what escapes is sound itself.

Why Don’t They Sound?

Because I do not want them to.
Because their role is not to produce, but to suggest.
Here, sound becomes a hypothesis. A digital file. A shadow.
As if design could function as a seismograph of the unheard.

This project is unfinished.

And it will remain so for a while. Because I am more interested in what is absent than in what is in excess.

Hush does not seek to solve a problem of noise, but to open a space for silence.