Breathing Space at National Museum of Australia an epic project based on sound logic

But a sound installation can have an even more profound effect on our perception - of space, time and even seasons.

From April onwards, visitors to the Garden of Australian Dreams at the National Museum of Australia will most definitely have a reason to stop and listen to a new sound installation permeating the space.

At various times of day, and at different points in the seasons, visitors might hear both familiar and unfamiliar sounds: choruses of frogs and cicadas, strings, percussive creaks and rattles, deep ocean rumbles, whispering voices speaking and singing, and layered musical instruments in patterns.

When musician Genevieve Lacey set out to create the soundscape, she knew it would be something epic.

The outdoor centrepiece of the museum's famously idiosyncratic building has long been something of a conundrum, both for visitors and staff. Although it's a symbolic landscape that explores ideas of place and country - including water, undulating surfaces and lighting effects - it's also exposed to the elements, blazing hot in summer, cold and windy in the winter, and used most often as a thoroughfare.

But when museum director Mathew Trinca contacted Lacey in 2020 to talk about building a soundscape to entice visitors to stay longer in the space, she saw an intriguing challenge.

The world-renowned recording virtuoso creates "sanctuaries in sound" using found and environmental sounds, and newly composed material. She was, until recently, the artistic director for Musica Viva Australia's FutureMakers from 2015 to 2019, and the much loved Four Winds Festival from 2008 until 2012. Central to her work, she says, is the practice of listening, and absorbing sounds. And for her, the Garden of Australian Dreams was something of a soundscape mecca.

"The acoustics are amazing - I would describe them as a little bit unwieldy," she says.

"Things bounce and echo and sort of pool in really unusual ways. So we had to make really careful decisions about frequencies and pitches, trying to make something where sounds didn't get in the way of one another.

"So you had to actually, in a strange way, have a very delicate approach to something that is so epic, which was another fun part of the challenge."

The result, Breathing Space, is a kind of aural "rewilding" of the space, pulsing with human and non-human sounds - instruments, choruses of frogs, cicadas and birds. The sounds and compositions evolve with the hours and the seasons, so that the full composition takes a full year.

It turned out to be a surprisingly apt project for what we now know as the COVID era. Trinca says the timing and ethos were perfect for a project of this nature.

"We invested in it, at a time when we knew that musicians performing arts and others really suddenly had the rug pulled out from under them," he says.

"And a whole lot of our cultural fabric was in danger of falling apart, really. And even though our circumstances were challenging, we recognised that, by comparison to some of those artists, we were still able to keep people employed through that time, we were still able to keep doing work that we thought was important. And because other people have shown that faith with you, I think these institutions need to, in turn, show faith with the wider arts community in which they sit."

The museum team had been mulling over the idea of a sound composition to enliven the garden space, and the idea of a collaborative project involving Australian artists,

Lacey says the project came to her at the perfect time, in the early days of the pandemic.

"For me, who until that point, a very large proportion of my life had been live performances, and a great deal of that international, not to mention interstate, to suddenly be confined to quarters - it's been an intense time," she says.

"But there were various ... gifts and opportunities that arrived as a result, and this is definitely one of them. So I suppose that also informed my approach here, because I just felt like I was the luckiest person alive to be offered work in that time. And so it's a hugely collaborative work."

Among the artists are writer Alexis Wright, singer Lou Bennett, and Vahideh Eisaei, who plays the stringed qanun.

"We've employed more than 60 people, and we've made a really epic duration work, which we thought was befitting because the space is quite monumental," she says.

But the experience is gentle and contemplative, designed to make you stop, listen and wonder. And the experience will almost never be the same as the day before.

"It's made up of a vast array of quite delicate, ethereal sounds, by and large, because one of the things we discovered about the acoustic here is that high frequency sounds very beautiful here, [but] as soon as you put low things in here, that quickly clogs up the space and builds up these resonances that can become quite oppressive," Lacey says.

"There are six different compositions and each of them belongs to a different architectural area in the space. And each of them is a particular length, anything from six hours through to week-long."

They all orbit at their own rate, so that the entire composition only repeats itself once a year.

"It basically gravitates towards and from the equinoxes and the solstices, so at summer solstice, it's at its most active, midwinter it's at its most contemplative, and then the two equinoxes, it's kind of in flux, in transition."

Trinca says it's another step in the building's history - one that has been changing and responding to museum culture, and the people who work within it, for the past two decades.

"Honestly, most great museums take time - they sort of accrete layers. And each director brings something to it," he says.

"The staff clearly make such contributions to it and every generation, and over time is when you become great. Not on day one. People forget that."

Lacey says her composition is one piece of art within another.

"The idea of an installation is that it transforms someone's perception of a space, and that a visitor has completely free agency to roam the environment that it lives in, and come to their own conclusion," she says.

"So it's not about singular artworks, it's about multiple things adding up to an experience. We've really tried to craft a listening experience ... It sounds beautiful in different ways. And people can just make their own journey through it."