On Standby

On Standby is a piece of sound art designed to be listened to while sleeping. It’s based on data collected by seven different people in Malmö, Sweden. Each of those people used a smart plug to collect data on the energy consumption of a device in their home over the course of a single night, the night of 25th August 2024.

The music plays out over the same timescale - one minute of data from 25th August takes one minute to play back. The whole dataset takes 10 hours and 40 minutes to run through. You’ll hear a unique sound every time a different device consumes half a watt hour of energy - about the same amount it takes to bring a teaspoon of water to boiling point. Many devices on standby don’t consume much energy, but they are always switched on, so this energy use stacks up over time.

Tune in on YouTube (with full introduction) or Bandcamp and other streaming services (just the music and spoken word sections).

On Standby is co-funded by the Interreg Baltic Sea Programme as part of the project “CCI4Change: Facilitation of citizens energy consumption behavioral change in BS cities and municipalities.”

More info