Slow Santa

Greeted by the smell of fresh pine, visitors to the Listening Lab grotto can treat their ears to a number of Christmas classics, including Santa Claus is Coming to Town and Driving Home for Christmas, each of which has been stretched to create a 24-hour soundscape.

The Future Laboratory used time-stretching software to slow each track enough to fill a period of 24 hours, transforming the succinct pop hits into soothing walls of ambient sound.

‘We wanted to encourage people to slow down and to create a space that could be the antidote to the stress and hassle that comes with this time of year,’ says Lucinda Chua, who designed the installation together with Queenie Wong and The Spitalfields Gardener.