When we sleep, our electronic devices lie awake. Our fridges, our freezers, our phone chargers, our boilers, our televisions and more, are all consuming energy - sometimes just a trickle, and sometimes a flood. Even in standby mode, most gadgets still consume small amounts of power.

Unlike humans and other animals, where periods of activity need to be interspersed with periods of rest and switching off, the interconnected web of electronic devices that we share our homes with continues to hum and buzz with energy, all through the night. Now, you’re about to hear what that sounds like.

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.

If an appliance consumes more energy, you’ll hear it more often. If it consumes less, you’ll hear it less often. Some appliances consume more or less energy at different times of night, so the tempo that you hear the sound repeat will change too. You’ll only hear a sound if the person who owns that device was asleep at the time. The first person to fall asleep did so at 10pm. The last person to wake up did so at 8.40am the next morning.

You’ll hear the voices of our volunteers several times over the course of the broadcast, as they tell us about their sleep habits, how they think about energy use in their homes, and how they deal with the long days and long nights at different times of the year in Sweden. You’ll also hear from a couple of other people. We have an expert on saving energy in the home, Nick Trapp from the Centre for Sustainable Energy in Bristol, United Kingdom. And right in the dead of night, you’ll hear an original poem, read by the poet, Anna Arvidsdotter - who also collected data for the project. 

Thank you to Nick, to Anna, and to all the volunteers who kindly gave up their time for this project: Annita, David, Konstantin, Martin, Sana and Simon. Thank you also to Region Skåne and Interreg Baltic Sea Region for funding this work through the CCI4Change project. Thank you to STPLN and all of the people that make up its community. Thank you to our radio partners Soundart and NGBG. Thank you to Sorting Room Studios for mastering. And finally, a huge thanks to the Loud Numbers community for supporting our work!

Puccini – Nessun Dorma instrumental by Fifty Sounds.