Leap second June 30, 2015 at 23:59:60 UTC - Seyðisfjörður/Iceland
A leap second is a one-second adjustment that is occasionally applied to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) in order to keep its time of day close to the mean solar time, or UT1. Without such a correction, time reckoned by Earth’s rotation drifts away from atomic time because of irregularities in the Earth’s rate of rotation. Since this system of correction was implemented in 1972, 26 leap seconds have been inserted, the most recent on June 30, 2015 at 23:59:60 UTC.
The UTC time standard, which is widely used for international timekeeping and as the reference for civil time in most countries, uses the international system (SI) definition of the second, based on atomic clocks. Like most time standards, UTC defines a grouping of seconds into minutes, hours, days, months, and years. However, the duration of one mean solar day is slightly longer than 24 hours (86400 SI seconds). Therefore, if the UTC day were defined as precisely 86400 SI seconds, the UTC time-of-day would slowly drift apart from that of solar-based standards, such as Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) and its successor UT1. The purpose of a leap second is to compensate for this drift, by occasionally scheduling some UTC days with 86401 or 86399 SI seconds.
Berlin/Burkhard Beins – a leap-second sound recorded using a small steel ball rolling across the concrete ground of the backyard.
Paris/Mark Baron – a leap second sound recorded on 3 simultaneous layers/focals of the same action: feld recording (binaural microphones/ tape recorder) of the “start/stop” recording process of our second made on another tape recorder, the sound of this (second) tape (omni microphone/tape recorder with high recording level), headphones/ omni microphone feedback created with second recorder’s playback.
Seydisfjordur/Gerard Lebik – leap second sound recorded using victorian synthesizer inside silo in Herring Meal Factory
The project was made on AiR SKÁLAR Seyðisfjörður/Iceland as part of the SOUND PLAY FESTIVAL / CSW Łaźnia Gdańsk