eight-channel space-sound composition for a
concertante, eight-channel space-sound-body
commissioned by inventionen berlin 2002
World premiere of the concert installation:
Thursday, July 4, 2002, 19h
Parochial Church Berlin
The spatial sound composition TOPOSONIC LINES N’ROOMS, which was created in spring 2002 and is part of the series of works for concert installations, was conceived by the artist couple as an eight-part spatial sound body that can be experienced “in concert”.
The sound material (like that of the entire series of works, by the way) is generated exclusively from the realm of the “microscopic” inner sound of animal sounds and natural noises. With the help of computer-assisted sampling technology, what was previously – in the truest sense of the word – “inaudible” from the molecular-acoustic inner life of animal voices or natural atmospheres and phenomena is now made “audible.” The artist couple <sabine schäfer // joachim krebs> calls this process of quasi-scientific material extraction “EndoSonoScopy”, which means as much as “inner sound representation” or better “making inner sound audible”.
A pool of so-called “acoustic fragment patterns” (samples) from the micro-range of animal and natural sound, catalogued and continuously updated according to special audio-artistic criteria and created over years of searching and collecting, form the reservoir, so to speak, for the artificially formed spatial sound milieus. Ritornelle from microscopic animal and natural sounds thus create the consistency for the individual multilinear-transparent SpatialSoundMilieus, which are in permanent fluctuation between “natural <-> artificial”, “concrete <-> abstract”, etc.
By means of a computer-aided sound distribution, a space-encompassing RaumklangKörper is formed, which projects the multi-dimensional spatialities of the microscopic noise and sound worlds into real space. “Naturally” moving SpatialSoundFigures and oscillating SpatialSoundSpaces are created, evoking experiences similar to those experienced by humans in the natural acoustic environment, where sounds and noises move and mix in a free-flowing manner.