{kA}: Oblivious to Gravity

1 INSIDE THE BUILDING
For this project it is crucial to create the compositions on-site so that they can be inspired by their surroundings; that means not a single part of the composition will be created in a studio and then tailored to fit the building. The spatial sound composition is only be worked on upon entering the building.

Basements become natural echo chambers, through opened windows enter sounds from outside and doors are used as filters. Depending on the positioning of the speakers, materials used for isolation and reflection, such as carpets, glass, wood and steel, will play a role in the creation of the sound material. Each building’s unique and individual sounds can be integrated and the building’s history and original purpose helps form the sound composition and its structure.

Each building will be explored as far as possible. Listening to the unique sounds of the location provides new ideas for further thought. For the compositional process, the ear will be the most important instrument.

What are my impressions of the building and its surroundings?

2 SURVEY
After collecting impressions of the area’s atmosphere, the further step is to answer a few questions about each room to be used. For this, Gerhard Eckel, David Pirrò and I have created a conceptual, software-aided toolbox. Standard applications “test” the rooms, ex. its frequency, reveberation times, absorption, etc:

Conceptual toolbox:
MAX/MSP-Patches are used for the spatialization and for expedient testing of a sound room, for example multi-track rotating bursts, low short pulses and high frequency waves, pitches for various rooms in order to “tune” the building with chords. I also use templates for arrangement and sound organization with filters and EQs in channel strips and multichannel versions. Furthermore, for the initial spatial impressions, I have developed standard sound sequences and arrangements that include familiar sound material.

Basically, one approaches the building using a standardized question-answer repertoire (acoustical survey), which can be changed and expanded.

How do the sourroundings react?

This step is not only about preparing and finding a beginning for the composition, but more importantly, about the assumption that the answers to the questions will accumulate as empirical value that can be used to help simplify the questions and help the composer better understand and even learn to read the character of the material, the space and interaction with its surroundings.

3 COMPOSITIONAL ANSWER
Based on the impressions experienced, the piece is created at the location and out of it. For this the following is possible:

• Integration of acoustic conditions
• Usage of site-specific sounds
• Modification of sight-specific sounds
• Spatialization of sounds in the building
• Complete refusal to use the acoustic elements and sounds specific to the location.

How can a place be acustically (re)organized?
Being the his will change one’s perception of the place, does the place become a different one altogether?
Is there an acoustic architecture?

The result of this process is implicit artistic knowledge, which, in turn, can become a guideline or even the foundation for future practice. This knowledge can thus only be gained through practice, i.e. composing inside buildings, and can then be used to create further works.

4 CONCERT
Various scenarios come to mind for presenting the works and the building’s atmosphere, whereby the building’s architecture and acoustic properties play pivotal roles in the presentation.
One idea would be to place chairs at different points where the building’s sounds “come together”, for example in staircases connecting different floors or in a hallway near entrances to different rooms.
After selecting listening points, the same piece could be played from different acoustic perspectives. The visitors would change seats after each playback. That means the concert would consist of the same sound material with different colorations and filtering schemes from the building.
Other ideas include installations where the visitors are standing, for example, a walk-in listening-parcours. Listening points could be near some fixed point, for example, in front of door cracked open just a bit, in a ventilation shaft or near a window, behind which the sound composition is played.

In buildings which cannot be entered by visitors it would be record the composition at a specific point, for example from a Soundfield microphone hanging in a stairwell or a Dummyhead fixed to a tripod in the arched ceiling of a basement. The recordings could then be streamed to the IEM’s Cube or saved on a hard drive and played back via earphone concert. An ambisonic playback in the University’s concert hall Mumuth would also be possible.

5 DOCUMENTATION
The project’s state can be watched on this website. Here the currently beeing processed subprojects (buildings) are visualized and made audible. A part from that, information is provided about the selected cities and the characteristics of the buildings and critical reflections on the production process.
Besides, each building had been documented by a print publication collecting several material (audio, photo and text) on the whole production process.

{VIDEO / PHOTO}
The documentation is not for providing a visualization of the finished work as much as it is for documenting and visually supporting the decisions that were made in the process and the experiences gained in order to create a kind of guideline for future buildings and problem solving situations, i.e. to record the experiences for future reference. A photo-documentation and catalog had been created for each building.

{AUDIO}
In this context, the audio recording of the special sound-space setting is extremely important. For this, the purist assumption that the composition is so closely linked to the location that it cannot exist without the location, would be plausible. Of course that would mean any recording of the composition would be superfluous.

However, one could also use the given setting to make a recording and in turn, use it in another, independent project. During recording, interesting possibilities unfold for capturing the sound of the building or the sounds of the location and using them in a musical context.

After the initial phases of entering the building, surveying it, compiling the composition and the concert, there is one final step pertaining to picking up the sound setting of the location on microphones and recording it. Perspective variations are possible, for instance outside and inside, close, far, etc. and it is possible to cut the sources from their direct surroundings and put them on separate tracks. A further option would be a room mix on a common time axis. Further options are the aforementioned ambisonic recording for a speaker concert in the Cube or Mumuth or for broadcast on a binaural radio program. These are interesting possibilities because, while the finished product will have been composed and arranged, the fact that it was created in a different “sound setting” will mean it has its own characteristic atmosphere.