Making Music With Six Monumental Buildings
«As a particle of the atmosphere is never lost, so sound is never lost. A strain of music or a simple tone will vibrate in the air forever and ever, decreasing according to a fixed ratio. The diffusion of the agitation extends in all directions, like the waves in a pool, but the ear is unable to detect it beyond a certain point. It is well known that some individuals can distinguish sounds which to others under precisely similar circumstances are wholly lost. Thus the fault is not in the sound itself, but in our organ of hearing, and a tone once in existence is always in existence.»
Florence McLandburgh; The Automaton Ear, and Other Sketches; 1876
Making Music With Six Monumental Buildings
2024
Geo Located Sound Walk
Location: Museum Island, Berlin
Duration: ∞ (depending on listener)
Making Music With Six Monumental Buildings allows you to immerse yourself in the nocturnal soundscapes of six monumental buildings, while taking a walk around the Museum Island located at the historic center of Berlin, Germany. The piece will redirect your attention and alter your experience of the place and your surroundings.
The result is a new, or rather a renewed perception of the place through an augmented acoustic environment.
The aim of the work is a new, or rather a renewed perception of the place through an expanded acoustic environment.
An additional effect of my sound walks actually sets in some time later, after the experience, namely an enhanced perception of the surrounding sounds.
The walk was created using the free smartphone app Echoes. The conceptual structure is based on virtual circles (see map below), each of which represents an audio file. The six audio files are recordings of the soundscape of buildings, which were recorded exactly between midnight and 1 a.m.
Each center point of a circle represents the exact position where the field recorder was originally positioned inside the buildings.
Using your smartphone and a set of open headphones (do not use noise-canceling), you will experience the composition on location and in the presence of the buildings. Their acoustic sound worlds are expanded towards the public space, overlap, and mix with the actual sounds of your immediate environment. While walking throughout the circles, the intensity of the recordings varies in real time depending on your distance to the buildings and your walking-speed. Thus, a unique composition and experience emerges each time the sound walk is started.
Buildings: Altes Museum Berlin (inner portico), Berliner Dom (center under dome), Deutsches Historisches Museum (Schlüterhof), Friedrichswerdersche Kirche (choir), Neues Museum Berlin (Ägyptischer Hof), former Staatsratsgebäude der DDR (State Dining Room).
How to walk the sound walk:
(If the Echoes app is already installed on your phone, skip these steps and directly click the button below!)
1. Open this site on your smartphone.
2. Click the button below.
3. Download and install the Echoes.xyz app.
4. Open the app and use the search option to search for ‘The Whalesong Project: Berlin’ or click the button below.
Further instructions are provided in the walk description on the app.
Photos of the recorder positioned in the buildings; from left to right: Altes Museum Berlin (inner portico), Berliner Dom (center under dome), Deutsches Historisches Museum (Schlüterhof), Friedrichswerdersche Kirche (choir), Neues Museum Berlin (Ägyptischer Hof), ehemaliges Staatsratsgebäude der DDR (State Dining Room)
16 Minutes Of Oscillating Buildings
sample of an automatic composition with six monumental buildings for a hexaphonic installation.
2024
Here you can listen to an audio sample created from the same source material as the sound walk described above. The conceptual approach of the two works is similar. Although, the medium, spatial, and sensory experience is very different. However, you can get an impression of the acoustic nature of the sound walk.