	European Soundscape
	Europe is Real
	Europe: A Landscape of Ideas
	Leading Opinions

	Threshold to the Kingdom
	27. Januar 1945
	This is your Victory
	Faces of Europe
	Strength and Opportunities
	Europe all Weather
	Ars Electronica Futurelab

Soundtrack of the Conference

"European Soundscapes"

Composed and compiled from the sounds, voices and music of European diversity

by Rupert Huber.

The sound installation will be set up a few days in advance in the park adjacent to the Congress Center as a harbinger of the conference that will be getting passersby in the mood for the big event.

Sound Samples

One of the values that we Europeans have in common is the appreciation of beauty.

This concept is multicultural and multimedial, but it means the same in all the arts and modes of perception. Not everything can be expressed in the music of beauty, but that is a part of the beauty and greatness of art.
Just imagine the sound installation as oratorio; the various different sounds become groups of instruments, if one considers the way they originated. For instance, there is a piano, environmental sounds from all over Europe and acoustic works of art by artists from all over Europe. These acoustic artworks came about in so-called telematic real-time compositions—i.e. the artists were linked up with each other via digital networks and could, in this way, exchange sounds and then process them further. The voices—likewise from all over Europe—are like singers, actors delivering a dramatic reading and the chorus of a drama, all playing a tonally determinative role.

It is meant for the visitor approaching the Congress Center to experience an illuminating sound projection domain upon which tonality rains down like rays of sunshine on a January morning, and this as a way to do justice to the idea of a united Europe.
A small acoustamatic serenade featuring Karl Böhm during a fictional rehearsal of “Cosi fan tutte” will be presented to mark Mozart’s birthday. It alludes to the fact that, in the spatial composition of the sound installation, the distribution of the instrument groups corresponds to the first 25 measures of the Jupiter Symphony—a structural homage to Mozart.

A Musical Journey through Europe

Due to the special nature of the spatial setting—noise from the street and plaza as transitional zone to the nearby park—I give precedence to organic sounds like voices, bells and piano. Flat, two-dimensional expanses are contrasted by percussive elements. As in the Jupiter Symphony, in which the orchestra’s defined instrument groups do not produce the sounds alone but rather the way the instruments are spatially positioned (the physical seating arrangement of the musicians) also plays a role, the following instruments come into play:

Choral recording made throughout Europe

Sounds from telematic compositions (Horizontal Radio/Ars Electronica 1995, Radiotopia /Ars Electronica 2002, private exile/Wiener Festwochen 2004)
Sounds recorded in almost all Europe countries
Original sound recordings made in Rome, Paris, Berlin

The spatial arrangement proceeds on the basis of five different loudspeaker positions (instrument groups). As in the classical literature—similar to a quintet—there are different models for the positioning of the speakers: e.g. all simultaneously play two or three voices, accompany one “melody voice,” polyphony (different interrelated sequences)

Rupert Huber, January 2006www.ruperthuber.com