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Sound Studies, the new masters program at the UdK–Berlin University of the Arts, focuses on the great variety of spaces and situations we encounter in everyday life that we experience aurally —i.e. via our auditory faculties. This extensive presentation investigates how these auditory experiences, in turn, shape our conceptions of the realities of the world around us.

Visitors are invited to get acquainted with Sound Studies by partaking of, thinking about, listening to and participating in this exhibition. The show goes into how the Sound Studies program came about, and discusses the research and teaching being done in the various departments by presenting work that’s been done by faculty members, alumni and students currently enrolled.

The 2012 Campus Exhibition encompasses the Sound Studies archive, the UdK’s research project focusing on five Berlin neighborhoods, and individual works that deal with how people personally experience spaces and their particular aural qualities. The department’s new Auditory Architecture Research Unit will present its current research project on Berlin’s Ernst-Reuterplatz. One part of the exhibition deals with the acoustic depiction of signals that can’t be registered by human beings, as well as with the audible dimension of spatial perception and a space’s atmosphere.

Plus, there’ll be performances, presentations, talks in the Kepler Salon and afo architekturforum oberösterreich, as well as “listening walks”—for instance, Thinking with Your Ears and Sonic Journalism with sound artist Peter Cusack (UK).
During the festival, students in Sound Studies and in the Generative Art/Computational Art class taught by Alberto de Campo (AT will be working on concrete interventions in public, urban and medial spaces. The UdK will host Campus Laboratory on Linz’s Main Square in conjunction with u19 – CREATE YOUR WORLD, Ars Electronica’s future festival of the next generation.

Works

Ampere

Frauke Schmidt (DE)

A music box. An arrangement of object and sound. A poetic construct. An endless succession. A closed loop. Continuity. Alteration. Structure. Movement. Sparks in between.

Auditive Atmosphärenkonstruktion 2012

Johannes Steininger (AT)

Supported by AUSTRIA BIO PLASTICS

This site-specific atmosphere construction is based on the pneumatic design of an interior water fountain. Activated by an electromagnetic voice coil system, the electroacoustic tires act as vibrating resonance bodies and bring about an atmospheric exaggeration of the preexisting acoustic conditions.

Auf Wiedersehen, geliebte Mutter – Sibirien und der Ferne Osten erwarten uns!

Johannes Kiersch (DE)

Supported by KHAM-Theatre in Komsomolsk-on-Amur

A sonic voyage in Russia‘s Far East – in Vladivostok, Komsomolsk am Amur, and on the Baikal-Amur Mainline. Nuances of Soviet past and Russian present. Abandoned factories and Chinese markets, former prisons and a harbor for raw material export – simulation and reality, silence and noise.

[be’li:n] – Atmosphären eines Klanggeflechts (Metrophonie No.1, 2008)

Olaf Schäfer (DE)

This research work on the synthesis of city and its sounds is concerned with the presentability of sounds in architectural and urban fabrics. To do this it implements a variation on the practice of sound-walking: observing everyday sounds is aimed toward a text of the most diversified urban spaces and atmospheres.

Breathing Room

Elen Flüge (DE/US)

Breathing Room, a composition for loudspeakers & lungs. Waiting in a quiet niche is a space to sit and breathe. A chair invites a solitary guest. Cocooned in fabric, the piece wraps around the listener who becomes a quiet performer, adding their own respiration to the rhythm of the room.

Clownzeichner

Steffen Martin (DE)

This almost ready-made device, consisting of an active loudspeaker and three felt tip pens driven by the acoustic energy of musical compositions, writes music. In doing so it playfully exposes relations of seeing and hearing, and boundaries between categories of perception. What does visualization add to sound and what does it take away?

Ein Fliegenpapier – Gelenkte Aleatorik (0,008 m³ : 0,064 m³ : 0,512 m³)

Robert Schwarz (AT)

Acoustic considerations of space and freedom as a physical model: The acoustic version of Robert Musils Fliegenpapier (Fly Paper) shows the ruthlessness with which convention and habit eventually wear away at all vital energy.

Electromagnetic microcosm

Annie Goh (UK)

Supported by the Snuff, the r-aw.cc workstation

Changes in electromagnetic fields nearby are read in real-time and portrayed visually as well as auditively. The unknown, as represented by the short-comings of human sensory experience, is compared with the unknown of that which still remains inconclusive within contemporary scientific knowledge.

Feld III (aus der Serie Wellenfelder)

Julius Stahl (DE)

Inaudibly low frequencies in sine-wave glissandi cause 1400 wires on a screen to vibrate such that standing waves are visible along individual strands. Minimal differences in wire lengths allow particular modulations to emerge which migrate across the whole wave field – a self-stirring micro-polyphony.

Klangbild Digi.flat 90-12

Abel Korinsky, Carlo Korinsky, Max Korinsky (DE)

This wall-work made of flatbed scanners shows how a technical process becomes a complex aesthetic phenomenon through its duplication. Over time a meditative effect is produced by the back and forth of individual scanners, rhythmic movement of their lamps, and corresponding rhythms of mechanical noises.

Panharmonicon 2

Alois Späth (DE)

Live Performances during the festival.
Supported by Dr. Michael Wackerbauer, Historisches Museum Regensburg

Using transducers, a DVD player plays its packaging materials, styrofoam and cardboard. Inspiration is the enormous orchestrion-musical automaton, „Panharmonicon“ built in 1805 by the native Regensburger instrument maker and inventor, Johann Nepomuk Mälzel.

PRÄGUNG – ein perkussiver Werkprozess

Harald Christ (DE)

Supported by Michael Haas

A programmed pneumatic machine – originally meant for printing facades with paint pellets – „plays“ a metal sheet using projectiles, following a graphic template. The transformation of the rigid membrane can be experienced as an intervention in the resonant properties of the metal. Movement, sound, and light join together in an expansive installation.

Rauschgold

Thomas Wochnik (DE)

Golden banners, audio-visually communicating but their own materiality. Rauschgold questions attempts of traditional media to sustain archaic structures of information- distribution and property. In turn it suggests freedom from content and a focus on the medium‘s iconic and aesthetic potential.

Sonic Suit

Satoshi Morita (JP)

Supported by nhb; Heidrun Schramm, TXOKO, Nicolas Wiese, Christine Wolf

Ever since Satoshi Morita discovered the potential of haptic in intimate sonic sensation, he has produced sound objects and compositions for inter-sensory perception. Their vibro-tactile sonic vibrations excite skin receptors and dissolve the boundaries between auditory and haptic sensation.

Strudel between contradiction y confusion

Marco Montiel-Soto (VE)

A table strewn with a seeming chaos of notations, paper clippings, books, post-cards, photographs and objects. Yet these are connected by an imaginary thread of memories. As visual references they accompany a voice in three languages, recounting a journey in time through two cities: Maracaibo and Berlin.

TXOKOs Enhance Your Presence

Pheline Binz (DE)

Supported by der Frauenbeauftragten der UdK Berlin; Anna Hentschel, Henning Liebig, Johannes Jörg Schmidt, Krispin Schulz

This interactive sound jacket makes non-verbal communication possible between people by reacting to proximity and distance with spontaneous, partially chaotic melodic creations. It can even be played as an instrument, but may be tricky to master.

Vordergrundgeräusche (2012)

Daisuke Ishida (JP)

In a visualization of the ambient sound north of the bridgehead buildings in Linz, differences in sound pressure are shown through fluctuations in illumination. The dynamic effect of lighting brings attention to prominent sonic variations, making back- ground noise into foreground noise.

Sam Auinger, Georg Spehr (künstlerische Leitung / artistic direction); Silvia Keller, Katrin Emler, Andrea Riedel (Organisation / organization); Dany Scheffler, Cecile Bouchier (Technik/Ausstellungsbau // technics, exhibition architecture); Martin Supper, Frauke Schmidt (Archiv / Archive); Peter Prautzsch (Grafik / graphic design); Sabine Sanio (Textredaktion / editor)

Talks/Presentations/Performances

Denken mit den Ohren

Sam Auinger (AT), Peter Cusack (UK)
Do/Thu 30. 8. 12:30
Kepler Salon

Auditory Architecture

Alex Arteaga (ES/DE)
Fr/Fri 31.8. 17:00
afo architekturforum oberösterreich

Die Geschichte der auditiven Kultur

Sabine Sanio (DE)
So/Sun 2. 9. 10:30
Kepler Salon

Auditives Design

Marcel Kloppenburg (DE), Georg Spehr (DE)
Mo/Mon 3. 9. 19:30
Kepler Salon

Personal Sound Space (The Exhibition) II

Elen Flügge (DE/US)
Do/Thu 30. 8. 18:00 – 19:30, Fr/Fri 31. 8. 13:00 – 14:30, Sa/Sat 1. 9. 13:00 – 14:30, So/Sun 2. 9. 13:00 – 14:30, Mo/Mon 3. 9. 13:00 – 14:30
Klosterstraße 1, 3. Stock/3rd Floor

Voice Box (that thing in your throat)

Thomas Koch (DE), Jessica Páez (FR/ES), Damian Rebgetz (AU), Alexander Sieber (DE)
Fr/Fri 31. 8. 19:00, Sa/Sat 1. 9. 19:00, So/Sun 2. 9. 16:00
Tabakfabrik

Hörspaziergänge/Listening Walks

Do 30. 8. 17:00, Sa/Sat 1. 9. 11:00, So/Sun 2. 9. 14:00
Treffpunkt/Meeting Place: Hauptplatz, Mobiles Ö1 Atelier

Campus Atelier

Sound Studies at Ars Electronica Music Day
Campus Labor
Do/Thu 30. 8. – Mo/Mon 3. 9. 10:00 – 19:00

Sonic Place Linzer Hauptplatz

Hauptplatz

Varia Zoosystematica Profundorum

u19 – CREATE YOUR WORLD-Festivalstadt
Sam Auinger (AT), Peter Cusack (UK), Alberto de Campo (AT) und TeilnehmerInnen der Klasse Generative Kunst/Computational Art und des Masterstudiengangs Sound Studies der Universität der Künste Berlin (DE)