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BOX 30/70

BOX 30 / 70: Sam Auinger/Bruce Odland

The sound installation Box 30/70 “tunes” the plaza in front of the Ars Electronica Center through subtle transformations of urban soundscapes. An ongoing dialog with the cities of the world.

BOX 30/70 is a mobile sound installation on a tour of selected European cities. In a customized container, visitors can undertake an intense encounter with the acoustic environment of their everyday lives. Ambient sounds and background noise are transformed and re-tuned in a microphone-equipped resonance tube mounted on the container’s roof. A cement-encased loudspeaker set up near the box broadcasts this modified soundscape back into the public space in real-time. It is also made available to listeners in the box’s interior, an artificially isolated environment in which visitors can hear, see and relax like in a chill-out room. The transmission of real-time sounds alternates in a predetermined time ratio (30 to 70) with compositions from Alphabet of Sounds. This databank is a work-in-progress consisting of transformed urban soundscape material that the two composers have compiled during their 13-year collaboration.

Auinger / Odland define their work as a 'dialogue with a particular location', writes Markus Steffen in an essay on the project. 'Architecture and traffic flows as well as the social dynamics and significance of a place directly manifest themselves in these ‘retuned’ tonal spaces. Auinger / Odland bring listeners closer to their acoustic environment, in that they first isolate them from it by means of the simple acoustic phenomenon of resonance and, by creating a different perception of everyday processes, they simultaneously sensitize listeners to the special acoustic situation and — even more — to the identity of a place. (…) BOX 30/70 is a work-in-progress, an installation that transports the idea of 'resonance tuning' to different European cities by presenting the identical system at a variety of different sites—Berlin, Witten, Rotterdam, Düsseldorf, Dresden and Vienna since its initial development in 2001.'

The setup consists of a microphone-equipped resonance tube (TUBE) in which the ambient soundscape is reproduced, a mobile space (BOX) providing a listening situation that is visually and acoustically set apart from its surroundings, and an exterior-mounted, cube-shaped, cement-encased loudspeaker (CUBE) that opens up a listening perspective in which the resonances and the soundscape mix. The BOX resembles 'a 'listening post' within the acoustic environment', as Steffens says: A listening post into which real-time video images of the situation outside the BOX mix from time to time.

'Listeners can hear the transformed sounds of high-profile public places in Europe in which urban life with all of its diverse forms of movement and expression crystallizes—a growing acoustic memory that makes similarities and differences acoustically clear. (…) BOX 30/70 is not only an acoustic situation report on urban spaces but also a musical demonstration of their hidden potential.'

BOX 30/70 is part of the Center Exhibition (September 7 - 12, 2002, 10:00 a.m. – 9:00 p.m.)
Box 30/70 has been produced by singuhr-hörgalerie in parochial, Berlin, and Siemens Arts Program, Munich.






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