Sonoric Perspectives

Sonoric Perspectives – Baltic Sea Biennial of Sound Art 2006 Sonoric Perspectives, this year’s Baltic Sea Biennial of Sound Art, has two foci: sketches and high school students’ Sound Art projects. Probably for the first time in the history of this new, innovative genre, an attempt is being made in the area of drawing/musical score/sketch to document the aspects of the genesis of a work that are not otherwise accessible to the public. This is why the title Sketchbooks refers to a literary genre that is close to diaries, private notebooks, and travel sketches. The sum of the various mental processes that flow into a technical procedure reflects artistic positions at the time of their origin. The program takes up the boundaries with graphic notations and sound-poetic works, which are important motifs in the development, with John Cage, George Brecht, Philip Corner, and Dieter Schnebel, to suggest the proximity of works of Sound Art to works of experimental music. To mention two examples, John Cage’s Imaginary Landscape for recordings with constant and variable frequencies, large Chinese cymbals, and prepared piano, one of the earliest compositions of electro-acoustic music, written in 1939, and Dieter Schnebel’s Signatur 33 were included. An extensive score of the stations of the latter’s compositional work brings almost 50 years of his life into view. Both works call to mind the shaping influences of compositional work on Sound Art.

Sonoric Perspectives addresses the theme Perspective to process it as a symbolic, technical, and concrete reference point. An extremely wide variety of artistic poetics are all concerned with the processes and attitudes of hearing. They are symbolically indicated by two medical-technical hearing devices that were developed more than a century apart. These hearing instruments make it possible to provide approximations of average hearing ability; the pupils’ projects use directional microphones, radio microphones on mobile apparatus, and frequency amplifiers connected with filters to adopt unaccustomed perspectives and to explore the unknown. Sounds that are familiar as the typical acoustic background of nature and the city are brought into imaginary concert halls by means of simple modifications. Using echo effects and simple modulations, individual echoes can be designed that enable the reflection of specific rooms. Thus, large halls with smooth surfaces or vaulted cupolas can be simulated. The connection between short and long echo intervals makes it possible to make sounds seem to float in spaces. Original tones are enriched with modulation effects by adding delayed and modulated repetitions of the original signal. Original signal and effect are connected, resulting in polyphonic structures. Overtone singing emerges out of noise levels that until then were perceived as noise. Phases are shifted, noises artistically are processed, and exterior space turns into a concert hall, even if it is only a set of headphones.

Between May and July 2006, in cooperation with a number of partners, we are continuing what began two years ago with the Biennial of Sound Art – Sonoric Atmospheres – on the Baltic Sea coast in Rostock, Bad Doberan, Heiligendamm, Kühlungsborn, and Wismar, which ran for 100 days with the support of Germany’s Federal Cultural Foundation. This year’s Biennial of Sound Art will show collections of drawings, scores, and sketches, as well as providing glimpses of the working and living worlds of internationally renowned artists. The aim is to prepare the ground for a better understanding of the new genre and to show the connections between visual art, architecture, avant-garde film, and contemporary music. The student project will playfully introduce visitors to the techniques of the new form and offer perspectives on artistic positions precipitated by the Fluxus Movement of the 1960s. The foundations of Sound Art will be worked out with pupils from Rostock and Stralsund and with the Mecklenburg-West Pomerania chapter of the Federation of Blind and Visually Impaired People and documented in the form of acoustic maps: sound material will be described from the perspective of everyday hearing and captured as an acoustic atmosphere. Weather and seasonal factors thereby play a role that will be precisely described and fixed as material in map legends. In this way, the acoustic environs of homes and routes to school will be experienced with the ears and described. The found material will be digitally recorded and made experiencable anew in the medium of Sound Art. This playful approach to the media of sound, motion, and resonance spaces aims to arouse curiosity.

The results of the pupils’ projects from Rostock and Stralsund and the Federation of Blind and Visually Impaired People, which have developed an acoustic cartography with point grids and heat styluses, will be presented as a component of the exhibition. The opening will be designed in cooperation with the Tonkünstlerverband MV (Musicians Association of Mecklenburg-West Pomerania) and the students of the Rostock University of Music and Theater.

Here I would like to express my gratitude to the Ministry for Education, Science, and Culture of the State of Mecklenburg-West Pomerania, the Deutscher Musikrat (German Music Council), and the Embassies of the Nordic Countries in Berlin, who have institutionally supported the continuation of the Baltic Sea Biennial of the Nations from the beginning. The cooperation of the Hanseatic city of Rostock, the Kunsthalle Rostock, the Hanseatic city of Stralsund, and the St. Jacobi Cultural Church in Stralsund made it possible to carry on the concept of performing in various venues at the same time with a thematic event of innovative art. In the course of years past, the Baltic Sea Biennial of Sound Art has developed into an international project; this year it will go to Ystad, Sweden and sites in other Scandinavian countries; in 2008, it will be presented in the Embassies of the Nordic Countries in Berlin. All of this is possible only because of the collaboration between the artists, galleries, and partners on the project of a Baltic Sea Biennial of Sound Art, whose name’s high ambitions can be justified only over time.