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Headscapes - compositions for headphones

This is a broadcast of a CD publication for the exhibition "Headscapes - Kompositionen für Kopfhörer", taking place in the gallery "Besenkammer - etwas Raum für Kunst" in Saarbrücken, Germany, May 27 through June 23, 2010. The exhibition is the final presentation of a project at the Hochschule der Bildenden Kunste Saar, Germany, within the department Audiovisual Arts led by Christina Kubisch. Curated by Marc Behrens and Stefan Zintel, organized by Peter Strickmann.For more information, please visit www.besenkammer.org.

Subjective inner sound spaces, spatialization experiments for what is heard in the inside, technical approaches to the infinity of  the space inside the head. Listening pieces for the space inside the head require an engagement for the unknown and unconscious, for introspection and alienation from the exterior space. They can only be experienced via headphones or special mechanic constructions. Novel spaces can be generated virtually and challenge the listener's standpoint, proprioception of head and body: the average seventeen centimeters between the ears. The listener is not situated inside the sound space, rather allows it to occur within him, he ultimately absorbs the universe.

 

1 Alexandra von Bassen: Marseille, ma ville 5:26 ["Marseille, my city"]

Margaux Littra, who is living in Germany for one year, recounts of her city in the south of France. Her voice, as well as audio recordings from Marseille and the surrounding area, made in December 2009, are the components of this sound story for headphones.

 

2 Daniel Henrich: hear drum, eardrum 6:25

All of us hear with a drum, our eardrum. Sound hits the eardrum, but the actual hearing takes place in the organ behind the membrane. I have set up various durms with microphones inside them. When a sound hits the drumhead, the otherwise familiar sound is changed by the membrane and the space behind it. The sounds we hear with our eardrum, and the sounds we hear in the drum are transformed into new sounds. So we have to rethink: Do the sounds we hear sound the way we believe they do? Do we all hear the same? Different drums sound differently. By composing a piece for headphones I intend to isolate the viewer from the room he is in, and place him inside a new space, the space behind the membrane. We are so used to the way we hear, that the different sounds created by another membrane sound somehow different, but also awkwardly familiar.

 

3 Deng Runxia: Nachher 1:15 ["Afterwards"]

 I make a composition for headphones. I use the decay curve of the sounds of different everyday objects like glasses, bowls, as well as the reverberation of selected spaces and of spatially interesting situation in the outside.

 

4 Stefan Zintel: Inner / Outer Circle 4:57

Humans can assign direction to sound events they perceive. The spatial perception and localization depends substantially on the moment of sound impact. In my work, the "in-head localization" for sounds in different frequency ranges is the main point.

 

5 Hye-Kyoung Kwon: WG 2:08 ["Shared apartment"]

I live in a shared apartment. I am from South Korea, and my flat mates are from Italy (Milan) and Germany (Cologne). All of us speak differently. On headphones I bring all these languages together into one space, into one person. Language barriers melt. A single language is created with the possibilities of composition.

 

6 Peter Strickmann: Vom Sickern und Süppeln 6:44 ["Of seeping and oozing"]

Composition for headphones. Sound material is generated from the noise of water that seeps away into different dry earths. The different earths are to be collected in different locations/landscapes, dried and then watered in the sound studio. The water seeps away in earth and leaves the sound on the surface. I capture it there and let it infiltrate ourselves via headphones. A sharp crackling in the neck. A swallowing in the forehead. Thus, the small sounds of the water will become a murmering of the synapses.

 

7 Seo Ryang Kim: Wasser 5:28 ["Water"]

When I was a child I went on a family vacation to the sea. When playing at the water's edge I was drowned by a high wave, so that water shot into my ears. It was as if the water would completely fill the space in my head. I still remember the sound of the sudden and loud intrusion of water into my head with horror. The water flooded my ears and flew out again, but what remained is a nightmarish feeling. In my composition for headphones I am articulating that experience. The sound sputters, flows through the space inside the head and picks out the destructive power of water as a central subject.

 

8 Sun-Mi Han: Who am I? 4:21

It was a rainy day in summer. On that day I asked myself a question: who am I? When I was asked by someone to state who I was, I answered with my name, without thinking about it. But when I ask myself the same question, the answer is a different one. Sun-mi Han - can a name be my ego? Names are just an index, nothing more than a denomination, a connection to the information in our heads. But what the name hides is so big that it cannot be put into a single word. With the doubts my quest for the self began. Who am I? And what about you? Who are you?

 

9 Marc Behrens: Yes, China

9:53

By far the loudest and densest urban 360° noise I have experienced in China - in the city centre traffic of Hongkong, Guangzhou and Beijing. A sound occurs almost never isolated from others. Even in interior spaces the low frequency field of traffic noise seeps in through the walls. "Yes, China" is a survey of the acoustic urban space with emphasis on such sounds and situations which bind the people's attention or enable identification with the location. Inside urban, physically aggressive noise, the head's interior space is often the only retreat. In the flowing and bass dominated sonic world of subways, motor coaches and construction sites, different sound sources of higher frequencies are able to push through: crickets, sound signals at traffic lights, steam pressure-relief valves in Beijing's 798 art zone, a priest's painfully resonant brass bell. During recording many of those sounds I worked without monitoring headphones, positioning microphones merely according to experience. When one listens in realtime to the exterior world within which one resides with open mikes and on headphones, big alienation effects will quickly show up. Loudness proportions seem distorted, shifted. Localization will change according to the employed microphone type and be limited already by the use of stereo headphones. Even when position and microphone characteristics largely coincide, the perception of the sound on location will mutate. The active mind edits the experienced and recorded sounds into a sonic world which, as it were, steals and internalizes the contours of the outer world. At a different time, different place, and for a new listener, two interior headspaces melt: the one formed by the composer and the one experienced by that listener. Both refer to two allegedly similar exterior spaces: the one experienced by the composer and the one which the listener would imagine. #

Play 46:40 min, Besenkammer - etwas Raum für Kunst 27/5/2010

Send & Receive

I always wondered what kind of sound would be heard whilst on its journey when you either send or receive an e-mail or transfer data across a Network. The idea first presented itself when an IT friend of mine was chatting about his workplace and that I should pop along one day and record some of the sounds . Not wanting to let the opportunity pass me by, I spend a day, armed with a number of recording tools sitting in an enormous network server room. My initial thought was that of complete shock! I couldn't quite get over how noisy the space was, I foolishly always imagined that it was going to be really very quiet, with just the discreet sound of a small fan and the occasional bleep from time to time. The noise was mainly due to the number the cooling fans required. So never really wanting to capture the sounds of cooling fans, I would focus on the light sources from any LED light by using a number of different photocells and by using a specially constructed audio/ network cable that allowed me to connect to both the server and my laptop at the same time, where I wrote a MSP patch that recorded to one soundcard when data was being Sent, and to another soundcard when the data was being Received. This method enabled me to kill two birds with one stone and allowed me the option for working with either sound source whilst the data was being transmitted. The final piece is comprised from 16 different servers, and from 1200 different ports, collecting close to 16,000 sounds . The first section of the piece are the sounds heard when the data was being 'Sent' and the second half of the piece is the perceived sound of the data being 'Received'. Markus Jones #

Play 13:12 min, Markus Jones 17/1/2009

Interview with Tamio Shiraishi

An excerpt from the Duo for Radio Stations (1992), a surrealist live radio show hosted by Judy Dunaway and Chris Nelson. Together they interviewed Tamio Shiraishi via telephone from Japan. This short conversation of improvised airwaves is including recordings of various noises and types of static from radio and television signals (FM, AM, UHF, VHF and short-wave) and a telephone beeper. #

Play 3:29 min, AAIR 4/9/2008

The Radio Ham

The bittersweet comic genius of Tony Hancock made him one of Britain’s biggest stars during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Scripted by the prolific Galton and Simpson, his hugely influential radio show Hancock's Half Hour lasted for five years and over a hundred episodes, spawning a successful television series. The show pioneered the development of situation comedy, deriving its humour from the characters responses to everyday life rather than the variety format then dominant in broadcasting. Each week the streets were reported to empty as families gathered together to catch the latest episode. Several shows were instant classics, including ‘The Radio Ham’. As ever, Hancock plays a spectacularly exaggerated version of his own character, a down-at-heel comedian living at the dilapidated 23 Railway Cuttings in East Cheam. ‘Tiring, this radio lark’. #

Play 27:40 min, Daisy Blue & Friends 9/4/2008

Kinder singen und spielen

MUSIK FÜR ALLE : 31 der schönsten Kinderlieder - Potpourri. Made in Germany. Bearbeiter: B.Enger. Hinaus in die Ferne (Methfessel); Ringelreihe (Volkslied); Zeigt her eure Füßchen (Volkslied); Fuchs, du hast die Gans gestohlen (Volkslied); Der Mai ist gekommen (Lyra); Wem Gott will rechte Gunst erweisen (Frölich); Der Kuckuck und der Esel (Volkslied); Alle Vögel sind schon da (Volkslied); Hopp, hopp, hopp (Volkslied); Himmel und Erde (Volkslied); Hänschen klein (Volkslied); Wer will fleißige Handwerker sehn (Volkslied); Suse, liebe Suse (Volkslied aus 'Des Knaben Wunderhorn'); Weißt du wieviel Sterniein stehen (Volkslied); Schlaf, Kindlein, schlaf (altes Wiegenlied) #

Play 17:23 min, AAIR 25/3/2008