TURNS: KAMUNA Special with the Hertzlab residents

Sensation, Sense and Emotion: These aspects of Human experience stand out to be our rawest mode of existence. Yet we often remain blind and unaware of the thermal currents of feeling that exist right underneath our skin, things which seem real to us yet are hard to put into words. 

The piece "winds over Mount Meru" presents a sonic textural narrative designed to draw out visceral responses from the subject's skin, an experiment in understanding the many reactions new media technologies can provoke. 

What can emotion and sensation tell about the human body and its capacity for feeling, whether that be feelings of today, yesterday and tomorrow?

At a time when artificial intelligence is ubiquitous and new developments are becoming increasingly impressive and even human-like, we often forget that AI still cannot match the complexity and performance of the human brain.

The electronic composition “Neural Noise” deals with precisely this relationship. On the one hand, randomly generated, glitch-like sound fragments are created, whose tonal characteristics arrevisited later in the piece and used to generate new sounds. This recursive process is intended to reflect the learning ability and self-referentiality of human thought.

On the other hand, EEG data serves as the basis for further layers of sound. This data is assigned to specific areas of the brain and is spatially distributed and positioned in the room in order to make neural activity spatially tangible.

The KASTEL Symphony was created in 2013 by Prof. Dr. Jörn Müller-Quade's KIT working group and was composed specifically for performances in the ZKM Klangdom by Johannes Helsberg.  

Geometric shapes from Castel del Monte form the basis for motifs that are encrypted according to cryptological principles and developed over four movements. The music transforms from familiar orchestral colors to synthetic sounds and returns to the classical orchestra in the finale.