Sculptural Aspects in Loudspeaker Music

As a follow-up to the opening of the exhibition »Negative Space«, the event will focus on aesthetic experience and sculptural work with sound and loudspeakers.

Lecture and book presentation by Gerriet K. Sharma create an understanding of media-specific space-sound phenomena. In the following concert with the new loudspeaker system, the IKOsaeder loudspeaker, sounds are interpreted as sculptures.

7 pm
Lecture & book presentation by Gerriet K. Sharma: Aural Sculpture – Spatiotemporal Phenomena of Auditive Media Techniques 

The lecture attempts to classify electroacoustic space-sound phenomena [plastic sound objects], regardless to their technical descriptions and metaphorical attributions, as »classical« sculptural body-space relations. Currently the loudspeaker-based sound projection techniques used are of interest to the automotive industry, computer and mobile phone companies, the event industry and VR technology. These will be available in shortest time in various executions for each household. This availability raises the question of what perceptions we share in these medial spaces, and how we can still track down potentials for aesthetic experiences and make them usable for acoustic arts. Questioning the description of these radically different, media-specific space-sound phenomena as »sculptural« enables their treatment independent of marketing idealizations and cinematic sound sensations. It is about the development of an aesthetic practice that composes space by assuming space as a prerequisite for sound-plastic material and thus pursuing the goal of finding a poetic approach in contemporary media art in order to be able to include complex environments artistically.

8 pm
Concert: Sculptural Aspects in Loudspeaker Music

The loudspeaker has radically changed music, its conception and reception over the last 100 years. Whereas in the past a sound could always be attributed to its origin as a sound event, previously unheard »abstract phenomena« suddenly emerged. As a result, these sound materials became the subject of new creative practices, which have been integrated into our everyday media life from music and sound art to film and television. In the field of loudspeaker music, various international schools of the generation and treatment of these sounds developed, which also sought to establish the space and spatialization of sound as an extension of conventional musical parameters. On this concert evening, works by very different representatives of these schools will be presented and instrumentally interpreted as sculptures by a new loudspeaker system developed in recent years, the IKO speakers (IKO).

Concert Program:

• John Chowning »Stria«
• György Ligeti »Artikulation«
• Gottfried Michael Koenig »Klangfiguren II«
• Pauline Oliveros »Three Pieces«
• Iannis Xenakis »Diamorphoses«
• Karlheinz Stockhausen »STRAHLEN«

The event and the publication are part of the »INTERFACES« project supported by the »Creative Europe« program of the European Union.