On the first episode of the Visiting Practioner Series, Sam Auinger was the first invited. I recognise that I’ve been in touch with some of his sonic essays about the interaction of sound on a daily basis and how we could experience, acknowledge and observe the acoustic of the very divisions of our home. In this article, or sound piece, called My Pebble, Sam guides the reader into a meditative experience with a pebble and the various surfaces of one’s room. The reader should spot the differences between every material and how the sounds reverberate and interact with other objects throughout the experience. I’ve read this project exactly one year ago, and I journaled that experience in an article entitled Mindfulness and Sound Art, where I review and tried many other suggestions from artists like Ruth Anderson and Liz Phillips.
Sam Auinger is a very passionate person and he clearly dissolves his interest in a global size vision of sound. One of his idiocracies is the relation human-sound, and this could be plural, debunking both elements of contemporary issues: rural-city; sound-image. One of his most interesting projects is SONIC VISTA, a sound installation by O+A, collaborating with Bruce Odland. This work takes place in Frankfurt and works as a celebratory monument for the city’s Greenbelt, and it was intended to be a permanent installation that could be used and enjoyed by the citizens. He goes through the analysis of the city’s most iconic spots, in which regards its acoustic and functionality. After a long interpretative process, Sam and Bruce decided to use Deutschherrnbrücke (bridge) as the anchor point. This was what gave the projects name SONIC VISTA: the possibility to hear and see the whole of Frankfurt at the same time. This was the result: A gentle halo of harmonically tuned real-time sound emanates from two “Sphere” loudspeakers which radiate the sound in all directions without “hot spots” and function as visual attractors seen from the whole city.
The intent of this work, apart from giving people the opportunity of feeling their city, was to alert the necessity of rethinking our way of media consumption that usually goes by absorbing all visual things. What about the audible ones? I asked Sam on his lecture and this was the answer:
“it’s definitely a question difficult to answer.
I just heavily experience and find
daily pieces of evidence for it that the auditory
domain tells a different story than the visual.
I find myself in a world out of visual decisions, budgets and governance decisions to be made not so much in the auditory domain.
Acoustics represent a world that is in constant flux and its dynamic.“