DIGITALES HÖRLABOR Ein Seziersaal für verrottende Klänge
Descripción de la Exposición
Our research project is physically located at the main campus of the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna, in the only unrestored building which used to be an auditorium of the former School for Veterinary Medicine.
Address: Altes Auditorium, Anton von Webern Platz 1, 1030 Wien.
The building is the northern half-round element on the back side of building S on the campus.
We run our own project-related experiments with sound and media in this room, but it is also a publicly accessible listening space. We integrate external artistic positions which are related to our research agenda, that is, working with digital sound and time-dependency.
Conceptually, we refer to the legendary Mold museum (Schimmelmuseum) by artist Dieter Roth. Roth is well-known for his works with (bio-)degradable art and established his Schimmelmuseum in 1992 both as a workplace and a museum for the produced works.
Currently, the following works are on display:
Till Bovermann and Almut Schilling: CD-R(ot) – sound installation
Angélica Castelló: Magnetic Room – objects and sound installation
Klaus Filip: Dust a bit – opto-acoustic installation
Thomas Grill: Midnight song – sound object
Juliana Herrero and Thomas Grill: Antenna – sound installation
Martin Howse: Enrichment and depletion – installation
Nicole Krenn and Thomas Grill: Fields of Haze – audiovisual installation
Tobias Leibetseder: Fragments – installation
Dario Sanfilippo: Phase transitions – sound installation
Almut Schilling: The Carrier – Experimental system
Mario de Vega: Intermission – sounding object
https://rottingsounds.org/category/threads/auditorium/
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Antenna
by Juliana Herrero and Thomas Grill, 2018/19
commissioned by rotting sounds
Steel cable, color, acoustic transducers, digital sound processing, text
The “Antenna” installation creates an interface between sound and its environment. It transmits sounds generated from encoded text. These acoustic vibrations are resonating through the networked body of the artwork, amplified and broadcasted into the surrounding air. The artwork recites the text of “The Art of Noises” (L’arte dei Rumori), a futurist manifesto written by Luigi Russolo in a 1913 letter to his friend and futurist composer Francesco Balilla Pratella.
An audio codec translates the individual letters into musical chords, which are in turn sent over the wire sculpture. These vibrations are modified within the filigree structure by the environmental conditions — wind, rain, dust, birds sitting on the wire. At the other end of the wire network, the sounds are picked up again and translated back into text. This process can be followed on a small display. By the time, the environment of the sculpture inscribes itself into the text by disturbing single bits of the manifesto, slowly turning it from readable text into environmentally informed noise.
The Carrier
by Almut Schilling, 2019
Stainless steel table, microscope, rhyzopertha dominica, compact disc, digital audio tape, floppy disc, contact microphone, headphones, loudspeakers
Phase Transitions is a long-form composition for an autonomous adaptive ecosystem operating in real-time which explores the idea of digital deterioration and the behavioural changes in dynamical systems with varying parameters. The work is based on feedback delay networks with nonlinear transfer functions, specifically, saturating units (also known as soft-clipping functions) whose purpose is to ensure stability in self-oscillating conditions but also to make the deterioration process possible.
Information can be understood as the conclusion of time, space and material. Represented by digital data information relies on a carrier to be processed, interpreted and stored. Depending on the logic of the carrier the bitstream (001101011…) needs to be transformed for burning, magnetising and electrifying. Listening to music through a magnetic tape (DAT) differs significantly from playing it with a CD or MP3 player. An information carrier does have a physical materiality, specific intrinsic properties which shape the sound, a characteristic noise, changing with time.
The data needs to be processed for interpretation through a signal chain of specific elements. Something like an ‘interpreter’ translates the bitstream. The MP3 player enables us to conceptually hear the sound. A bug (Rhyzopertha dominica) transforms the bits and BYTES just in another way, we might be able to learn to hear and understand? Let us mix up the conventional interpretational chain of digital sound processing. Let us hear the binary materiality, metal growing through oxidation, a cd interpreted by a bug, a MP3 file played through mould, heat and dust.
Phase Transitions
by Dario Sanfilippo, 2019
commissioned by rotting sounds
Electronics, algorithm, transducers, resonant bodies
Phase Transitions is a long-form composition for an autonomous adaptive ecosystem operating in real-time which explores the idea of digital deterioration and the behavioural changes in dynamical systems with varying parameters. The work is based on feedback delay networks with nonlinear transfer functions, specifically, saturating units (also known as soft-clipping functions) whose purpose is to ensure stability in self-oscillating conditions but also to make the deterioration process possible.
Saturators transform signals so that amplitude values within a certain range are passed through almost untouched, while values outside that range are compressed never to exceed the limits of the saturators. The more the signals are far from the allowed range (so to speak), the more the signals are distorted (i.e., signals deteriorate), which results in more frequency components being added to the network.
The feedback coefficients determine how much of a signal is fed back into the network, while the lengths of the delay lines determine after how much time a signal will start to recirculate. The first parameter is responsible for the deterioration process as it affects the magnitude of the signals going through the saturators, which will also change the spectral output because of the added frequencies, while the second parameter is responsible for reinforcing or dampening specific frequencies in the spectrum. These are the two varying parameters in the system.
The delay lengths are chosen as powers of prime numbers. It is enough to know that that will favour a homogeneous distribution of the energy over the whole spectrum. The initial feedback coefficients correspond to the self-oscillating threshold of the network. It means that, after being initiated, the network could theoretically operate endlessly without any external energy being provided. In this case, the network is initially triggered by an ideally short impulse (a Dirac) that sets the system into an operating state, producing sparse tones.
The system is coupled with the environment through a microphone (input) and a resonating wooden bench (output). The signal from the microphone is processed so that some information is extracted and used to pilot the delay lengths. The analysis window of this process is one hour. It means that there is no immediate cause-effect relationship between what happens in the environment and the output of the system: theoretically, a perturbation in the environment will reach its maximum effect after one hour, but the system’s output is continuously affected by the past environmental conditions.
The feedback coefficients are set to grow of a magnitude of 2 in about three months. Roughly, that is the limit after which the saturators will be full and will have no further effect except producing broadband noise. That is indeed what sets the life span of the system.
A nonlinear system with several interacting feedback loops and varying parameters is expected to generate phase transitions. These are a radical change in the state of the system, and they show particularly rich and nontrivial dynamical behaviours. The last and perhaps most important aspect of the work is an adaptive mechanism for the growth of the feedback coefficients used to explore microscopically such behaviours: when a phase transition is detected, the feedback growth is radically decreased to almost freeze the current state variables until the transition is over. Interestingly, the detection process itself can either trigger or suppress a transition, resulting in a system that, by observing itself, will also affect its behaviour, which is what generates the formal development of the piece.
Midnight song
by Thomas Grill, 2019
Ink print on paper, acrylic glass
The work is a printed representation of the soundscape recorded at the auditorium at midnight of March 1st, 2019, the beginning of metereological spring. In the still of the night, a nightingale sings outside in the garden, its song leaking through the windows into the reverberant space of the auditorium.
The audio recording is in the form of a monophonic 1-bit encoding, a very high quality audio representation consisting of a stream of bits. The bit stream has been printed as a spiral of black and white segments, starting in the middle of the circle. It can be converted back to audio by a simple decoding process. However, imperfections in the print and through wear and dust on the acrylic glass will change the visual appearance over time, therefore also changing the audio content.
Enrichment and depletion
by Martin Howse, 2019
commissioned by rotting sounds
Custom electronics, radioactive material, ultraviolet light
Depleted uranium: a byproduct of enrichment used as armour plating and armour penetrating projectile. Biological/radioactive half-life: 15 days/4.468 billion years respectively.
Enriched uranium: a type of uranium in which the percent composition of uranium-235 has been increased through a process of isotope separation. Uranium is enriched to fuel nuclear power generation and for military nuclear weapons use.
/Enrichment and depletion/ attempts the simple digital play back of the mineral or lithic, the sucking stone tapes, in order to enter into deeper times of the geologic and of media sedimentation
We wish to play back a clear instance of decay and dissolution, of the loss of energy and identity enacted by radioactive decay. Forms of playback can equally be considered as engaging in material and informatic decay or deterioration. Magnetic tapes are ground down and eroded geologically by the repeated application of the read head, memory bits must be energetically reset as they are destroyed by a digital readout, paper and ink are worn thin on repeated readings.
And in the moment of their capture by instrumentation, through their observation, the energies of the cosmos are consumed; they die out.
/Enrichment and depletion/ sets out to replace the oracular and significant writing of the stones, the ghostly stone tape with its geological palimpsest, with a clear and meaningless output of planetary depletion, only the earth and universe in dissolution.
Any atomic or sub-atomic change within materials implies a nuclear transmutation. Radioactive decay, also known as nuclear decay or radioactivity, is the process by which a nucleus of an unstable atom loses energy by emitting ionizing radiation. A material that spontaneously emits this kind of radiation – which includes the emission of alpha particles, beta particles, and gamma rays – is considered radioactive.
Radioactive minerals containing uraninite and sprouting yellow and green crystals of autunite and meta-autunite, sourced from sites of cold war uranium mining in Germany’s Erzgebirge region, are placed next to a geiger counter tube. Each local decay event delivers a pulse which is subsequently stretched and treated as a one bit sample. A single pulse within a time frame (a sample rate of twice the average counts per second) is treated as a one, an absence as a zero. These single bits are collected in a circular buffer, cycled through and played back at a higher rate as a one bit encoded audio stream. New bits are slowly added to the circular buffer as they are read in. It’s a repeating rocky tape loop.
The interval between these detected decay events or bits presents a high entropy source of randomness. Although we know that in 4.5 billion years half of the stock of uranium-238 atoms will have decayed into thorium-234, we have no way of knowing exactly when an atom will decay, producing as part of this energetic transformation a beta particle which will strike the geiger tube and trigger a bit count.
Given the half life of the isotopes within the active material (Uranium-238 and Uranium-235) /Enrichment and depletion/ will emit quite a different recording or playback in perhaps a few billion years.
Intermission
by Mario de Vega, 2019
commissioned by rotting sounds
Operating System, script, silicon carbide crystal, electric power line
Intermission is composed of an electronic system and a rudimentary suspension mechanism. Its principle is simplified as code written to analyse and retard an audio signal using the microphone input and segments of a computer interface as engines. A piece of silicon carbide crystal, suspended from the ceiling, interacts with the feedback of the system itself, acting as a gate that increases and decreases the fluctuation of a digital signal.
Magnetic Room
by Angélica Castelló, 2017
Woven tapestry made of cassette audios tapes, wooden objects & sound file
Magnetic Room is a sound installation / composition playing with the ideas of worship, confusion and memory. Intimate LowFi, construction and destruction.
“…I was falling asleep that night I kept thinking about Angélica Castelló’s Magnetic Room. Five amorphous, organ-like shapes made of knit cassette-like tape hang from the ceiling to form one mass of vibrating energy. Even in a dim barn, light inevitably hits the curled tape in thousands of folds, so it glistens like a sweaty reptile just crawling out of a pleasant swamp. A pedestal rests just underneath the floating mass, so as the mass inevitably sways, its movements are amplified by the frame the pedestal provides. A small, red, house-shaped block also rests on the pedestal. Nearby is a cassette player and a pair of headphones. I don’t remember anything about the sounds on the cassette, but the images of the sculpted object presented to my mind an instruction manual for how worry works, how it can be contained, how it can be freed, how it can be darkened, how it can be productive, and maybe even how to think about consuming it.” (Andrew Choate)
CD-R(ot)
by Almut Schilling and Till Bovermann, 2019
CD players, loudspeakers, amplifiers
A monolithic CD player stack revealing the (im-)perfect of digital audio.
The CD — arguably the first digital music medium for consumers — a “technological breakthrough in audio history reproduction. Laser and disc come together for one of the purest sound ever … a work of magic.” now becomes obsolete.
CD-R(ot) tells about the promise of this “ultimate sound experience by an unbreakable technology”, embodied by CD players and recorders of various brands, quality, and technological generations.
Seven playback machines (8 times 2 channels) are fed with referential material, their analogue output signal identically and simultaneously amplified and emitted. Minimal differences of reproduction emerge, amplifying onto the false promise of “pure perfection” of the digital, the myth that 01010010111 are infinite integrity. Continuous playback causes degradation, amplified by controlled micro-manipulation of the CD material, triggering the very soul of digital reproduction: the error correction.
The result: A pure sound? A mess? A distinct aesthetic of obsolete laser-based technology? Close in onto the perception of this “digital reality” and judge for yourself.
dust a bit
by Klaus Filip, 2019
commissioned by rotting sounds
Digital audio via laser beam
A musical motif in just intonation consisting of pure sine tones serves as starting material. It modulates the intensity of a laser beam. The laser is sent through the room with a mirror several times and finally directed to a phototransistor. On its way through the room, the optical signal is disturbed by the dust present in the air. Individual bits are changed. The dusty bitstream overwrites the memory of the original signal, is sent to the source material and again through the room.
This is repeated over hours, days and months and can be heard via headphones.
Fields of Haze
by Nicole Krenn and Thomas Grill, 2019
commissioned by rotting sounds
Paint on paper, generative audio composition
The installation “Fields of Haze” claims the western corner of the auditorium with 31 paper-covered stretcher hangers suspended from the ceiling. The pale color surfaces break the view to the back wall of the library of the Music University – where thousands of scores are stored – on the other side at this point notes for ensembles with several pianos. In very slow succession, chords seep through the wall and emerge through the mists. In short, they are clearly audible, but run quickly and spread out over the paper walls. Gradually, they blend into a vague tonal color that settles permanently in time and space.
Architecturally, the installation presents itself as a flatly dissected image of single images that spans the corner of the room, detached from the classical hanging on a flat wall. Through its permeability, it opens the room into the depth, but on the other hand, it offers a homogeneous radiating surface for the sound. At the same time, the paper carries both a visual and an acoustic color, in a movement that moves both spatially and temporally.
The piano chords represent the composition Véxations by Erik Satie (played by Jaime Wolfson), whose prescribed 840-times repetition at the chosen tempo would take several weeks. The individual sounds melt within a few seconds through spectral erosion processes, as they are also manifested in the MP3 compression and condense into swathes of digital sound vapor.
Fragments
by Tobias Leibetseder, 2019
commissioned by rotting sounds
Cardboard, paper, plastic, metal, waste of any kind, data, sound, video
The processual and constantly changing sculpture “Fragments” is in permanent development and consists of artefacts of the Rottings Sounds process. Waste, things collected, things stored and things put aside, texts, pictures, data, sounds etc. are the basis of the shape-changing work. Object or exhibition, museum or archive, collection or documentation are moments of intrinsic research and decomposition, accompanying the process and resting in the distant but immediate eye of the virtual observer.
Exposición. 19 nov de 2024 - 02 mar de 2025 / Museo Nacional del Prado / Madrid, España
Formación. 23 nov de 2024 - 29 nov de 2024 / Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (MNCARS) / Madrid, España
