Marcel Cobussen 

Curated by Ludger Brümmer and Götz Dipper, ‘ZKM_Klangdom’ lets me first seat myself on a quite comfortable couch in a scantily lit room. Once accustomed to the darkness, I find myself in front of a computer surrounded by 24 speakers with just as many green lights. The domal set-up of speakers and lamps make rather complex movements of sound and light through space possible.

On the computer I can select a piece of music from 37 possibilities, all of them especially composed or modified for this sound minster (translation of ‘Klangdom’). I choose two pieces: Trevor Wishart’s ‘Imago’ and Ake Parmerud’s ‘Blow Up’. As the visual element is not really challenging – the lamps are directly connected to the speakers, so that when a speaker transmits sound its matching light glows – I close my eyes. Immediately I am swamped by sounds coming from different directions ...

... The rasping sounds of ‘Blow Up’s’ beginning not only enter my ears but penetrate my whole body. I experience a sound massage, an aural surprise, as I do not know from which directions the next sounds will come. The music incites thoughts: ‘Wo sind wir wenn wir Musik hören?’ Peter Sloterdijk claims that, contrary to the eye, the ear has no opposite. We are always amidst sounds. From eye to ear also means a transition from visualizing an object to inhabiting the medium; the indispensable, both spatial and ontological, crevice between the seeing subject and the object, which turns the subject into a non-involved witness, is replaced by or complemented with a mode of inter-esse, of being-in-sound.

The green lights, not meant to make the space visible or to orient oneself, are only contributing to this experience of being surrounded by sound. The eyes help the ears to surrender to the sonic enveloping. It is a more professional elaboration of my room where, as a teenager, I used to listen with my friends to Klaus Schulze, Gentle Giant, and Magma, lying on the floor with just a small blacklight bulb on.

Immersion. That is the keyword of my experience of ‘ZKM_Klangdom’. It is not for nothing that Frances Dyson, considering the potential immersive effects of virtual reality or new media art works in Sounding New Media, resorts to discourses around sound and developments in audio technologies and sound art.

Sound is the immersive medium par excellence. Three-dimensional, interactive, and synesthetic, perceived in the here and now of an embodied space, sound returns to the listener the very same qualities that media mediates: that feeling of being here now, of experiencing oneself as engulfed, enveloped, absorbed, enmeshed, in short, immersed in an environment. (Dyson 2009: 4)

Even without having to rely on an impressive volume, ‘ZKM_Klangdom’ pulls me into a world in which subject and object converge and resonate in one another, a here and now which simultaneously gives entrance to an a-topos and a-temporality, just like the other Dom or minster is/was (perhaps) able to do ...

References

Dyson, Francis (2009). Sounding New Media. Immersion and Embodiment in the Arts and Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Sloterdijk, Peter (1993). “Wo sind wir wenn wir Musik hören?” in Weltfremdheid. Frankfurt a/M: Suhrkamp.

Jan Nieuwenhuis

During the ZKM Sound Art exhibition, the Klangdom is installed in a listening room. A variety of compositions can be selected from a computer, which plays them through a 24-channel speaker system. Because of the number of speakers and the software system for sound spatialization, space can also be used as a musical parameter. Sound can be distributed spatially.

According to Chandrasekhar Ramkrishnan, Joachim Goßmann and Ludger Brümmer, there are two approaches that contributed to the development of multi-channel sound installations: the acousmatic approach and the simulation approach. The first one “focuses on the loudspeaker and its qualities as a way to organize sound in space” (Ramkrishnan, Goßmann and Brümmer 2006: 1). As an example, the authors mention the Acousmonium, a loudspeaker orchestra developed by Francois Bayle at the Groupe de Recherches Musicales in 1974. The second approach “uses a 3D space as parameter, hiding the internal routing to the loudspeakers and uses signal processing and psycho-acoustic properties to produce the illusion of a sound emanating from a particular point” Ramkrishan et al. 2006: 2). The difference between the two approaches is whether the control of the sound position in space is implemented as a musical parameter. The first approach does not offer that control: sound can be distributed between a set of speakers, and their location defines the position of the sound source. The second approach, however, offers the possibility to control the movement of sound in space, via software – in case of the Klangdom the program Zirkonium – that combines the different speakers to create the illusion of a virtual sound source. The acousmatic approach can be regarded roughly as a very large speaker system; the simulation approach rather as an instrument designed to control the movement of sound in space as a musical parameter.

The Klangdom requires a different listening approach that is not only focused on the sounding material as notes, but one that also engages the position of sound in space, the sounding material as nodes. It asks for a heightened auditory awareness of the listener in order to fully attend to the (illusory) movement of the sounds. Listening to music in the Klangdom changes my experience of space, because the acoustic horizon[1] differs from the visual one and “an experiential arena can be quite different from a physical arena” (Blesser and Salter 2009: 56). The sounds expand and shrink the space; it grows or diminishes and sounds larger or smaller than it actually is. The music moves around me in a dynamic flow that changes my perception of the actual room.

The speakers of the Klangdom, however, are equipped with a light that shines when the speaker emits sound. On the computer screen, the trajectory of the sounds and the virtual sound sources are displayed. In order to follow the moving sound on screen, the listener can rely on the eyes rather than the ears. This however, is in contradiction with the actual experience of perceiving sound moving through space. As Wouter Snoei[2] notes: “If I take a preset circle, triangle, or square on the computer screen, I don’t hear a circle, triangle, or square in space. […] The speed of a moving sound is more important than its exact spatial coordinates” (Snoei 2013: 5). I am drawn to the lights that focus my attention on the physical and visual surrounding. The lights reduce the experiential arena of the room once again to its actual physical dimensions and nullify my preceding experience of sound as an audible space.

References

Blesser, Barry and Linda-Ruth Salter (2009). “Aural Architecture: The Invisible Experience of Space.” In Pnina Avidar, Raviv Ganchrow and Julia Kursell (eds.), OASE, Journal for Architecture. Immersed. Sound and Architecture #78: 50-63.

Ramkrishnan, Chandrasekhar, Joachim Goßmann and Ludger Brümmer (2006). The ZKM Klangdom. Retrieved April 14, 2013, from http://ima.zkm.de/zirkonium/NIME06-Klangdom.pdf

Snoei, Wouter (2013). “Wouter Snoei.” In Erwin Roebroeks (ed.), Spatial Music: Artist Stories (p. 5). Retrieved April 14, 2013, from http://gameoflife.nl/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/Brochure-GOL-DEF-DEF-PDF1.pdf

Ludger Brümmer, Bernhard Sturm – Klangdom (2006)

Sharon Stewart

I enter the exhibit space entitled Klangdom, a dark room with multiple speakers hanging from the walls and ceiling. Four chairs are gathered around a table with an LCD screen displaying a representation of the speaker set-up in the room. A composition is already playing, and green lights flash under the speakers. I have the uncanny experience of being surrounded by a robotic orchestra with the central computer serving as the conductor. With eyes open, the lights serve as a sort of demystification of the arranging process, revealing precisely which speakers are active - turning on and off, and perhaps even glowing in relation to the intensity of the signal - in what I perceive as a fairly direct correlation. This activates the visual/analytical centers of my brain, and I focus on the computer image, green lights flashing in my peripheral vision, listening to what I see and judging or adjusting my auditory perception according to the motions of the dots on the screen.

At some point, fairly quickly, I want to just listen. I lie down on the floor, supine position and closed eyes encouraging my bodymind to become more receptive. At this point my auditory centers are allowed to take over, and I start to hear the sound in the space discovered by my listening, the space in which “I” forms a paradoxical center-whole: a center which both perceives the sound moving at a certain distance, within certain boundaries, as well as becoming the space within which the sound moves, the internalized perceptual experience of that space. Sounds swing around me and swing me around them, sharp curves tick the tissues of my brain, sound friction sandpapers my spine, and individual or clustered bursts of sound expand and contract (ourselves in) this sound-space. The dance could last all day, as far as I am concerned.

Vincent Meelberg

People still seem to trust their eyes more than their ears. People only believe it when they actually see it, not when they hear it. Hearing appears not to be enough for people in order to become convinced that something is, or is not, the case.

Even sound artists sometimes feel the need to visually show what could easily be comprehended by the ear alone. Take Klangdom (2006), for instance, created by Ludger Brümmer and Bernhard Sturm in cooperation with the ZKM Institute for Music and Acoustics. In this installation, 24 speakers surround the listener, who can select a musical composition from a computer terminal, which the will be played over the speakers. All compositions are remixed, and sometimes even composed, specifically for this installation to make use of the surround possibilities it offers. The sonic result often is spectacular.

But this was not enough for the creators of Klangdom. They also visualized the audible effects that could be heard. In two ways even. They coupled each speaker with a lightbulb that went on whenever the speaker it was coupled with emitted a sound. As a result, the listener could visually follow the surround sound. Furthermore, the sonic spatial trajectories were visualized on the computer screen as well, so, apart from closing your eyes and trusting your ears, there was no way to avoid the visual stimuli created by the installation, stimuli that showed what you could hear. Despite the beautiful sonic effects the installation provided I could not avoid getting the impression that even sound artists sometimes mistrust the ear.