Standing under the tents, visitors heard a soundscape of rain and thunderstorms intertwined with a piano piece derived from the pealing of bells, creating a nostalgic sentiment about camping and stormy summer nights. Yet by reaching the end of the installation, lighting, rumbling and the forest of tents gained another meaning: The gruesome reality of war. The light and sound choreography followed the rhythm of the first missile attacks on Ukraine in February 2022.
Khroma Berlin is a New Media art center, spanning over 1200 square meters presenting light and sound installations, code-driven, kinetic and interactive art. We are very proud to announce that two of our sound sculptures are part of their first exhibition. Fireflies makes the emergent behaviour of the synchronous fireflies audible, while Touch-me-not, a kinetic installation reflects on the very nature of the relationship between art peace and visitor.
We are excited to take part in designing a museum experience which tells the story of a mining site through big scale interactive exhibits. It is truly special to be able to plan a whole exhibition with the sound in mind from the very beginning. The eerie beauty of the mine is an incredible sight, but still very much a land of darkness. The underground world of catacombs possesses a haunting soundscape with interesting acoustic properties which gives us plenty of wonderful opportunities to think, and bring the place alive sonically. We can't wait to tell you more as the project progresses!
FOAM Institute further develops design together with our friends at why do birds, to protect urban health through improving the acoustic quality of cities. After creating a uniform sound for Germany's electric buses in public transportation, FOAM is currently working on three further AVAS sounds for different brands. Working with several brands at a time gives a great opportunity to bring the design principle to life, and approach each one of them as a single part of a harmonious sound palette. Similarly to the instruments of an orchestra, even though all brands possess their own unique sound characteristics, when played simultaneously they melt together seamlessly, to create a harmonious backdrop to our daily lives.
Sensescapes is an interactive 360° room installation which we created in collaboration with SCHNELLE BUNTE BILDER and Into Light at the Grassimuseum for Applied Arts in Leipzig. As part of the permanent exhibition “From Art Nouveau to the Present Day” museum visitors have the chance to immerse themselves in audiovisual interpretations of the exhibited style epochs (Bauhaus, Art-Deco, Streamline, Optical-Art, Computer-Art and Machine Learning). For each design era we composed and programmed interactive music and sound design. The visitors bring the interpretations to life and modify them through their movements, which allows them to learn playfully about the different design styles.
The multiple award winning project Myriad explores the beauty and challenges of the animals’ global migrations in an ever-changing, globally connected world that is increasingly being influenced by humans.
The piece originally created as a Virtual Reality experience will be soon transformed into an interactive and immersive walk-through installation, to make its debut at the Frankfurter Kunstverein. We are really happy to support the beautiful storytelling of Myriad with an interactive spatial sound composition. The audiences will be able to join different migrating species, travelling along wind and ocean currents, across continents and over soaring mountain ranges as they make their way around the globe, side by side with an ever expanding human population. The intent of Myriad fits perfectly into our practise of sonification, in which we use sound to weave scientific insights into fascinating, emotional stories - in this case, stories of survival and perseverance.
In the last few months, we have been working on a big scale sound scenography project that gives us several opportunities to learn and try out new tools and formats. We were invited to use L’Acoustics’ spatial audio system & processor L-ISA throughout the exhibition.L-ISA introduces an object-based spatial mixing workflow for real-time rendered media experiences. This feature enables us to seamlessly integrate our spatial audio know-how into real-time generated visual workflows and let us create interactive and ever-changing sound environments in „3D“. Earlier this year we met their team at their headquarters near Paris and besides training sessions, we shared ideas on how to adapt their technology for our specific use case.
The project also gives us a chance to utilise our custom made, adaptive audio system for the first time in a spatial sound setting. Thanks to this tool the sound experience changes depending on the visitors pace and interests, adapting the whole dramaturgy of the exhibition on the fly. Combined, the two systems can create a vivid, versatile and immersive scenography that isn’t bound by sweet-spots, phantom sources or preconceived visitor behaviours.
Our favourite secret exhibition, Himmel unter Berlin opened again this May at an amazing underground location. We presented a new, 12.2 channel sound and light installation that brings visitors on an emotional journey to the point of no return. Event Horizon is the boundary around a black hole where gravity is so strong that nothing, not even light can escape. The installation poses the question, what could we hear when time, information, and matter become disentangled from each other?
The 15 minute piece explores the topic through the human voice - superimposing musical materials that bridge the ancient and the modern, before ultimately becoming a state that melts, entwines and ultimately collapses into fragments of breath and text. We are very grateful for our collaboration with Fohhn, whose system helped us to immerse visitors in the sound, and translate an ungraspable phenomenon into an an emotional experience.
300 years of classical music met our compositions based on climate data at the Konzerthaus Berlin in November.
In Listening to Climate Change the professional musicians of the future, the Youth Orchestra Berlin performed a concert to raise awareness for a more ecological tomorrow. The repertoire of the concert included five classical pieces written between 1737 and 2008 with five pieces written and produced by us. Through the mixed concert program a timeline emerged, where our pieces musically represented climate change.We are grateful to Landesmusikrat Berlin for their openness and the opportunity to try out new ideas. For the third piece of the concert we tried a spatialisation technique for orchestra and audience for the first time, in which we turned the cellphones of the audience into individual speakers. Based on where they were seated, the audience was assigned one of the 12 individual voices of the composition and became an integral part of the piece. We were very impressed by the potential of the approach not only because it was a fun way to involve the audience but also made use of the whole spatial capacity of the concert hall.
Chasing Waterfalls premiered this fall at the Semperoper and then had its Asian premiere at Hong Kong New Vision Arts Festival. We co-composed the opera with Angus Lee for 6 human singers and for the first time in the history of the genre, for one singing voice synthesis system.
The opera, developed by phase7's artistic director Sven Sören Beyer, embarks on a music-theatrical investigation on the impact that artificial intelligence has on our human, social and creative existence. Apart from using several neural networks in our compositional process we also created an artificial intelligence pipeline, whose output became a character of the opera on its own account.
With the technical help of T-System MMS the audience was able to hear lines composed by the AI without any human intervention. The 5th scene of Chasing Waterfalls was dedicated entirely to this character, who took the stage and reflected on its own existence. To help the future's AI Operas, our colleagues at T-Systems MMS decided to share their code which we whole heartedly support! Until those future projects roll around, listen to Scene 5 to see what we could do with the technology available today!
If we know so little about the human mind, what exactly are we trying to replicate with AI? CHOM5KY vs CHOMSKY is a mixed reality installation that invites visitors to have a thought-provoking encounter with Artificial Intelligence, guided by a virtual host inspired and built on the digital traces of renowned linguist Noam Chomsky. This interactive, multi-user, playful and collaborative experience allows users to examine the promises and pitfalls of AI in a fun and engaging way, while posing the questions of what we’re hoping to achieve, to recreate and at what cost. Since all of these topics are very close to our heart, creating immersive composition and interactive sound design for the piece was a real passion project. The piece debuted this November in Berlin and will soon go on a world tour.
It was a bit more than a year ago that our Sound Scenography premiered for the Luxembourg Pavilion at the Dubai Expo 2020. The scenography of Jangled Nerves celebrated 5 important facets of Luxembourg, which divided the exhibition space into 5 chapters. Our orchestral score created a dramaturgical arch throughout the pavilion while it elevated the exhibition into an emotional journey. Visit our website to listen to the full soundtrack!
Originally created for the Humboldt Labor, SCHNELLE BUNTE BILDER developed a custom version of the +Panic swarm-system for the impressive display of the Kosmograf. Just like for its interactive counterpart at the After Nature exhibition, our swarming, real-time composition is accompanying the visuals.
