Unvorgesehen–Real–Farblos (2012)

Binaural voice recordings (headphones), computer graphics. Shown as part of the exhibition «Writing Machines» at gallery ESC im Labor in Graz, Austria.

Three discrete “real-time” moments in the form of soliloquies conducted in front of an open window. They examine the creational process, the design and function of sound art and the position of the listener. Due to the recording technique, the voice appears inside the head of the listener, and it creates a rhythm of foreground and background, which in turn have been translated into autocorrelation diagrams of selected sound features (spectral content and temporal contour). The printing lets the rose-coloured tableaux change between chip and fabric textures.

The title reflects the three recordings and in English means “unforeseen, real, achromatic”. It is a technically simple sound piece with three headphones mounted above a couch, each accompanied by a computer print. On each headphone you can hear a different sound diary entry which was recorded during my stay at the RONDO residency. The recordings were taken “live” so that I would improvise around a core idea connected to my compositional process. That is to say, I made an analogue translation between the compositional and the performance time. For the computer prints I wrote a program which produces a self-similarity matrix of the sound file of each recording. Time elapses from the bottom left to the top right, and each pixel found by horizontally or vertically moving away from the diagonal is coloured according to the similarity of those two moments in time. As in Dots, two types of rhythms interfere with each other: The rhythm between the soliloquies and the background noises, since the recordings were made in front of an open window to the city and the voice being suspended by many pauses, and the rhythm of the autocorrelation matrix which individuates the three prints.

Excerpt from “unvorgesehen” (use headphones)