free sound territories

hypersound touchpoints

tuesday | september 27, 2022 | essen

In the lecture performance hypersound touchpoints, we can expect encounters with multicultural sound resources that are brought together in the World Wide Web to form a collective composition. At a time when AI and algorithms have become buzzwords, four real artists will compose artificial sound territories simultaneously in front of an audience at different locations in both digital and analogue space.  The aim is to develop virtual free sound territories that seek to perceive sound phenomena at the place of listening and generate impact independent of generic listening expertise and musical profession.

Hypersound touchpoints are the intersections where sounds connect via the World Wide Web to create a shared experience for all participants, be they the performing sound agents or the listeners who are invited to follow these sound encounters. As in a true hypertext model, a particular sound progression is linked to sequences of other sources through many points of correspondence selected for meaning and musical context. Sound agents from Tel Aviv (Israel), London (UK), Pécs (Hungary) and Essen (Germany) will present such a hyper-linked sound journey set up especially for the BLAUES RAUSCHEN festival with the active participation of the festival audience.

Friedhelm Hans Hartmann alias Freed is a Silesian composer and sound artist living in Israel. His efforts to socialise new musical perceptions have led to various international projects, including the contribution of a large fund of experimental sound textures to the Freesound.org community, the collaborative creation of musical pieces consisting of sounds from numerous sound creators of diverse musical backgrounds, interactive street concerts as well as various remote performances via the internet with sometimes several simultaneous contributors.

Photo © Freed

Photo © Heinz-Josef Florian

Dr. Heinz-Josef Florian, composer of electroacoustic and instrumental music from Gladbeck, Germany, is a sound programmer and also the author of the present hypersound touchpoint configuration developed according to ideas by Freed. Selections from his electroacoustic oeuvre, often based on stochastics, chaos theory and fractals, will form part of the collaborative web of internet-based music performance.

Photo © Javier A. Garavaglia

Prof. Dr. Javier A. Garavaglia, born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, lives in London and Cologne and is a composer, violist/performer, sound artist and music technologist with a broad cross-disciplinary approach in Digital Arts. Dr Garavaglia was Professor at London Metropolitan University (2003-2016). While his main compositional goal is the communication of a distinctive musical narrative via the dramaturgy of music, his research and practice focus among other on 3D audio and algorithmic sound design.

Photo © Balázs Kovács

Dr. Balázs Kovács is a philosopher and sound artist from Pécs, Hungary. After his PhD in interactive sound and habilitation in virtual <-> real sound art bridges, he became head of the BA programme in electronic music and media art at the University of Pécs. In search of solutions for self-powered electronic music, he organised the first photoSynth symposium in 2018.

Photo © Josef Sprinzak

Dr. Josef Sprinzak is a vocal and interdisciplinary performance artist based in Tel-Aviv. His work, which he terms “Text Sound Art”, is an inter-medium situated between poetry, music and performance art. His artistic research investigates language and the relationship between meaning and sound, spatial narratives and sound-mapping. The themes he deals with include memory and consciousness, the poetics of image-voice relationship and modernist literature. Performs in Israel and worldwide in contexts of performance art, contemporary music, visual art, poetry and theatre. In addition to live performances, he also created radio plays and recorded music.