Linz, Garden of Time-Dreaming 1990

Planet Speaker, transforming car sounds to music 1990

The first exploration we made into this topic was dictated by necessity.  In our work for the 1990 Ars Electronica, "Garten der ZeiTraume," we wished to create an unusually delicate sonic transformation of the garden Schloss Linz by creating an invisible web of sound that gave the feeling of falling through centuries of time.  We found our imaginations blocked, however, by the  ever-present sound of traffic which kept saying to the ears "Post-War, Post-War, Post-War...".  Responding to that apsect of the environmental soundscape, we created  on the hillside overlooking the main commuter traffic  an installation to transform the sound of cars into something more interesting and mysterious.  A parabolic sound collector with a mic pointed at the road below collected the traffic sound which was Vocoded or morphed, with water, wind, electric guitar, and other sounds.  The morphed sounds were projected through five speakers, designed by us and built by John Hansen.  These ceramic "Planet Speakers" sent a focussed directional beam of sound up the hillside, arriving at the listener just before the ordinary traffic noise did.  This masking formed a protective barrier to the intrusive car noise and allowed us to design the rest of the garden's sound atmosphere as we had planned.  It also became an attraction on its own, as the voices of different motorcars seemed to be released through the technology on a different level of perception.

"Cube Loudspeaker" Linz 1990