Berlin: "Lost Neighborhood" 1993

Resonance Installation at the Kongresshalle

In 1993 in Berlin we were once again making a sound installation in support of Peter Erskin's Secrets of the Sun.  This time the site was the proud 1956 parabolic structure donated by the the United States at the height of the cold war paranoia.  The Kongresshalle is located on John Foster Dulles Allee, due west of the Reichstag, and looks like nothing so much as an Eagles Beak taking a bite out of Berlin.  First we listened to the sounds existing in the area; intense traffic, bell tower,  fountains, picnics, people, cars,  busses. In other words, the sounds we heard were intense but normal large city noise amplified and reflected by the colossal post-war cement monument  that penetrated the park-like visual environment. 

We chose to use a resonating tuning tube of 4 meters in length at the bus stop located at the main entrance.  The tube's interior reinforced a clear overtone series and reduced all incoming sounds to those possible intervals.  Our rhythmic structure was the arrival and departure of busses which activated the tube's fundamental and first octave overtone every five to ten minutes.  A tambura-like drone was provided by the  fountain in the reflecting pool nearby.  Occasional interludes of people coming and going, or waiting for the bus provided melodic interest as their voices and footsteps were scanned and distributed on the upper partials.  We tuned the position of the microphone in the tube to the flat 7th, giving the whole a sort of blues scale.

For several days we considered possibilities for the position of the speaker which would re-introduce this tuned resonance to the site.  Finally, we chose to use a Planet Speaker on the cement floor of the plaza, pointed up at the parabolic cement roof.  Since the beam of sound the Planet Speaker produces is very directional, a listener could stand right next to it with the speaker almost at her feet and the sound still seemed to emanate from the arched roof above; its first reflection.  There, with very little power from the amps, we could use the parabolic architecture to amplify the sound.  Walking around the site and hearing this beam of tuned resonance coupled with the architecture changed the perception of the site, making the dominating shape of the parabolic roof seem to float like a wing.

This form of composing with resonance, speakers, architecture and live input of a city as a sound source to generate all the sounds has one main benefit.  It continually refreshes itself.  It is never the same.  As an interface, it is always changing in response to its sound environment  with the traffic, visitors, season, weather,  and with the time of day.  It transforms the already present interplay of elements in the sound environment into perceivable information.