Listening Space

10:45 am and 5:30 pm

Moritz Fehr
In the years between 1915 and 1918, employees of the so-called Royal Prussian Phonographic Commission recorded the voices of prisoners at the Königsbrück POW camp near Dresden on wax cylinders and shellac records.
On November 22, 1916, Grigori Kim (Kim Hong-Jun), who was held here as a soldier of the Russian army, sang, along with others, the Korean folk song Susimga. The recording of the song has been preserved to this day and is part of the collection of the Lautarchiv Berlin.
Data Acquisition (A Song of Sadness) engages with this recording of Susimga and its significance for the present. Due to the forced situation concerning the recording as well as the still unresolved questions regarding the copyright and personal rights of the singer Grigori Kim, the historical recording is not reproduced here.

11:10 am, 3:20 pm

Paulo C. Chagas
The piece „Pune Metamorphosis” is composed based on Ambisonics sounds and 3D videos recorded in 2019 in the Indian city of Pune. These sounds capture typical soundscapes of this vibrant metropolis.The Ambisonics soundscape composition creates a continuous transition between sounds that convey different cultures of individual and social listening, such as human relationships, animals, technical devices, architectures, and structures of space and time. A second layer results from transformations of the original Ambisonics sounds through granular synthesis that explores unconscious cognitive sound assemblages. A third layer is based on bass flute sounds that have been electronically processed and spatialized using wavefield synthesis.
„Pune Metamorphosis“ was made possible by the Fulbright Scholarship program.

11:40 am, 2:25 pm, 4.50 pm, 6 pm

Merzouga (Eva Pöpplein & Janko Hanushevsky)
Somewhere on earth night is falling at all times. At each and every moment someone is singing a lullaby somewhere. These lullabies are as varied as the cultures they come from are different. And by no means do they always correspond to our ideas of what a lullaby sounds like. While in some regions of the world children are sung to sleep with gentle melodies, there are lullabies in other regions that can compete with the rainforest’s noise at nightfall, and merge perfectly with the forest’s complex soundscape. The impressive musical diversity of lullabies, and their variety of nuances and timbres, are represented in the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv’s collections.

Lullabies connect us to the generations before us. In the ephemeral transition between day and night, in experiencing the warmth and security of an embrace, the most solid foundations of our lives are built: the bond with those closest to us, the cultural identity that roots in the melodies we sing and in the stories we tell our children; in the myths and legends and in the promise of being protected. Because when the night ends, a new day will come. And when that day is dawning, night will be falling again somewhere else in the world.

12:00 am and 3:45 pm

Ulrich Wegner & Marcus Thomas
»sufisonics« addresses religious experiences and behaviors of Muslim men and women in Germany. A Sufi congregation in Hamburg, the Tariqa Burhaniya, is introduced in its acoustical dimensions. Contrary to orthodox Islam, Sufism, Islamic Mysticism, emphasizes a person’s individual path to a unity with God.
In February 2015, it was possible to make a comprehensive documentation of a hadra, a ritual performed by the congregation on each Thursday night. The musical material recorded built the basis for the work on the sound installation.
It is noteworthy that in »sufisonics« the Burhanis and Burhaniyas don’t appear merely as musical and ritual actors; rather, they speak up and report about the hadra and their spiritual experiences. Sections in Arabic and German reflect the bilingual realm of a Muslim congregation in a German urban environment.
»sufisonics« combines a documentary with a sound art approach.

12:20 pm and 4:10 pm

Senti Toy Threadgill
“No one can take the song within me
No one can take the song within
I Will Not Weep”

The water terrace rice fields of Nagaland, the heartland where elemental sounds of water, wet earth, sweat, breath, and the human voice find song. “I Will Not Weep” is a song of resilience. It is the simultaneous plurality of Naga sounds with its complex colonized past, and the ever present disruptive violence of the Indian army. There has been deep mourning and loss over time for the Nagas, but we sing.

12:40 pm and 4:30 pm

Marc Sinan
The once raging river has almost dried up today. For thousands of years, the river, which is called Amu Darya in Persian and Oxus in Greek, has produced cultural treasures that radiate from China to Western Europe. Today, it has become a symbol of man’s overexploitation of nature. But it is not only Central Asia’s nature that is threatened; traditional culture is also disappearing at breakneck speed and being displaced by globalisation and devastation.
Marc Sinan has undertaken an extensive journey through Uzbekistan and, together with Markus Rindt, filmed musicians who keep alive centuries-old musical traditions that have always been cosmopolitan. He presents the results of his research in the form of a chamber music suite, a road movie, for guitar, clarinet, harpsichord and percussion.

1:05 pm

Merzouga (Eva Pöpplein & Janko Hanushevsky)
Since ancient times, the Mediterranean has linked the cultures of the Middle East, North Africa, Southern Europe and Turkey. Mare nostrum, Our Sea is the liquid foundation of our cultures. Today it threatens to become a border to seal Europe off from its neighbours.
Liquid Continent opens an acoustic window into the collections of the sound archive of the Ethnologisches Museum Berlin and the diversity of musical traditions along the Mediterranean. We juxtapose the singing, drums, lutes and flutes that have resounded from the shores across Our Sea for millennia with an electro-acoustic sound composition of ocean noise. This longest, continuous natural sound that we know is older than the writing of history. Music, like the sea, has experienced the rise and fall of empires and political systems. It is the anthropogenic equivalent of the liquid continent that connects us across linguistic and cultural boundaries.

1:25 pm and 2:55 pm

Mehmet Can Özer

This piece is focusing on the oldest archival recordings of the Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv nowadays hosted in Humboldt-Forum. Such historical recordings offer different layers in meaning, first of all its content. Soundscape of that era can be only heard by the means of wax cylinders. Personally, I find it so emotional – the mortality of mankind and immortality of documentation are struggling. The Passage is shading light on memento mori, which was the inspiration from the beginning, also annotates the architectural function of the listening space.
Sound reproduction from the very first example till the current situation is the passage in this composition. The recording technologies have made the electroacoustic music possible, so it was a natural continuum to me in terms of sonic material. Using the advanced immersive audio embedded in the listening space, The Passage is inviting the audience to change the roles of being past to lasting.

1:50 pm and 5:10 pm

Sounding Situations (Milena Kipfmüller, Klaus Janek, Jens Dietrich)
The piece Triple Feedback draws attention to mutual listening and the power of recording. During colonial expeditions of German anthropologists in Rwanda at the beginning of the 20th century, unequal encounters resulted in sound documents that are stored today in the Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv and were not accessible to the local people for a long time.
In Triple Feedback, the artists’ group Sounding Situations investigates how power structures can be transformed through dialogue and new, original recordings.
Contemporary Rwandan songwriters, singers and music producers listen to the recordings that were previously inaccessible to them and send their analyses, comments, expertise, but also anger and rage back to Germany.
In their composition, the group Sounding Situations has transferred the old original recordings into their present musical language, which enters into an exchange with the visions and samples of contemporary Rwandan musicians.

2:10 pm

Moritz Schuck and Julie Daudré
In an urban environment, water is omnipresent. The sounds produced by this element resound in many places in the city. Often, this is less consciously perceived due to the masking effect of other machine- or human-generated sounds. Equipped with various technical means such as granular synthesis, Moritz Schuck and Julie Daudré head off on an artistic journey through the water worlds.
„Water Worlds“ was produced as part of the course „Spatial Audio: Production & Performance“ in the summer semester of 2022 at the Electronic Studio of the TU Berlin. In the course of one semester, the students could work on an artistic or technical/scientific topic.

2:45 pm

Moritz Fehr
The spatial sound composition Transformation: Fortress with Seven Towers explores how place, sound and music can interrelate and resonate with each other. It is inspired by the history of the Eptapyrgio Fortress in Thessaloniki and how it is reflected in various Rembetiko songs. The fortress was built in the Byzantine period, and over the centuries its function changed many times. During the years when it was used as a prison, many Rembetiko songs were written that directly refer to it. The Turkish name Yedikule, by which the Eptapyrgio is also known, is likewise the name of a fortress located in Istanbul. In Greece, as well as in Turkey, they both serve as a museum today. Taner Akyol improvised for the spatial sound composition Transformation: Fortress with Seven Towers on the Bağlama.