Sound installation.
Room responses of the CLB Berlin to an octahedron loudspeaker.
Space
Each of the 8 directions of radiation of the octahedron will stimulate the room in a different way. This means the room “responds” in 8 different ways.
The 8 directional speakers can sound together and individually. Between single control and simultaneous sounding of all 8 loudspeaker-chassis’ different combinations are artistically worked out for the CLB Berlin.
Sound color
The sound material moves between abstract and relational sounds. Punctual and two-dimensional. Longer “pauses” allow the intrinsic sound, the noise of the room, to be heard clearly. Few times real instruments will be heard in the room.
Movement
Alternating radiation directions of the octahedron can also simulate movements. Real movements, however, will additionally be experienced in smaller time units at huit 2: two clarinet players will interact minimalistically with the sounds from the octahedron and take different positions in the room.
Octahedron
The idea to design and build this speaker came from the current wave of 3D audio concepts. The platonic solids icosahedron, dodecahedron and cube-shaped speaker concepts are already in artistic use. Martin Supper decided to design and build an octahedron for artistic considerations.
Clarinetists
Jürgen Kupke and Thorsten Müller
Martin Supper (*1947) taught electroacoustic music and sound art at the Faculty of Music of the UdK Berlin. Studies of computer science, linguistics and musicology at the Technical University of Berlin. From 1980, as a DAAD scholarship holder, two years at the Instituut voor Sonologie of the Rijksuniversiteit Utrecht. There he studied computer music and electroacoustic music with Gottfried Michael Koenig. Diploma in computer science, doctorate in musicology. Supper directed the current “UNI.K | Studio for Sound Art and Sound Research” at the Berlin University of the Arts from 1985 to 2017 and additionally the postgraduate master’s program Sound Studies, also UdK Berlin, from 2009 to 2015. Since 2013 Martin Supper has been teaching regularly as a visiting professor at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music.
Compositions and sound installations since 1981, including DH2 (1989), which was selected for the 1990 World Music Days in Oslo by the German jury of the IGNM (CD release on Cybèle) and fragment (2003) for speaker, two-channel tape, and loudspeakers, speaker: Hanns Zischler. One of the selected compositions of Tempo Reale Firenze (Luciano Berio), premiered in Florence (CD release by Perspectives of New Music). Collaboration with theater directors, actors, dancers, radio playwrights, film writers and others.
Photo: (c) Susanne Elgeti 2021