Tuned City day 5 / block 2 / 3 pm / radio house Nalepastraße

lecture
Jan-Peter Sonntag
Arbeiten im raum

performance
Jacob Kirkegaard
Labyrinthitis

nix

Jan Peter E.R. Sonntag is interested in the spatiality of sound as an amorphous body one can walk through in relation to possible space models as well as in spaces that only start to form in the head through psychoacoustic ambiguous phenomena and thus work diametrically opposed to our visual perception. On the basis of his early “raum-Arbeiten” with high frequency sinus tone interference fields and architectures of standing pressure waves on one hand, and the seemingly endless sonic air currents he has produced since 1993 on the other hand, he will present acoustic perceptual spaces that are constituted differently than their physical boundaries might indicate. He will also talk about his own body as an acoustic reception space, since we hear not only through the system of our ears but first and foremost in the brain.

Jacob Kirkegaard has turned his ears inwards for his new work Labyrinthitis, a three-part interactive sound piece that consists entirely of sounds generated in the artist’s auditory organs – and will cause audible responses in those of the audience. Labyrinthitis relies on a principle employed both in medical science and musical practice: When two frequencies at a certain ratio are played into the ear, vibrations of the hair cells in the cochlea will produce a third frequency. This tone is generated by the ear itself: a so-called “distortion product otoacoustic emission” (DPOAE), referred to in musicology as the “Tartini tone”.