About
Approach:"stadt:klang - urban:sound" is an interdisciplinary art project at the threshold of architecture, music, video and performance art. It focuses on our existing interactions with various public spaces, and provokes a temporary shift in the perception of how we utilise them, particularly with relation to music creation, film production and peripheral related arts.
Method and implementation:
The stadt:klang principle sees urban spaces as a collection of "sonic ensembles" and pursues a variety of methods to explore, record and demonstrate these possibilities. The city de facto becomes a laboratory of musical experimentation where we select objects / elements (facades of buildings, street furniture, flooring, etc.) and transform them into myriad musical instruments with specific characteristics relating to their constituent materials, tactile-ergonomic qualities and resulting acoustics.
stadt:klang considers the altering of these levels of perception to be a core design outcome of the project. Audio and video recordings as well as graphic representation of individual projects/activities (inclusive of further editing) help to form different "sonic city maps", further grounding the project within a specific urban context.
In principle, we distinguish between the following approaches:
The City is the Orchestra
→ Recording on selected objects with particular sound qualities (façade / street furniture / flooring, etc.)
Movement Throughout the City
→ Aural interpretation/ representation of movement through the city
→ sounds evolving from urban modes of transport, e.g. tempo variations resulting from human interaction with the local city environment .
stadt:klang Sound Archive
→ A collection of sounds created through the course of our work, unprocessed source sounds captured from the city. The archive aims to be the basis for creating an interactive platform, i.e. the possibility to upload new sounds to an ever expanding library downloadable for future user experimentation.
Work in progress
Together with expanding the stadt:klang Sound Archive, and regular publications on the Internet (www.stadtklang.tumblr.com) we are currently working on urban cross-border projects, e.g. Vienna and Barcelona. In this example, we are generating parallels /comparative projects between the two iconic cities in the form of short films / sonic city maps, with the goal of creating a particular urban sound (or tag) for each city. We hope to bring stadt:klang to more cities, particularly with the cooperation of local musicians and artists.
stadt:klang aims to be an open-sourced platform and database for the creation and collection of urban sounds.
contact:
lorenzo.karasz@gmail.com
flo.kogler@gmx.net
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