The city of Vienna epitomizes the meaning of what the contemporary urban environment of a European city can be. It has all the cultural and urban elements one would expect to find in a great metropolis. Against this contemporary urban setting, the starting point for this sound sculpture is a question, what was Vienna before it was Vienna ? What was Vienna in its original and natural state before it was an inhabited area?
Today, the answer is to be found in the eastern part of Austria and in Hungary along the Donau. There are river wetland forests, the "Au", that are the last remnants of the original Donauauen that extended east from the Wienerwald into what is now Hungary.
These Donauauen near Hainburg contain extensive river wetland habitats that in the springtime are full of the many sounds of birds, frogs, insects and moving water. The Donauauen can be used as a rich natural resource of environmental music.
"Landscape Soundings" uses the Donauauen as such a musical resource. This is accomplished by placing microphones at many different locations in the Donauauen north of Hainburg and simultaneously transmitting the sounds to a sound sculpture location in Vienna, the Maria-Theresien- Platz.
 The idea for this project was inspired by the circumstances of the Maria-Theresien-Platz. This long rectangular park is situated between two massive architectural structures, one devoted to Art History and the other devoted to Natural History. Standing in the middle of Maria-Theresien-Platz it was quite natural to imagine possible relationships of this formal park to the issues of Art and Nature, Man and Nature, ecology and so forth. This led to the original question about the natural origins of Vienna, and what this formal park may have once sounded like several thousand years ago.
The idea of returning Maria-Theresien-Platz to its original, natural, pre-cultural acoustic state is not a rejection of the contemporary urban and cultural context It is an attempt to define a new and vital link between an ecological sensibility, an aesthetic sensibility and the meaning of urban public space.
The presence of "Landscape Soundings" transforms Maria-Theresien-Platz into an open air museum. A museum that is not preserving the past, but helping to preserve the present by stimulating a public awareness of what had recently been an endangered habitat Hainburger Au became a famous place in Austria as the winter 1984 site of great and heroic demonstrations intended to save the trees from being destroyed and displaced by a hydro-electric station. In 1990, it will probably become Austria's first national park. In this recent historical context, the idea of relocating it to the center of Vienna is meaningful.
The acoustic transformation of Maria-Theresien-Platz is realized by installing many loudspeakers at various points at ground level, on the facades of both museums and within the rotunda of each museum. When possible, the visual presence of these loudspeakers has been minimized, so as not to disturb the normal visual aspects of Maria-Theresien-Platz. All of these loudspeakers play live sounds from the Hainburger Au.[1] Visitors entering the Maria-Theresien-Platz from either the Ringstrasse or the Messepalast pass through a "curtain" of live water sounds from the Hainburger Au. These watersounds mask the existing acoustic background of traffic noise. Upon walking further into the Maria-Theresien-Platz visitors can hear the sounds of various frogs and insects coming from loudspeakers hidden in the ground level lighting wells. From the facades of both museums come the calls of many different kinds of birds. These sounds from the two parallel museum facades echo across the wide space of the Maria-Theresien-Platz, becoming themselves transformed by the acoustics of the architectural context. Loudspeakers placed within the rotundas of both museums play nightingales and other song birds which echo inside the resonant acoustics of these vast interior spaces. Microphones are placed within each of these rotundas and transmit the resonant acoustics of these interior spaces to loudspeakers mounted on the museum facades at ground level, on each side of the entrance, so that visitors approaching each museum can hear the reverberating intonations of the museum buildings.
My purpose in installing "Landscape Soundings" (with its live sounds from the Au) in the public space of the Maria-Theresien-Platz is not intended to be a romantic return to nature. It is intended to be a radical transformation of the acoustic meaning of this public space. The acoustic qualities of the Maria-Theresien-Platz will also transform the natural sounds from the Au because of the sonically reflective presence of the two parallel museum buildings.
"Landscape Soundings" also has a life on the radio. At various times of day, I am realizing live mixes of short duration for the ORF. For the program "Kunstradio-Radiokunst", I am also realizing some late evening mixes of longer duration. In all of these radio versions of "Landscape Soundings" I mix and compare the original sounds of the Hainburger Au with their acoustic transformation by the Maria-TheresienPlatz. As a radio sculpture, "Landscape Soundings" also acoustically interacts with thousands of different listening situations throughout Austria that are instantaneously reached by these radio broadcasts.
"Landscape Soundings" simultaneously listens from 16 microphone locations and transmits these sounds to Vienna at the Maria-Theresien-Platz.
The individual microphones are distributed at intervals of least 100 meters apart from each other. The most extreme distances of the first to the last microphone are more than one kilometer. When you divide these relative microphone distances by the speed of sound (330 meters per second) a potential time structure is created that describes the movement of sounds through the Au landscape that is mapped by the microphone positions. The longest acoustic delays occur in relation to sounds that are loud enough to travel through the Au landscape to the most widely separated microphones. Nightingales, woodpeckers, crows, blackbirds, thrushes, ducks, cuckoos, jays, titmice, finches, redstarts and herons are loud enough to echo through these furthest microphones. Sometimes these microphone installations hear echoes created by the nearby human presence. Although the microphones are as far away as possible from the sounds of aircraft, traffic and trains, they occasionally enter the microphone configuration. Thus, the distant airplanes may become like a flying organ, as each microphone hears its Doppler shifting engine harmonics with different pitches. Train and boat whistles as well as church bells can sometimes be heard reverberating through the landscape.
"The clear voice
of the fulling-block echoes up
to the Northern stars"
Basho |