We are pleased to, in collaboration with Jesper Norda, Sound Studies Lab (University of Copenhagen) and Art Music Denmark, to invite you a:

 

 

Listening Seminar

Following the first ever full durational live performance of Jesper Nordas piece The Goldberg Variation (Bach Clock) – for one, two or more pianists, 2012, are we proud to organize a Listening Seminar attempting to situate different perspectives of and for listening while dealing with the performance and it’s aftermath.

 

The seminar is following a ‘strict’ structure of short presentations from the presenters (Jesper Norda, Carolyn F. Strauss & Holger Schulze), followed by wonderings and responses between the presenters, concluding with an open sharing/discussion together with the audience.

It is moderated by Lukas Lund, co-founder of Bureau for Listening.

Place: Bådehuset / Ancestral Modernism, Refshalevej 320, 1432 København K (Find your way)

Date: Monday the 9th of October 2023

Time: 2:00 pm – 4:00 pm

(we hope that this timeslot will allow you to participate in the seminar as part of work or a corresponding framework, not taking time away from being with family or other obligations).

 

Tickets: This is free due to different support from:

København Kommune Musikudvalg, Nordisk Kulturfond,

Art Music Denmark & Statens Kunstfond

We are also very grateful for all the help Ying-Hsueh Chen has been able to offer with realising this project.

Content for the seminar:

It can be difficult to decide on the format of sharing the content of a listening seminar. What to say in order to keep and create a curious, open and fruitful tension and attention towards listening itself? If too much is ‘declared’ about the seminar before-handed, what then to do as audience to stay open and curious about the content, rather than creating stiff expectations? If too little is shared, what kind of attention is then even possible to nurture?

 

We don’t know what would be the amount to share. So, we will not share the question/wondering which each presenter have prepared to conclude there presentation, but will following share a short (classical) abstract by each presenter:

Jesper Norda

Chopin Hours / The Centre of Silence / Bach clock

A sound is simultaneously a carrier of abstract information and concrete information. 

(Example: Someone whispers something in your ear. ”The abstract” is the message you are supposed to perceive, ”the concrete” is the sound of the whisperer’s voice, the airy, warm, breathy quality.) Your brain decodes the abstract information, giving it context and meaning. The concrete information in turn finds its way to other organs: the skin, the stomach, the eyelids, the hair follicles. 

 

Silence is often the same as absence, an opportunity to leave a conscious approach to the world in favor of a more contemplative one. A sudden silence can sometimes offer peace.

 

Silence is often the same as presence, a state where you leave a contemplative approach to the world for a more conscious one. A sudden silence works like all the lights being turned on at a party: you leave a kind of curated, abstract situation and find yourself relentlessly and immediately in a concrete situation, where your own body/breath/vision is the focus.

Carolyn F. Strauss

Slow Listening as a gesture of radical affection

How can listening link us to spaces and times beyond the ones that are proximate to us, the ones we know? 

 

Slow listening takes different forms, has distinct shapes and dimensions depending on the context, and of course depending on the listener. It is a means to honing perception and intuition, listening not only with the ears, but with the full range of human senses. It is both a local practice in the here and now as well as one that can traverse geographies and temporalities. In all cases it is intimate and inclusive, moving inward and outward to nurture new impulses and connections with self and others, human and more-than-human.

Holger Schulze: 

Being a Sonic Persona.

Reflections on an Everyday Life of Listening and Sounding

What do you sound like right now? What are you listening to right now? What strange sonic persona are you right now? Exploring the anthropology of sound means exploring particular, often erratic and even idiosyncratic experiences of sound and practices of sensing, listening, and sounding. I cannot know what you are hearing at this moment – and I cannot know how you are experiencing sound where you are. An exploration of this infinite variety of sonic personae is motivated by its apparent impossibility.

Short presentation of presenters:

Jesper Norda:

Jesper Norda works mostly with time-based art: audio and video works, but also with installations, text, photography, sound design and music. A recurring theme in his work is a constant questioning of the borderlines between sound and silence.

He holds an MFA from Valand Academy of Fine Arts as well as an MFA in musical interpretation and research from The Academy of Music and Drama in Gothenburg. As a teacher, he is working at HDK-Valand in Gothenburg as a teacher at the Design department.

Carolyn F. Strauss:

Carolyn F. Strauss (US/NL) is a researcher, curator, and creative facilitator whose work traverses the fields of architecture, design, contemporary art, emerging technology, and social and environmental activism. She is interested in enabling spaces of inquiry and encounter through which an expanded realm of human potential is explored and developed, with a particular focus on creative practice as a catalyst for dialogue and new experiences. As director of Slow Research Lab, Strauss has engaged a network of thinkers and creative practitioners in a myriad of research-based programs, including collaborations with prominent museums, cultural organizations, and academic institutions.

Holger Schulze:

Holger Schulze is professor in musicology at the University of Copenhagen and principal investigator at the Sound Studies Lab. His research moves between sound in popular culture, a cultural history of the senses, and the anthropology of media. Currently he is working on the three-volume Encyclopedia of Sound Studies, as one of the three chief editors. Selected Publications: The Bloomsbury Handbook of the Anthropology of Sound (2021, ed.), Sonic Fiction (2020), The Sonic Persona (2018).

Screen shot of presenters and moderator from a zoom pre-meeting:

Documentation of the seminar:

 

A reportage of both the performance and following Listening Seminar by Rasmus Weirup for Seismograf.

We are working on different ways to document the seminar. We strive to find a way in which the sensibility of listening is present in the content, methodology and shape of the documentation.

 

Our three presenters, Jesper, Carolyn and Holger, will in their own and different words offer an ‘afterthought’ as a response to the their experience with the different movements of listening present at the seminar.

 

A microphone was placed on the floor in the middle of the room (in the middel of the circle of participants. Both a raw unedited AI generated transcription and another edited and fragmentized transcription will be offered as documentation material.

 

Afterthoughts from presenters:

From Holger:

Since the morning of the Listening Seminar on October 9, 2023, I have been anticipating these two hours of listening and conversation on this early Monday afternoon. I enjoyed riding my bike from the Sound Studies Lab to Bådehuset on Refshaløen. And when we had all gathered in this more than century-old woodshed, Jesper Norda, Carolyn Strauss, Lukas Lund as well as our participants, I could indeed feel all the material sound events surrounding us. Fossil fuel engines accelerating, a bus stopping and starting again, tourists and workers passing by, chatting or shouting. I enjoyed being in this enclosed and safe place. It was also how I experienced the radical affection that Carolyn Strauss spoke of in our conversation. I could actually feel these sonic affects as the performance of a radical presence that emphasizes the multiple relationships, intentions, and sensibilities of us sonic peronae in this space. In all our infinite, fractalized difference.

From Carolyn (directed in a mail to Lukas):

You’ve asked us to share an ‘afterthought’ about the listening seminar on Monday 09 October, and I must say that, for me, the ‘movements of listening’ that were most present during the seminar were the ongoing after-resonances (effects, unfoldings) of what transpired two days earlier. To return to that space together again with you and Jesper was very special. Even with the piano gone and the furniture in a different configuration, the experience we shared was still very much alive in the space and also in my body in the space. There was the comfort of returning ‘home’ again.

From Jesper (directed in a mail to Lukas):

Lukas, you asked me to write an afterthought after the seminar, and maybe I waited a bit to long to sit down and write it. Now when writing I’m struggling with some kind of demand on myself to write something smart – and this is actually the total opposite of what I felt during the seminar. Sometimes you can feel a bit insecure and self aware when asked to say smart things – like giving the opening presentation at a seminar, but this day that feeling was not at all present.

 

I also remember this – although I was in the room on Sunday watching the (wonderful) piano rental guy roll away the piano after Saturdays performance, I was still surprised to see the room without it.

Edited and fragmentized transcription of the recorded seminar:

Coming soon.

We may also include a reminder of all that, which we have difficulties with documenting…

Like gazing into each other eyes.

The speculation and imagination of what the space have been used to during its lifetime – and the bodily feelings of such an imagination.

 

But do we even to what degree are we even able to comprehend what escapes our means of documenting? What is the relationship between sensing and documenting, between being present and already plan what to register and archive?

Complete, unedited AI generated transcription of the seminar (including unclear group talks, video sounds, noise etc.)

Welcome everybody, and thank you so much for being here, we are few, but hopefully that
will also enable us to perhaps have a more close, intimate, care-taking discussion later.
So that’s maybe a plus. We have two hours of this listening seminar, which is kind of following the performance that we did last Saturday with Jesper, but it’s not a must to have been there in order
to be part of this seminar, but there will be a certain way of grounding the space that
is of course informed by that performance that has taken place here, and that most of
us have been there for that performance, will affect and inform likely what we say and do,
but to what extent, perhaps we don’t know.
I will just say a few words, and then do a little introduction, and you will also feel
what the structure of today, and then I’ll be more quiet.
First of all, the time setting of today was the idea of you being able to participate as part of work, rather than giving up your free time with your family or otherwise to be part of the seminar, and the location of here is of course part of the performance, but there’s also this idea of traveling out here, how does that inform a listening seminar?
Because of course what we do now is also experiment into what is even a listening seminar, how does these two concepts of listening and seminar inform each other, and what kind of listening takes place at a seminar, and what kind of seminar is possible to organize through listening,
and this is an experiment of what that could be.
And that’s perhaps just a little note for later on. We will have three presenters, and I’ll just go through the structure so everybody knows that there’s some kind of curation here. There’ll be three rounds of free presentation, and each round will be of 20 minutes, and
each round will be with one presenter, we’ll start with Jesper, doing a 10 minutes presentation, followed by some kind of wondering or questioning of where he sort of comes to a hold or end, and where he does not hold the answers, but are curious about how we think with him.
After that 10 minutes presentation, the two other presenters will have 10 minutes to respond
to that.
What do they think of it, what resonates with them, what comments, what wonderings do they
now have?
And it will be kind of like informal, but to center that presentation, to give us some grounding. And then there’ll be another round with one presentation, this time by Caroline, followed by wondering and responses, and then with the last round with Holger, also 10 minutes,
his wondering question and then responses. Then we’ll have a break to ease up the room in terms of now these three people have been
the main ones to speak, to fill out the room.
And during the break we will ready ourselves to have a discussion, conversation all together. And I hope that it will be an easy, nice room.
And if you have any concerns or whatever during the time, please also voice that.
We have food and drinks and stuff like that.
We also have a toilet.
And I think that’s the main thing from my side.
And who are you? Well, me.
So I’m Lukas, organizer from Bureau for Listening. Bureau for Listening is a platform and artist collective concerned with listening. Listening is this perhaps rational capacity, research framework, both artistic and critical
practice. We’re interested in how listening can take on many different forms and also shape backwards to what we do and who we are, what would be a listening way of being. And this is of course part of what we then do. And maybe I could also say that Jesper is of course the artist and composer of the performance
we had this Saturday.
You also have many more hats on.
And if you want to know more, it’s on the website of today. Holger is… You have also many hats. But you’re also a professor in musicology and founder, leading researcher for the Sound Studies Lab. And Caroline is researcher, curator, many different hats, but from Snow Research Lab
in Amsterdam.
And again, there are links on the website if you want to know more. But with these words, Jesper. Okay, thank you.
Yes, so my name is Jesper Noorda.
And I am an artist.
I’m living in Sweden and in Gothenburg area. I work mostly with time-based art. Sound installations, video installations, but also text-based work and photography. And I also do on occasion sound design and even music.
Sometimes.
Sometimes.
I just wanted to say something about Saturday’s performance first. You know, I try to live a pretty good life. I live a quiet life with my family on the countryside. I have a lot of nice structures going.
But sometimes I get a bit tired of my consequence thinking. And it kind of manifests through my art sometimes. So it was many times during Saturday’s performance that I was a bit surprised at what was happening. And I thought it was… I’m so grateful for trying to do this.
And I realized a few things. For me it’s very important to keep the structure, to count the notes, to keep the rhythm. And I have such a hard time doing this.
And not make music out of it. I mean, it’s all the notes that do the global variation and they are just layered out like this. But to my surprise and maybe my joy, I felt that when I all of a sudden was kind of making music, everything was easier for me.
This is not a brain surgeon thing. I think it is pretty normal that it works in that way. But I didn’t think that it should happen to me when doing this. So that was a nice thing. And in the end I sort of gave myself a kind of finale moment when I just…
Because I had this recording of the piece that was kind of accompanying me all the time. And that I could also lean back and let play when I needed to break. And sometimes I was so confused when trying to understand the time here, what was happening.
But then I was just playing along with the recording. Playing the same thing that we had on the recording as from the piano. And for me that was a kind of a relief actually. And it was maybe the most pleasant part of the performance for me.
So it really made me start to listen as well and take in the space. I was happy that I surrendered in the end. In a way, to that fact. And I called a friend the morning after.
We went to art school together and he kind of straightened me out a bit. And he laughed a lot. He said, oh this is always what’s happening when people are doing these conceptual art pieces. They try to think they do… You do these kind of systems and then you try to fit in as a human and you will always fail.
So he was very kind in this. But of course that is also the interesting thing in a way. I think. And I think that’s a beautiful part of it as well.
Yes. So with that said, that was a very nice experience to me in that sense actually. And maybe I talked too long about this.
Now this should just be a short note. But when thinking about this situation, I wanted to talk about a few other pieces that I have made. That also relates to the question of listening and how to be a listening person or being.
When I look through my catalogue, I sometimes find it hard to see that there is a stylistic movement through my work. Or there is a visual identity or something. But they mostly come back to…
Often I try to re-experience what I experienced when I was a teenager and try to learn to play the classical guitar. That is my instrument, classical guitar. I played it between I was 11 and 18. And I was sitting in my room and I looked at the black dots on the white paper.
And then I…
And then the next one. And after a while you start to get a feeling of it. It’s like getting a grip of time a little bit. And to me that was pretty much enough.
I never became a guitarist and I never became really that good. Because I kind of lost interest when it came to perfect things. But I’m truly really fond of that transformation of those abstract signs into a meaningful emotional and physical experience.
And that is something I try to give in a way. One of the pieces I… I’m not going to do that now because I’m going to play another piece. But there is a piece I did some years ago that is called Chopin Hours.
And it’s a little bit the same like this. It’s Chopin’s Études. So I stretched it out for 24 hours and it’s a public commission for a school. So it’s a permanent sound installation. It’s still running.
And it is in a school for kids aged 7 to 15 years old. And I was quite scared, upset. And really I wanted to do it but I thought how, why should we impose sound…
I think I have lost the connection. I think we should come back. Sound… I will fix that later. The kids, they need to be at school. They are forced by law.
And now we shall have a sound installation that they need to listen to.
I don’t get it.
So I give a kind of solution with a kind of inverted interactivity. So as long as the kids are quiet and still, it will sound. But when they start talking and playing, it goes off.
And it works very well actually. Because now I don’t know. I did it 9 years ago. So the first couple of years I had some adbusters at the school. But now I think everybody just forgot about it actually. I got a note from someone saying, is it working? We don’t hear anything.
And I went out, yeah, it works perfectly. But you are not quiet enough. Can you change anything? I don’t think so, because then you will need to hear it all the time.
I don’t know what to do now. You just need to be quiet and listen, if you want to. So for me it was an act of democracy really. When the kids want to hear it, they settle down. They be quiet.
And when they are tired of that, they just start talking and playing and fighting over everything. Time now, Lukas? How much time do I have?
5 more minutes.
Yes. And then I also got to talk about the piece that is called the Center of Silence. That I made a few versions of. And when I do that, the Center of Silence, I don’t know why I can’t really see anything now.
Maybe with the focus?
Yeah, like this.
Yeah.
Okay, I shouldn’t do that. So, I come to, you can look back to me. I skip that image, because it’s nothing really. It’s an empty space. So imagine this space empty.
So the Center of Silence is a person. So it is a recording of a person talking about the space. He’s talking about the width of the space. The volume of air in the space. He talks about how much that air weighs. He talks about how the air molecules behave when exposed to different kinds of sounds.
And if it’s like random. Or if the air molecules are standing in waves. And it does that when a sine wave is played, for instance. And he also talks about the air pressure that is really heavy upon us. And the pressure that comes from within, that makes us not implode or explode.
It keeps us in balance. And then he talks about the state, the balance that we may call silence. So that is kind of also an attempt to define silence in a way.
But of course, it’s never silence. Now I will go to this presentation. And these are two pieces. And this is my experiment for today. Because I’m not really happy with these.
I’m happy with these pieces. But I’ve not been able to do good shows with them. So this first piece I called Stone Clock Slash Landslide. And if I start this now.
Okay, so now I’m not having the measures. You hear, maybe hear. So it’s kind of a performance thing where I drop a thousand stones on a rock and record them.
I really like the sound quality of stones. It is a kind of sound that is really not making anything more than it is as a material really. You can almost hear the sound from how it looks in a way.
And then the clock just continues and we have this gradient.
And in the end we go to black.
Like that.
In the end. And that is important because the other part of the piece is then called Landslide.
And where I play everything in random order. So we have the perfect order in Stone Clock Slash Landslide.
This is pretty much similar to Goldberg’s clock thing.
I realize now it’s the same thing. But perfect.
And then. So in this piece, especially in this clock version, we have this silence as a gap in between. It is a pause and anticipation.
Yes, thank you. It is very concrete in a way. Four seconds in between.
Four seconds of silence. Oh, sorry. I am back.
And then. And this piece, you don’t see it really. It is called Torch.
And then there is a lot of slash signs. And then a lot of six numbers.
So a lot of numbers meet just in one minute. So now we are going to play a little game here. So first the screen will go black. And there will be a short, super short flash. And you all now have to be with me.
And think of this flash as traveling through us. Traveling through these walls. Continuing its way out in space.
Forever.
And you can follow the distance in the counter that I made. So are you with me? So this is the, like in real time. Speed of light.
It doesn’t make any sense now. But I really like this. I like this in relationship to talking about silence and listening as well. Because this is, I have never done anything that is more silent in a way.
It is difficult to think that you can listen to this. I don’t know. So I wanted to kind of end with that. And when doing my, when you asked me to send in like a short paragraph for this.
I ended with a question. You wanted me to end with a wondering. And so I have been talking about silence a bit. And maybe this question is not that. It is very broad. I think I said, when facing a silence, what is your response?
So it is a super broad question. But for me it also is a kind of, you need to be careful. Because that of course depends on what state you are in, in a way. If you are happy or stressed or anxious.
But still, that was my question.
Okay.
So maybe that was my ten minutes.
Yeah, it was.
And more. Sorry, sorry.
It is okay.
Thank you.
And now it is like the idea that Karen and Holger has a time to respond to the presentation and to this wondering.
I imagine that you also brought a little bit in hand.
I would like Holger to begin and Alf gets two cups of tea for us.
Wonderful.
I have a response to what I do.
First of all, thank you for sharing that.
And when you asked this question, what do you do when silence is around us? I sensed it in some of us also here. I always take a deep breath of relief.
That is almost my intuitive first reaction. It is almost, you have this term of grounding activity sometimes in psychology.
So an activity that connects you with the environment, with your body, with your calmness.
And I feel silence is, for me at least, one grounding activity. I am safe, it is good.
I am not attacked from sound or anything.
And I am guilty.
Thank you.
That is my first response on silence.
And there are two things I thought, or three things I wanted to share that I thought of during the presentation.
The first thing was when you described the stone clock and the landslide of stones. I then wondered, probably you need not to make a Goldberg slide.
It would be the randomized version of the notes.
I don’t know if that makes sense.
Maybe it has been done before.
But it would be the logical next step. That is the one thing I thought.
And I imagined immediately, how would that sound?
Can we still recognize a third of the tonal center?
It is already hard, probably when one listens to your Goldberg Clock variation. Yes, but it could be really interesting.
Because I assume that some harmonies and some tones will occur more often in the cover. And they will kind of set the tone for this chaos.
Like a colored chaos? Like colored white noise? Yes.
Like a filter almost. A filter, yes. That would be interesting to listen to.
And the second thing, my last thing I want to share is when you showed us the light flash and the meters. I still feel dumbfounded about the reality that anything on this poor planet that we sent out into space at one point, television, radio, even basic terrestrial communication we did since the early 20th century or something.
As soon as it reaches the atmospheric outside, it travels forever, of course. And that still I feel unimaginable. It is totally clear that the first thing some aliens, if they have read the Telskar, will listen to, is the weird first experiments of radio experiments.
And then it gets a lot more accelerated.
I find this still an almost insane imagination.
And that will be part of that.
So all this white noise we are producing every day will in sequence reach certain alien civilizations if they exist.
And of course they do.
I just want to bring this back again to the materialization of this flash.
Really nice. I mean I have to kind of bridge from there to some notes I made about Pauline Olivera’s quantum listening.
Because she talks about the fact that they spent, you know, they spent $165 million for the Mars climate orbiter to be launched by NASA. And as an afterthought they put a $15 microphone from a hearing aid on the thing.
Like there was not a thought about actually listening to space.
So the Hubble telescope and the James Webb telescope and all these things, there still is not this. And even, I mean even, you know, the blue dot, I mean Carl Sagan insisting on sending a camera and looking back. Or these kind of afterthoughts in fact that reveals so much information.
So, and I won’t get into my topic quite yet but I was curious about, I do want to talk a bit later about your, what you went through on Saturday. Because in fact it was that it’s the fallibility of the human apparatus that is so interesting to me.
And the most revealing, and the most relieving also in a way that it’s not all mechanized, you know, thing. I do have a question for you which is why you work with these, number one why these very classical composers and this music.
And also what kind of stones were they, where were they from?
I’ll start with the stones. They were from a beach with stones in this size. But they were all the same, I mean geologically speaking they were all the same. Yeah, yeah, but yes. So, I’ll say in English.
Bohuslänsk röd granit.
Huh?
That was Swedish. The west coast, there is granite. Granite. Yeah, and it’s kind of reddish where I live. So, it was mostly from that.
Red granite.
Yeah. So, I took really what I could take in a way. And what I found pretty near to where I live. And I don’t know my fascination for the composers and why I work with these composers. Maybe it is a way out for me.
You know I studied composition for two years before going to art school. So, I went more and more interested in silence and less and less interested in music during my time as a composition student. So, I really found at home, actually in the 11th, I felt more at home when going to art school instead.
I didn’t really think why this. So, in one sense music and sound is kind of a craft.
I mean I wrote a lot of music. Not very good, but I wrote for scores and stuff. And I can hear when writing. I can kind of imagine what that would sound like. But I’m super interested in how our perception works around when being presented to something that we don’t know.
And I sometimes feel that when I’m presenting my own music, if I write my own music, or if the music is too new, then we start to listen to that rather than the rearrangement or the puzzle. I sometimes think that for me it is more important with the presence of being at the riddle than being swept away by something you never heard.
So, that is why I choose really familiar pieces. Because then we can all agree on that we have a ground here. We have the Goldberg Variation as a ground, but now we are standing in front of a new situation. Or the Chopin piece that I used in school.
I have used Schumann as well. And I have used movies, pretty standard. And books, that is not really super interesting, but they are common knowledge. So, I like the idea of common knowledge and to look at that.
Kind of embracing a little bit that we have some kind of mutual ground.
Was that clear? Yeah. Great.
I think we move on to the next presentation.
Yes. Yeah. Hi everyone.
So, I don’t know, I won’t get too much into Slow Research Lab, but which is the platform that I founded and that I continue to direct. But listening has been for us, anyway, throughout our projects, kind of a thread that runs through as kind of a tool of slow research, of slow practice.
And it takes many forms.
And it is not only listening to sonic things. It is listening through the body, listening through other senses, and exploring ways of listening with the earth, with other species, with the unknown, which is a lot of what we are going to talk about today, actually.
What was the first? I actually really want to, so the question I had asked was, I don’t even know if I, how can we listen, how can listening link us to spaces and times beyond the ones that are proximate to us or beyond the ones that we know?
And that question kind of originated with a project that we were, about listening, that we were doing or planning to do in like a study program we were going to be doing in Brazil in 2020, April 2020.
So, it didn’t happen.
But it was about this, it was an inquiry into like disappearing ecologies and how do you actually have empathy for, you know, can listening be a tool to somehow generate some empathy for a distant kind of geographic location or something you’ve never actually touched or known or felt the kind of vibration of? Or can you, through your own ancestral line even, you know, the way we have epigenetic, you know, memories of trauma and everything, is there a sonic kind of vibration, like what you were describing going into space, do those things, you know, do those modes of listening and modes of kind of vibrating or resonating actually pass down?
Can that like link us back to places where we’ve never been in this incarnation, in this body, and yet are we, and yet we’re connected to them? But what I really want to talk about is what happened on Saturday, because the experience of the Bach Club, which is, or the Goldberg Variation Bach Club, which I was here for the entire day, and Lucas, and for those who were not, some were not here at all, I think, but for, yes, for Lucas and I were kind of like this tripod in a way, like that was this staple presence that was here.
And then people were coming and going, and there were varying degrees throughout the day, with all of us, of attention and also rest. I mean, some of us really got to sleep, which was nice, while the rest of us were laboring away. But this kind of cycling through these twelve and a half hours in this way, and, but, yes, for your attention was so special to witness.
It was like, from the moment you began at eight o’clock, it was like this, it was amazing to watch your, there was this deep kind of care for the score that was like, like your whole countenance changed. The second you started, the first note, your whole, you know, changed. It was very interesting. And even though, and you had this beautiful focus throughout the day, even when you became less focused or soft focused, which, you know, Pauline Oliveros would approve of anyway, but, you know, that it was still, that was also a form of focus and of, as I was saying, that kind of human fallibility.
And so there was such a feeling of intimacy and care for the piece. And, yeah, it was, it was just, it was super touching and very special. And, and as I said to you, like, I haven’t been to Copenhagen in like 16 years, and I was just like, there’s nowhere else I want to be in the world right now, but in this space. It was, and then Sunday morning, so that was very, and we’ll come back to that, but, and then Sunday morning, I wake up to this news of this, the complete opposite, that’s this devastating news from Gaza, right? This like, pain and suffering and explosions and everything, you know, and I thought like, what, you know, almost like these two diametrically opposed.
Situations. And of course, you can go to this thought of like, we’re, yeah, what kind of privileged like position we’re in to be here in, you know, in Denmark, like listening to this piece and, you know, but I would argue that it’s actually really an essential thing. Like, it’s a, it’s like a, I really feel like we were holding the space for, that was kind of anchoring this turmoil that was happening elsewhere. And almost like a kind of a, I was writing down here, like a kind of a still point, but like, you know, it’s becomes kind of cliche to quote Donna Haraway these days, but in, at the beginning of Staying With The Troubles,
she talks about that, she talks about how we have to respond continuously to devastating events. And we also simultaneously need to build quiet spaces. And the quiet spaces is more the way Slow Research Lab has been functioning and creating these spaces that are really out of time. I mean, that’s what’s also interesting, that it’s a clock, but it’s completely out of time, we were completely out of time. And so, and in so doing, you, there is a, there is a kind of a liberation, but there’s also this deep kind of this deep care for the space of sort of not knowing where you are, and the way you were getting lost in the score just beautifully.
Yeah, this beautiful kind of softening, as I was saying, that was happening. So, yeah, I mean, what does this have to do with listening? It was an amazing experience to listen to the piece, of course. And, yeah, but it also has to do with what for me is kind of a very ambiguous territory of, that you could call listening, which has more to do with, as I said, previous, a little bit ago, more to do with the unknown, more to do with the space of not knowing, more to do with the fact that we don’t need to know everything. And this, this, the impossibility for conceptual artists to actually get, you know, you were saying that I’m thinking about On Kawara’s paintings, you know, this kind of like, it’s never, it never will be, it never will be perfect.
And that’s such a, it’s such a relief, actually, that, and because of the work or the research I’ve been doing, kind of speculative research I’ve been doing about artificial intelligences, it’s also to say that it’s like a relief to know that if we, if we collaborate with these entities, if we approach them not as, you know, you know, not as this kind of corporate productivity, you know, the way that the things, the way they’re going, but actually, if we approach them as, you know, as, you know, as, you know, as, you know, as, you know, as, you know, as, you know, as, you know, as, you know, as, you know, as, you know, as, you know, as, you know, as, you know, as, you know, as, you know, as, you know, as, you know, as, you know, as, you know, as, you know, as, you know, as
we approach them in this kind of, and through a kind of a, in a plural way, through multiplicity and we really collaborate with them, we can forge these very beautiful new kind of, like squiggly lines, you know, out into life that, yeah, that machines cannot, or we continue
to feed them to machines and then we arrive somewhere different and then machines are
also of course amplifying or helping us to listen in new ways and electrical impulses
like Christina and I have been talking about and things that will become more and more.
Yeah. Do you have any last remark? Yeah. So my last remark or I guess was to return to or my question.
So I have posited this idea of this kind of empathy or empathy that also can happen through
a space of kind of not knowing.
I called it and also became the subtitle of our last book. I call it radical affection and it has to do with an affection and I’m curious what that’s actually I won’t say what it has to do with.
I’m curious what that says to either of you or anyone else and as a space of radical affection is listening as a radically affectionate act but also radical affections that are just
where there’s no certainty and yet there’s a relation or a resonance that happens through the unknown to meet other spaces and people. All right.
Okay. Yeah.
Thank you. First I have to say it was so nice to hear you speak about the subject and giving some kind of more depth for me actually when hearing your experience and it was strange because
I know we were sharing some Instagram stories and I have a friend in Israel who not really got no response to my stuff but now she gave her heart to this and then the other day we
heard about this.
So it was became really close in that sense as well and she’s fine. So but yeah we were and I forgot to say about that because when I heard that you were going
to stay the whole day I thought poor Carol. Yeah. But Lucas okay you know what will happen because you erased it but we became like a team. It was super confident for me to have you two there and kind of sharing that and I was
a comfort not comfort because that means something else in English than I was a trade say. It gave me confidence. So but your question I really like that radical affection and of course listening is kind
of radical when it comes to the word affection because that’s the kind of gentlest thing you can do right. You can sit still taking in.
I don’t know.
But I am glad it showed. I remember when there were two hours left going for drive for two hours can be quite
long when you’re starting out and I felt we’re almost there now. That’s not okay. Is there only two hours left. So it was kind of a strange trip actually.
And what you said at the end that you were surprised when you turned the page and it
was the last page of the school. Yeah I was surprised. I wasn’t ready for that at all.
Yeah.
A bit.
Okay. But the other thing about this like knowing or this connected to radical affection is
also that you know we were talking in the slow listening gathering we had recently about this decolonial thinker who is based in the Netherlands named Roland Vasquez who was saying that like you know listening is so important for cultures like ours these dominant
Western cultures to bring back to these composers because we are raised with this idea that we are the ones who know and so we are the ones who others listen to.
And when you realize that other people have their own as he would say situated knowledges
which is a harrowing thing also then then you realize like oh actually I’m only knowing
from one perspective.
So and I think like what I but at the same time what I find beautiful with your with
the Goldberg variation what we experienced is that you I mean you completely deconstruct
the thing also so that it’s like yeah it’s not Bach anymore and it’s not and it’s almost it’s trying to it’s trying to impose this what one call what we could call the tyranny of the clock or something but at the same time like when you were you were playing too
fast or you were getting musical or you were yeah so there’s there’s actually that’s the
beautiful the the so we’re saying the kind of liberation from yeah the liberation from
the tyranny of the clock and of western dominant ways of knowing or of expression it became something different so you kind of enter into you actually lose that you’re saying it’s like a common ground but I feel like you kind of lose that ground in a way and that’s what’s beautiful.
Olga as someone who has not experienced the performance what would you like to
to respond to Caroline?
There are two things that you mentioned that resonate with me very strongly that have to do with the altered structural topography of time and space when you just said at the last oh
suddenly two hours was like just there you were surprised that after 10 hours and then 12 and a half hours oh it’s already over you being the heaviest working person in the space that’s one
thing where time topography changed and where you were relating to yeah what happened on the
Galileo’s trip and in Israel that’s a linkage over space and I feel that is something that is that can be regarded or not trivial but often we assign it more to visual representation say okay
now I see now I can be there in my vision in my imagination but in my personal experience I sense that through listening and not necessarily listening from that space we connect affectionately much more strongly to another person or another space my favorite
example is when people from the outside mourn or ridicule people being immersed into the headspace and the headphones and listening and I feel yeah but maybe they’re listening to a playlist of a very affectionate partner friend relative and are deeply immersed in this affectionate relation
to that person or listening to something that totally effectively fills them of course you can’t see it outside but that’s not that’s not their problem that my problem so there can be a deep affectionate time and space transcending relation to another location another person
that is not tangible from the outside or that cannot be seen from the outside I feel that is a an inherent power or even a magic teleportation and time travel that
that listening can do that’s the one thing I was thinking in this situation with 12 hours also
and I would like to hook in into the thing you said about AI and these machines because there’s also a topic regarding voice assistance and so I deal a lot with these days in a research
project and what you said how to approach these entities machines artifacts differently
I think sometimes if we perform these kinds of listening and approaching
sometimes I imagine how it were if we would educate train domesticate actually these tools through these practices exactly and how they would turn out in let’s say how they would become
such beautiful but also useless in a sense in the classical industry sense agents artifacts beings that do totally different things they might not respond very very accurate any longer they might not be responding with a list of sources and they
bring together all the source but we wouldn’t do that anyhow also so they would be in a sense more like us and that that would be weird and interesting and probably much more more playful yeah that’s very much the premise of the kind of research that I’m doing about this
and the kind of questions I’m asking to I have a podcast about that I’m asking to artists about it
but then my question to you back back to you on that would be how do you ensure that we have rich enough data sets to feed data sets of these I’ve talked about with others about anomalies or noise or we spoke about that at dinner the other night so yeah so that this we have not just this
one 12 and a half hour performance but this you know how how are the AIs then being yeah being fed
right this I’m more to respond very quickly I’m just do not think about the quantity of the data but about the let’s say extreme quality of data sets so not the most informative or well well
medium sources in data sets you want always sources that represent a kind of medium of knowledge but what why not take the most extreme cases like extreme art performances extreme musical extreme literary whatever and educate them with them with that that would create the morphic so it’s
not I would answer not the biggest quality of data sets their quantity but the highest quality
of extremeness but that’s yeah proposal yeah and you’d have to give them a different value then
obviously to yeah great again thank you very much for sharing uh we now have the
third round with the presentation from
okay it became a bit smaller now I can do like that I can all right maybe you you can operate thank you
yeah thank you I want to speak a bit report a bit about the research so and the term I use therefore is being a sonic persona which includes listening
as well as sounding so hearing others moving about drinking the heating eating a crunchy pear but also doing that eating a crunchy pear and drinking and getting warm and so on and
for me as a start to speak about that is always the most interesting bit to be listening
what we hear right now so bear with me a few seconds we did this already
just notice now how things have changed still with a high frequency of our digital tools if we hear them not eating any longer we hear our movements of textiles and paper
a little bit the outside of machines
airplane now a helicopter
these things come to us through of course the material connection of molecules and air towards the resonance which is possible in this very space in which we are sitting right now
which has a certain materiality we smell we sense we’ve seen now we can see them again and that as I learned has also historicity I learned through Lucas that hello this building is and 1914 is the mark here
so the needless to say I have some of the historical trajectory along the way is in here even though clearly some of the bits are not from 1915 but the building as such is like that so we can even imagine what happened here when people were actually using it as a bathing house
to change clothes to do things that’s also all here and in this materiality I often wish also
to remind of our own materiality I love this work by a photographer Howard Schatz from 2002 he photographed in this case 56 athletes so very well trained
extremely fit and aware people of their bodies of the skills of their bodies
and still if you look closer I try to make it a bit closer here these 56 human beings I feel look so radically different so radically alien to each other if you
for instance look in the middle of the of the female athletes on the top you have probably the pole vaulter and maybe a jockey or a ballet or a gymnastic dancer right here in the middle those two they are so different in their bodily I wouldn’t say bodily structure but
but in their body performance and how they have trained and what skills they have
and needless to say a sumo person also has different things than maybe another athlete and so on so this is just the outer physical bodily corporeal layer
if we now add if you will us untrained bodies who are not really athletes but do our jobs desk jobs and walk around do listening whatever have kids play with them do other things but not athletes our bodies are different again probably more fat around here and
a bit loose there like it is and then we add all these other persons on our planet who have certain what you call disabilities not seeing not hearing one limb cut off two limbs cut off deformations that people have there are people with 11 fingers with nine fingers
people with 11 toes with nine toes all of these things bigger earlobes smaller earlobes so where I want to get at is that the idea that as is often said also in anthropology we’re basically all the same I feel this very old and ancient saying on the one hand goes out of the
window because it’s clearly not the case not even on a very superficial account of people but I do not consider this as a negative trait but as a positive trait because it allows us to understand how difference is actually constitutive it’s not something that is
to be mourned or sadness or something horrific no it’s it’s the basic grounding normality there’s nothing else these materialities help us to listen the same as we nine people also
here are very different in age and experience and intentions in this space and so on this is
the one side of the bodily side but of course there’s another side and we have this here also in that space the so-called as I call them listening apparatuses I only oops I only have here now a selection of ones since the 1860s so the recent sound technology
developments starting with the upper left with the phonograph going through studio work mobile listening mobile recording hearing aids an early pro tools version dolby 5.1
high surround setup the spotify app and I feel one of the most interesting recent developments is this tool that can that’s not a hearing aid but that’s a tool and it’s more and more embedded in headphones where you can adjust for individual hearing loss and tinnitus and all of
that it’s in more and more headphones inbuilt in a basic version but there’s there are more advanced options and there’s the other side that we never just our bodies only but we always of course listeners in a technological setup most that’s the reality where we are if we’re listening to
a bluetooth speaker if we’re watching images on a on a video projection or in other contexts if we’re walking around with our earbuds or headphones these technological setups are always how we listen they are important because they’re not innocent they’re not
they’re not neutral they do things with us they channel our desires and they help us also basically to hear things actually like this last tool so this is the other framing part of being a sonic
persona which then leads me always to this there’s one insider i noted in the in the books sonic persona that in all these cases of new technologies i would claim new as you say auditory dispositive
being established in these cases if we have a new headphone or if we i remember if i moved from listening to a mono loudspeaker from a turntable to my first stereo cassette player
and you’re listening gets implanted into my body in my sensing and hearing body and this is like i would say a form of sensorial and habitual surgery inserting a new piece of technologically enhanced hearing aid into a corpse and i feel this happens also in a performance i can imagine
if i would have been i couldn’t for personal reasons 12 hours to listen to a performance i would also have adapted to this spatial bodily and also technological the piano is a technology setup that is here and i would change the bed i would adapt it i would have learned that probably
it would be hard the first one or two three hours after hour five four six it would be different and
i would have adapted to that and i would be part of that that’s the one thing and the other thing
is that i sense we struggle all the time between these our bodies and the technology around us sometimes it’s we have adapted it habitualized that but we’re changing with struggling auditory dispositives and people are doing that a lot if suddenly for instance you’re in a different place
you need to adapt to the environment to the location how it sounds to people speaking to other loudspeakers and so on in a sense that what we are as a persona as a sonic persona we negotiate between these things and that is also speaking about myself the role of a researcher so
in a sense the listening body of a researcher is also an example of this sensory corpus under pressure and we can only do it like that there is no objective neutral way of speaking about how we listen there’s only a situated one where we are in a situation
and maybe you’re ending wondering or question yeah so just as a brief image here this is the
book that i wrote about that sonic persona 1918 and the handbook the anthropology of sound 2021 and i come to the question my question would be if there’s a sound that you remember right now
from earlier today or from earlier this weekend this week earlier this year or much earlier in your life if there’s a moment that now comes back to you in memory because that’s also what
yeah well one thing that struck me actually i mean through what you said and also
um even in your response to to my thoughts on or this idea of radical affection or when you were talking about the person with the headphones you don’t know what they’re listening to
is we haven’t really talked about listening inward you know the body the the the listening apparatus is always something that’s listening out and you know and i think that there’s a i actually have a friend who’s a composer in new york who is an electroacoustic composer his first
album was called private times in public places and it was about and it was um intended to be not intended but i think it was born of sort of being in new york and being like bombarded with
sound and people and things and then putting on headphones and like getting on the subway and having this inner being able to open up like an inner an inner world or inner experience that otherwise you know kind of an expensive experience of listening that’s facilitated maybe by the sound
the music that’s on the headphones or whatever but that that’s just a tool for kind of digging in and you know loosening up like tight or contracted places or whatever and that gives it kind of an expensive uh um experience uh and so yeah i’m i’m uh i couldn’t really think of a sound it’s
interesting except that i thought of um jesper and i worked this will be interesting also we were talking earlier about the fact that actually i guess you’ve had tinnitus for quite a while
i was two years two years
and i have in the last year developed something like a kind of a very slight kind of buzzing in my ears that’s always there so uh which interestingly in during the piece yesterday
on saturday was like i think when the two minute two minute two second intervals are really precise i hear i hear that in between in these two seconds and when there are these little like
anomalies you know of of uh of the human you know like you actually doing it not the midi version you know then that goes away so it’s sort of like this because it’s just enough of a slight like distraction from from the thing and um
yeah so i was just thinking about how uh occasionally yeah or occasionally you’ll hear like the sound of your own heartbeat you’ll hear your own pulse you know like you roll over in bed and you have like a pressure on your ear and you start to hear your own that how the blood is
like circulating how you’re you know in your body and things like that and how we haven’t really
talked about that inner listening inward as like listening to a whole other universe because yeah yeah is it pronounced tinnitus or tinnitus
because i knew this question so so um and then i stopped it but but then just before coming here i i had i had a moment with my because today yesterday i was feeling perfectly fine after saturday’s adventure i was just okay i
shouldn’t be feeling this fine but i’m fine and but this morning i woke up with much heavier tinnitus than i have experienced in a long time and i i guess it is because of i’m not i have so much tension now so so i i have this hearing device
the tinnitus broke after me two years ago and i was on sick leave actually for two months because it was so strong you know so it was and it’s only one year but now it’s fine so and but i’m really really helped by this hearing aid because it is picking up sounds more i have a hair loss
at this point and it also is this i can put on this noise so i really needed to crank up the noise this morning and then all of a sudden when walking here i realized it feels like i’m walking against the wall so now my tinnitus has fallen down but i’m not really taking notice of the
quite heavy noise in my ear and now it’s too loud so that’s a nice moment of of this because it always felt physical like i was walking next to something like that and then i could turn it down and i’m okay fine so so uh so that is actually a like a sound memory from today
yeah and uh and also i remember when you asked us to listen down turn it up uh i have this sound yeah and that was so nice delicate a moment like so it was very very
but you were saying when we were talking about this with listening inward
just opening up like a
i don’t know space yeah or also this listening and also into the the unknown that is within us
as well yeah and the body sounds yeah but i think that you know also i would just say about this
when i start to get this ringing in my ears or this it’s not even a ring i don’t know it’s
uh i talked to my yoga teacher and he said uh well you know the yogis believe you get ringing in your ears when you’re reaching enlightenment so for him it was uh you know like uh
and then i started to think about like yeah things that were changing in my life and maybe yeah maybe
i’m listening maybe i’m just hearing the world differently maybe it’s not actually like a physiological problem maybe i’m listening to the expanding universe
before we go to the brief may just a brief anecdote related to that there’s this austrian sound artist maybe you know the name sam awing he did various performances one was with a container where he and the colleague amplified the outside sound and filtered it
and there’s one anecdote he told me that once a woman came there although we all liked it
next day she came and screamed at them almost to say what did you do to me now i hear my fridge and i hear the lights and everything is loud it’s horrible you horrible people next day
as you might expect you came with a cake and she understood i’m sorry i understood what you did and and i understood the teaching here so hearing more is also more pain but also more time all
great thank you to all three of you and for everybody else to to offer time and attention to these three presentations i think we need a break we’ll have a break until 35 minutes passed and during the break i’ll ask you to perhaps also
loosen up your body and think about what has been said what you take with you and especially perhaps if there was something that made a special impression on you it doesn’t need to be something that was said but just something to perhaps after the break share with the person next to you in order to start the discussion and also there’s again fruit drinks tea and i’ll be
going to the toilet if somebody needs to know where that is but aside from that again thank you to everybody and the break will be over 35 minutes past
all right um i hope people had a chance to uh i don’t know stretch the legs get some warmth in
the body and some food some drinks whatever whatever needed to to now be um more active
in this discussion um and of course before there was um a lot of different threads being presented
and acted upon in the three presentations a lot of fresh that was going different directions some of them from different ways interacting with each other but it was a big web of listening that was like possible there um and in some way it is like impossible task to now find out how to then get
something special out of it and what can we be common about what can we focus on together i don’t really think that’s the task either i think now is the chance to to share even more but also maybe connect to each other and make it a little bit more personal place some experience on it um
and just to maybe warm up our voices together it would be nice if we um find the person next to us in the way that it makes sense and just for um maybe three minutes really nothing more but but just to voice what from before made a special impression on oneself and again it doesn’t have
to be what was said because it just be the room the temperature even but but something else but
whatever that made a strong impression impression i may propose something yeah we are eight people
and so that not you and you and we talk maybe we have we have four here and four there maybe we could have a conversation there so we both have a conversation with that make some so like four
and four yeah yeah that’ll be fine then we can maybe extend it to um six minutes or something
until uh
it’s like a gateway to inner manifestation of inner listening but of course the inner listening can also just be like this to put shows like this
but um but to have helpful it’s like a there’s a choice for
the only one who was
and when i was starting competition i was very
uh i tried to be i tried to be very radical so i was i was kind of angry when someone closed their eyes during a listening as i had this i thought you lost that now so so bear with me but i was like
oh it’s people have music always work like that so now you close your eyes i was so focused on that presence in the moment but now i’m very loose with that now but it was important yeah so so i kind of also
surrendered to that kind of power that music has and also when it comes to this with with as well that you can actually move in space and time and get the new other my weirdest headphones moment was not when i was recording you know with this
two microphones in one ear uh what binaural binaural dummy head so i was we were doing films so i was uh helping out actually to make this sound so i was walking around with my
binaural dummy head yeah putting it there and and listening to what i was recorded so so i was actually listening on that ears with my ears and then and then the director said cut
and i stopped my recording and then i always rewind a little bit sometimes i rewind a little bit to make sure that i got it though and i got fooled every fucking time because then i kind of start to listen and then and then i heard
and i was very interested we weren’t recording now no okay it wasn’t there because it was so similar it was so stupid this situation do you understand what i mean so so because the recording was so realistic yeah can’t you imagine something else actually had said again yeah exactly so so
so every time it’s a uh that’s very strange headphones you need to decide the reality all the time yeah yeah yeah just like being a little bit away a little bit from reality
like to give it a shout and to help and i was very impressed with his
concept of radical affection yeah this connection and relations also
no it’s an interesting way of thinking but it actually because
it’s true that you know 19th century german critics wanted to do it in the situation on the
ground anything connected to there’s a lot of flow i mean there’s a lot of confusion or whatever everybody’s kind of you’re sharing the experience and then you see something happening somewhere else and you kind of yeah it lodges in your body but you don’t have to dare feel
the joy that you research today anywhere to put it or any to share it with
and to understand more what
issue inspiring concept think about that
yeah um also aesthetics you know there’s probably more i think i was also talking about
there’s always this structuralist i don’t know yet approach that always goes wants to look what is the most progressive and empathetically somehow to other spaces
another one that is more or you know in particular for that project ecologies
you know how we have the what’s it called the the
totally it’s part of the
class that we were very suspicious to something that came from outside
to the music
in the sense affection maybe such a thing you know
outside intrinsic in the score something that people bring to the music what struck me it was like me i connected with that was part of that but what i was saying
you’re focused on the differences
with the medicalness that that sort of like
i mean to be honest it’s also because yesterday
quite often we try to outline the differences
we try to understand the language
but then at the same time everything coming through was like
in some way put into boxes or systems and communicate with each other very easy
and focusing on the differences
make that possible just being taught
because then to have this instability for the situatedness
and how everything was not the same but different
makes everybody a bit um in my experience uneasy about it
quite often in a beautiful way
but it has with the uneasiness
you also have to foster this radical way of being together
you have to include that you have to to invite that into the space
because quite often we tend to do the opposite
we want to have it have it easy we have it we want to have it safe we want to understand what’s going on
and moving towards maybe some kind of
some kind of understanding that it’s to also
what karen was talking about with the unknown
or the unknown differences with the degree of the differences in the world but for me i’m like yeah all right there’s something there but mostly because i quite often feel myself
just for myself going through all the ways that
i don’t know what’s going on
like just different from the few of you right like
just it’s like a little game like i don’t feel the same it’s you
but i think also what you’re saying is leveling down into one model what’s like it sounds like a 19th century
thinking whether technology
i don’t know if you have a thought it’s regular the industry the mechanics it was possible no i think it’s difficult to grasp
this thing is familiar with many layers
then you need to have different shoes
because i’m really sort of yeah
and i think i resonate very much with this so i think there’s some kind of
impressions that we have a call for kind of a response
but there is a
somehow a sense that there is an adequate way
be affected when you talk about
it’s much more so that is
to start thinking one model that fits all
because it doesn’t
somehow that there is no balance i think so many many situations
just changing our stressful periods
whether it’s too much
very difficult to just focus on
of course i don’t know what because there’s so much else happening at the same time
but that’s interesting because you should
know very different things
i think there’s this
which is a similar kind of imbalance of where there is a
i think 30 more seconds
and then i think we will regroup again
and i think that i think
somehow is countered by this kind of situation
maybe i think we should
perceive to have a different kind of logic but there’s a curious aspect
i’m closer to them
so i mean that sort of was also my feeling yeah it was the creation of this space that was so
it became so out of time and out of that it really became like this futurist like this science
not science fiction but i was talking about it in the same way
that someone like sun raw was creating a completely different dimension and suddenly it’s like yeah
what do we do as european or european descendant not everyone but you know like
and those with those references like bach and and schumann you know like and then
and then yeah
but what do we do to actually reach those other dimensions and insist on that those other dimensions exist
so now we’re all back together
and we have sometime over 10 minutes
we can also go over time if people are not in a rush
but i would have to leave
exactly so 10 minutes
and one thing that i would like to ask the whole group
also as an organizer is this fact that we have now been spending some time together we have been gracious about each other but also that we have quite few people
and what that really means
because in some way at least for me as the organizer that have really affected me a lot i’ve been affected by the closeness of us and also the chance of actually looking everybody into their eyes which is different from when you have maybe just more than 15 people
then becomes like this obstacle to actually do that and i’m just curious if some of you would like to comment on or respond to what it made you feel like or what the experience was that we’re not that many people
and what that perhaps added as some kind of layer or opportunity or something
yeah i think actually also echoing sort of the situation
i think i entered here in salt lake
i was only here for one hour but it was a very nice experience
there’s many of these situations where we talk about things
where there’s always very
you have this very strict conduct of the space
so also and it happens quite often when we talk about
also when we talk about some business
so now we should listen you don’t everybody says so like this
and but the situation in saltlake was really
you came in and you felt very welcome
and it was a space where there was sort of a
there’s the the
sort of what’s called the aspect ratio of noise
to what was happening in the room was really pleasant
so it became a very calm and pleasant space
where you could move around
and you didn’t feel that you were disturbing someone unnecessarily
and i think there’s also something about this
being a group around the size
has some of the same quality that it opens for different kinds of communication
where we can talk a little bit about
how what the weather is like and stuff
and it doesn’t interfere with this that now we are on a strict time schedule
or something
so i think it definitely has qualities to it
that this size of a group
i also think for me it’s like
it’s very large privilege
to actually give that to each other
because in some way the time
where we now give to each other is of more worth or depending on how you look at it because if you entertain like 100 people then you can times 100 people with two
and then you have a lot of hours
you have a lot of resources of time and now when we are less people it’s kind of like a lower resource but the quality of it grows in some way because what you do matter the more to each other so it’s a different kind of measuring the privilege of being together
i find it’s always because in doing events
also in teaching these days it’s always about bigger numbers, bigger success and there is a side of that of the material side
more tickets sold
better
however if it’s about conversation
and about coming near to each other
and hearing what we are saying or thinking with each other
i feel always that it’s a luxury because it’s actually the signal-to-noise ratio or the signal-speaker-to-listener ratio is then better
and that is immediately a more effective
and a more direct communication
which i prefer always
so in that sense i’m never negative if there are less people
because then the quality gets and the ratio in that time so much better
i felt that when i mean we had this communication
when organizing this
and all the way through i felt comfort and kind of because as an artist and when i perform
there is this materiality aspect to it
i mean of course in a way it’s easier to feel success if there are 100 people coming in and out all the time but the way this was curated and also with this tale going into now
and this talk i just feel very secure with doing this so that has been very nice for me if i speak on that side
and as the performer or the artist of the event in a way and and i’m very glad to hear your like this how the room functioned
how you could operate in the room 20 years ago i did a thing that were extremely provoking but not by intention actually because i never thought that people were going to stay in the room because i just sent out sinus tones
that i had said this sinus tone is based on a mathematical formula so i said we’re building like a time capsule here that where time goes faster so these are these are sine waves representing different times i can explain this in a better way but the result was that it was this sinus tone
all the way through the space and we forgot to mention that it wasn’t a concert oh because there was this and i was just
people are still there they are sitting there
and they sat there for the whole hour it took and i never realized it and there was so there are still people coming up to me and say when will you do something nice like that again not not that kind of poetic silly things that you are doing you we want that but but but
and that is lack of lack of care in the situation because i thought that no one will sit through that we will have a conversation outside knowing that the work is going on in that space so that was quite the opposite of this
did you get a little bit stressed when i was following the score
just kidding
i i okay i knew i knew about this but when when when i was confident when lucas was following the score but since i know you are a musician and following the score and then that when i was speeding all the time
and it was but i have to give that
before we leave this room i would like to give the chance if somebody has some kind of open question or wondering that we can just leave in the room that we don’t need to respond to but just give to each other some kind of gift it would be nice to do that
and it’s also okay if you don’t have a wondering a question but if there’s something that you have been thinking about and just want to send out there i think that could be a nice way to to end this
i just want to mention that i really liked what you said about the decolonization of the music because we understand music
even though i’m from asia i’m from taiwan i was this is massive
education about
well-tempered the scale and all that which is was not it’s it’s actually not the age the few asian culture but now it’s it’s our culture is actually lost because of that so i have a very very mixed feeling about being a classical trend
trend
musician i’m a percussionist but i was a first pianist
sorry i was first
i didn’t tell you that i was the first pianist and and then also i that’s also why i became more fascinated with the percussion because you can do much more things you can go somewhere else
and this is well-tempered all this pop music from the west i mean you don’t hear microtonal pop song why why not not yet
not yet
that would be very interesting in indonesia but we don’t really really
the western culture is really dominating
we still love a good variation
there’s one thing i could leave in this room maybe others have also an idea
that because that’s already in the room and then i was thinking thinking about what i spoke about and also the wondering i came i was thinking about the sounds that have been dominant in this space
for the last 100, 110 years or so
because it was definitely not playing piano it was definitely not speaking about listening
but other things like if it’s a badawism
it means people i imagine
were disrobing and changing clothes
and preparing for swimming or relaxing or whatever
something like that that was probably i would imagine the most common soundscape or sound activities it could have been here and here maybe of other imagination or the knowledge
what happened here before
but that was something i would leave here
so that’s in a sense already here in the south do you know? i don’t know exactly the exact history but it’s called bohus and so it was this this floor was made only in 2020 so it was it was only a storage room
storage room okay it was storage room
so for from boats
maybe emergency boat
because you can see this green green how do i call this first aid and then there’s also like alarm
maybe it was a emergency somebody came here and say ah this is but i really don’t know the story
we could imagine emergency cases
that were cared here for
also interesting
rescue boat sorry
well i feel very much still in the afterglow of the of the experience and i think it’s going to stay with me for a long time as it will stay in this space and that’s that’s just more response to what we were saying
rather than wondering i’m putting into the world but may in the room but maybe to think maybe the wondering is just about yeah the after yeah
the the the the traces
you know
that’s also also what you had said about the the abstract and the concrete
right yeah oh you mean that i was
yeah like you wrote about how like abstract like sound has apps or language
or sound has information abstract and concrete
what’s abstract is like what you’re saying
like what i’m saying right now you’re all of your brains are listening and making sense of it and whatever you
and then there’s concretes the concrete is actually what’s being transmitted it’s my voice it’s the the warmth the tone of the voice it’s entering each of you
and it makes your way
you know depending like it said something like it makes its way into the body to the cells
to the to the organs to the yeah
yeah so it’s like uh yeah it’s interesting to to think about how maybe if we could all bring it’s an invitation to bring attention to things we listen to or experience even through listening through the ears
and how and to think about how they are not only imprinting on us
but like uh
reaching in and and and changing you know it’s like or shifting or
i don’t know
and yeah and that you’re all forever changed after that
that you don’t yeah i’m forever changed after what happened here for sure
yeah so before that i will say goodbye i will just let you know that
as part of the documentation
our three presenters have offered to do a note a little kind of after thought in terms of the note where they will sort of like think about
what kind of movements of listening took place and how to respond to that
how to communicate their after thoughts about that and all of you are of course also welcome to to do a little after thought to offer a little kind of note to respond to what kind of movements of listening was in here because as hogging the differences means that we have registered noticed
and been part of different kind of listening experiences and i thought for the documentation of it it would be nice to to share that and and documentate how different it is to to be together but it’s an open invitation and you can approach me afterward
so besides from that i’ll just extend my greatest gratitude
for the three presenters
but also to everybody collaborating on holding the space the way you did i felt that personally it was a very beautiful space
yeah so i’m very warm and grateful yeah thank you very much
i’m not fishing for that but we’re actually grateful
yeah thanks very well
thank you
yeah and wish you a beautiful day
thank you all right