““It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear. “”
Landscape Soundings: A Radio Sculpture
Vienna
1990
LANDSCAPE SOUNDINGS, was commisssioned by the Vienna Festival, in cooperation with the Austrian State Radio Company and the Kunsthistorisches and Naturhistorisches Museums.
This was a large-scale sculptural installation realized in the plaza situated between the Kunsthistorisches and Naturhistorisches museums in the center of Vienna. It translated the architectural theme of art and nature represented by the parallel facing museums into an acoustic transformation of this formal urban garden by overlaying the sensuous live sounds of an existing ancient Danube wetland.
“LANDSCAPE SOUNDINGS not only highlighted the poetics of a fragile and endangered natural environment by and through the live transmissions but, by eavesdropping on nature, also addressed the surveillance character of new recording and transmission technologies which are infiltrating every aspect of the social space.”
“My sound sculptures use the human and/or natural environment as a musical information system full of interesting sound events. In designing such real time musical information systems I am assuming that at any given moment there will be something meaningful to hear. I am in fact assuming that music, in the sense of meaningful sound patterns, is a natural process that is going on constantly. ”