Room tone shifts for the series “The Grand Buffet”

These two recordings from previous installations accompany the catalog for the series.

Sound immensely influences spatial perception and the perceived atmosphere - the felt space that is sensed upon entering a space. This consideration premeditates my compositional work for the sound installation “Für Alina”.

The sounds for "The Grand Buffet" are specifically composed for the imaginary spaces in Alina’s paintings. The paintings establish a strong spatial relationship to the architecture of Haus Schminke. With the addition of a sonic layer to the paintings, I intend to introduce a dialogue between the abstracted spaces in the paintings and the physical exhibition space. I imagine a room-tone for the spaces in the paintings, which is then diffused into the physical space through a hand tailored multi-channel loudspeaker system. The room tone acts as an expansion of the visual plane: ephemeral, invisible, dynamically soft (piano), changed, modified and shifted. The installation becomes a ‘motion-picture-soundtrack’: but here the motion is performed by the visitors who travel through the house or the exhibition, from picture (painting) to picture, inside the sound field to make the experience of the exhibition more affectual.

The sonic material has two main elements: (A) synthetically created resonance tones and (B) room recordings with various–more haptic– activities. I created the tones (A) with a self-developed software synthesizer called RoomToneGenerator (RTG) in tandem with a selection of analog modular synths. The temporality of these tones (A) is protracted, slow, almost frozen.These artificial tones saturate the exhibition space with new tonalities becoming a kind of sound carpet. The room tone and, thereby, the general atmosphere constantly modify– evoking an imaginary space similarly created in Alina’s paintings.

The integrated room recordings (B) run in real-time, functioning similarly to the traces of human presence in Alina’s paintings. Suggestive without revealing an overt human source, the recordings yield no speech nor capture pinpointable actions. Rather, they diffuse side noises that insinuate the subtle echos of human presence. Additionally, these recordings were made in each particular exhibition space to form an organic sonic depth and strengthen the connection to the physical space.

The assorted sounds (in the case of Haus Schminke, 90 different sound files) from the two collections (synthetic and room recordings) are randomly played back. Two files played simultaneously allow for a constant flow of new combinations– always a new sonic experience. With no clear loop, the installation unfolds as more alive. The sound becomes an ephemeral sculpture of the atmosphere, temporalizing the painting in the space and subsequently opening an emotional depth.

I must mention the difference in my approach to both installations of "The Grand Buffet" (Beacon 2022 and Löbau 2023). At the show in Beacon, the tones were intermediaries between the flattened representation of the original Haus Schminke space and the alien/foreign exhibition space. Here, the tones created a three-dimensional room sound, grounding the paintings, while also expanding them spatially and temporally. In Löbau, the exhibition presents a special foldback occasion, where the content and subject of the paintings - the Haus Schminke - also becomes the exhibition space. Here, I structured my compositional process accordingly. The electronic tones and recordings I had previously made are folded back into the architectural space through more than double the amount of loudspeakers, and a number of newly created and recorded sounds are added. The sounds here were made to foreground the abstractness of the physical space and to fully merge it with the imaginary picture-space, to create a new combined felt atmosphere and room tone.