Platzgesang

Photo: Tim Gorinski

04.10.2015 in the frame of
RAUMMUSIK und so – ROAR
nxnwfestival / Sound & Unsound
Ebertplatz/ Köln
15 minutes

As a child when imitating traffic-noises with my voice while playing, this sounded quite different from the inside of my head than it did from the outside. Listening was an inward experience, playing was a show for myself. The Performance Platzgesang was about recognizability and abstraction. I listended to a field-recording of the traffic-noise at Ebertplatz in Cologne via headphones. While listening, I imitated these sounds with my voice, to reproduce them. For this I used a microphone, an echo effect and a portable speaker. The performance started right at the place where the traffic-noise was recorded. Then, listening and singing, I walked across the square. My body became a filter, which only partially could reproduce the sounds, that I heard. Some significant sounds of approaching cars or those of a siren for example were recognizable to the audience, but the others were not. Instead they produced an abstract sonic image.

With the kind support of ON – Neue Musik Köln and Klanglabor der Kunsthochschule für Medien Köln.