SONOSPHERE

CONTENT

the sonosphere is an artistic and scientific exploration of the basic parameters of music and an attempt to raise the aesthetic awareness of visitors in the field of sound art.

OVERVIEW

the viennese sound artists SHA. & GTT created spaces of sensual condensation and concentration: zones of different musical aggregate states, extraordinary experiments at the borders of perception, unheard-of soundscapes and interactive sound organisms form the SONOSPHERE - a mysterious world for the formation of a new auditory awareness and the aesthetic refinement of each individual.

on about 600m2 the audience is confronted with phenomena that, besides conveying the knowledge of sound, focus on the auditory aspect of perception, i.e. a directly sensual, also playful approach to music, and thus ultimately lead to a natural expansion of the traditional musical horizon.

AUSSTELLUNG

the sensory noise awaits you with a whole-body listening experience: embedded in three-dimensional sound structures - generated from original prenatal recordings - you hear, see and feel vibration and oscillation.

in the reduction of the dense sensory noise to a single sound impulse - the acoustic atom, so to speak - the auditory pathway traces the journey of sound into the inner human being, from the outer ear to the cerebral cortex. the sinusoidal vibration is sensually reflected in its wave form in the sand of the wave tube.

in the perception laboratory, the light wall extends on one side, making the phenomena of auditory perception visible and audible.

opposite are the 6 terminals for experimentation, where shoe platters explain pitch and viennese city sounds explain volume, where visitors can walk through a wide variety of possible and impossible acoustic spaces, and where they can test their perceptual limits by means of psychoacoustic phenomena.

SOUND HEIGHT

two alpine schuhplattlers explain the physics of pitch: the faster they beat, the higher the pitch as a result of the repetition of minute vibrations. a comparison of the visitor's personal hearing limit with the hearing limits of other creatures also reveals unexpected physiological facts.

LOUDNESS

loudness is energy. with his own energy the visitor can re-collage different loud and quiet city scenarios: from the viennese forest, over simple street noise to the cozy viennese coffee house.

SPATIAL PERCEPTION

virtual walks through pyramids, spheres, concert halls, churches and mountains illustrate the different acoustic aspects of spaces. interesting is the sonic conquest of spaces with one's own voice.

VIRTUAL SOUNDS

our experienced reality is a reconstruction of our subjective perception. this can be demonstrated very easily with the interplay of two sinusoidal tones. with certain sounds together, instead of the two "real" tones, we hear either only one or three and even more of these ghost tones that are created only in our hearing.

SHEPARD SKALA

welcome to infinity! here the visitor experiences the acoustical illusion of a musical scale that rises infinitely without ever exceeding the personal hearing limit.

TIME DISTINCTION

self-deception! in this simple game of psychoacoustics, the visitor's perception is shaken. only the concentration on his "inner voice" brings the senses back into balance.

the phylogenesis explains the history of the development of the auditory apparatus: "in evolution, no mammal is known without hearing. already 500 million years ago, the primordial vertebrates living in the sea possessed an inner ear ...".

the instrumentarium puts the 4 analog primal principles of sound generation in the spotlight: a walk-in flute, a huge membrane, xylophone plates on the ceiling and an oversized string instrument are made to vibrate by computer-controlled sound exciters.

three interactive terminals, on the other hand, present current developments in digital sound processing: e.g. a 3d sonagram that depicts the visitor's voice and invites him to "paint the sound"; or the sound color game (the visitor moves through different spectral fields in a virtual sound color space and can perceive and playfully change the corresponding acoustic representatives).

SOUNDSCAPES

this application allows virtual flights over a soundscape created by the visitor. the hills and valleys of the bizarre landscape represent the volumes and pitches of the selected sound structures or the visitor's own voice.

SOUND ALLOY

by means of the new technology of digital "soundprocessing" it is possible to change any sound seriously. in this field of soundmorphing the visitor's voice undergoes a spectacular transformation.

SOUND COLOR

the visitor chooses his own colors of tones, sounds and noises in this acoustic drawing studio - and then paints with his voice in the sound color space!

in the sea of voices, the most important musical instrument becomes "tangible": the human voice. from the simple single sound to complex vocal phenomena, the visitor goes on a journey of discovery here. for example, it is possible to interpolate between the different "mouth positions" when singing a vowel, but it is also possible to make sounds audible that one would not believe to be produced by the human voice, but which have been created by masters of "vocal acrobatics.

the crossfloor connects the instruments with the polyphonium with its light ceiling (information about compositional achievements of our time) and a sound system at floor level, leading the visitor into a new sphere:

the polyphonium is the experiential space of modern sound composition. in this space, sounds from the macrosphere, the environment, the human body and the microsphere are collected and condensed and atomized in space in a real-time process at speeds beyond our perceptual limits.

the listening wall in the adjacent sound gallery offers a "listening in" to the ingredients of the polyphonium. the sound gallery is a collection basin for sounds of the most diverse kind: from the macroscopic level of cosmic background radiation to the real perspective of everyday city sounds, from the intimate sound world of the human being and his body to otherwise imperceptible microstructures of biochemical processes. via acoustic microscopy stations, the individual sources are audible or visible.

opposite, the final personal challenge to the visitor: the evolution machine at the end of the SONOSPHERE enables every visitor to experiment with sounds and sound structures. interactively, he can select his own "ingredients", mix them and generate complex musical structures through a simple user interface. according to personal preferences and his own skills, individual sound pieces are created, which can finally be immortalized on cd and taken home.