Output details

durch die vögel - a speech soundscape for John Cage

Radiophonic work for Hessischer Rundfunk

This project investigates the extent to which text and sound can be treated on the same level in a musical composition. How does random distribution influence perception of verbal and sonic semantics and how can they be interrelated in a quadraphonic space?

“durch die vögel” (‘through the birds’) combines documentary field recordings and voice recordings to create an imaginary speech soundscape. 70 different natural or ambient sounds, collected in Albania, Macedonia, Mumbai, Rome, Sicily, Istanbul, London, Munich, Hamburg, Cologne and Berlin, were woven together to form a “non-location”. The environmental sounds are relatively uneventful, rather static and localised within the noise spectrum, but nonetheless sonically rich.

The text, based on Daniel Charles’s book of interviews with John Cage, ‘For the birds’, was compiled by Florian Neuner and recorded by eight speakers in different sound environments. To avoid a sterile studio atmosphere and invest the sounds with more life, the speakers recorded themselves in public places like airports or pubs. Each voice recording was then divided 70 times and the fragments distributed across the entire duration of the composition, thus maintaining the chronology of the text within each layer.

The environmental sounds and voices are constantly, randomly and independently redistributed in the quadraphonic space, so that the listener has the impression of being lost in a sonic jungle, a disorientating feeling enhanced by the dream-like reduplication of Cage's voice, once in each of the eight channels, stating ‘I believe in each sound as being at the center of the universe, worthy of being listened to.’ The random numbers for the editing of all audio – length, channel distribution, etc. – were generated with Andrew Culver’s random time-generator program, TIC, which he wrote for Cage to use in the composition of the ‘number pieces’.