Colori che fan suonare lo spazio, come i suoni leggono, scoprono lo spazio​

Colours that make space sound, as sounds read, discover space​​

(Luigi Nono, from design document to Prometeo)

​

Portrait of a building is a work combining soundscapes, room acoustics, electroacoustic composition, and sound art; an imaginary soundwalk through Tyska kyrkan (the German church), in the Old Town in Stockholm. The composition opens up a kaleidoscopic soundscape, born out of years of repeated visits, site-specific listening, recordings, acoustic measurements, and sonic experiments.

 

It is a piece that ensues from astonishment, from deep impressions cast by acoustic and aural experiences. It keeps our senses open, not only to the spectacular but also to the ordinary sounds surrounding us. But it is also about the entanglement of sound and space, two expressions impossible to experientially dissociate. Sound as the aural expression of space, space as materialised sound. 

​

In this building, sound appears in many guises: a complex acoustic landscape; an architectural and urban instrumentarium—two pipe organs, church bells, carillons; and the city itself, filtered through the walls of the bell tower. From its heights we can hear the surrounding life of the Old Town and Stockholm spreading out into a deep and multi-layered urban landscape.  Field recordings, acoustic experiments, auralizations, and analyses of instrumental and spatial resonance are woven together. A body in motion maps out distances, materials, scale, and frequencies, and from the traces of this body, the listener is invited to compose their own “reading” of the composite structure.

​

 

Composition - Ricardo Atienza Badel 

Fieldrecordings - Ricardo Atienza Badel, in collaboration with Niklas Billström and Robin McGinley 

Organ and carillon player -  Michael Dierks
Produced by Ricardo Atienza Badel with the support of Radioart

 

The piece is composed from field recordings, spatio-acoustic, spectral and resonance studies, auralisations, and electroacoustic synthesis procedures. It is made in a binaural format, and we recommend listening to it with headphones.

 

Thanks to the German Church in Stockholm, and Michael Dierks in particular, for their warm welcome and assistance during these visits and recordings. 

 

Ricardo Atienza Badel is a sound artist and architect, associate professor of sound in art and media at Aalto University in Helsinki, Finland, and a researcher at CRESSON, the Center for Research on Sound Spaces and Urban Environments, in Grenoble, France.