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Themesicon: navigation pathSound and Imageicon: navigation pathAudiovisions
 
Klang Fluss Licht Quelle – Vierzig Säulen und ein Raum (Kubisch, Christina), 1999
 
 
 

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House» transforms a space into a finely balanced sound-light environment. The sounds La Monte Young produces consist exclusively of pure sinus oscillations, whose frequencies he tunes to the spatial proportions in such a way that stationary waves develop. Using a set of different speakers and mathematically related wave lengths, a sound space is created. The recipient strides through the space tracking down junctions and at the same time ‹interrupting› the balance of the stationary waves. The wave length of the magenta-colored light is connected to the tone frequencies. As is the case for Skrjabin and Wyschnegradsky, symmetrical arrangements play an essential role in the complex mathematical structuring of the sound space. In these examples, the transformation logic, i.e. the rules for assigning color to tone, are derived from music (compositional structure, music theory) or from mathematical relations of musical acoustics.

Work by the composer and artist Christina Kubisch demonstrates how in the area of sound art, visual and auditory design are closely interrelated. Sound installations may always have something to do with

 

space and thus with seeing, with orientation within the space; however, they are not invariably arranged visually as well. With Kubisch, besides the sound level there is almost always a light component as well, whereby she primarily works with the bluish element of black light. With her, too, the phenomenon of time clusters the senses into an expressly non-synaesthetic context. An even more precise description is that it is silence, which is regarded as something motionless in time and is experienced visually as well as auditorally, that becomes the connecting link. [18] Thus in «Klang Fluss Licht Quelle—Vierzig Säulen und ein Raum» (1999), both media convene in a sensual gesture, in a palpability and subtlety as an expression parameter of the space they occupy. The design of painterly and tonal elements does not adhere to a ‹calculated› transformation logic, nor does it strive for unity. Rather, it is based on intuitive decisions.

Electrical and Digital Transformation

With the arrival of electronic media, the practice has developed of translating music directly into an image as an electric signal, and vice versa, thus generating a

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