even though these have a distinctly aggressive component. This is partly due to the unusual weighting of planes in the overall sound, which is usually described as oppressively loud, even though the audience—at least in later productions—can still hold conversations. This almost absurd sound picture, almost an immersion in sound, is marked by intermodulated sub-basses, a moderate level in the audible field and chased high frequencies; it represents a physical commentary or a kind of acoustic meta-environment for the granular audio-visual stream, those flickering and twitching events that impinge via screens and loudspeakers.

«NOISEGATE»

«NOISEGATE» (Vienna, 1998) is the last work by Granular Synthesis devoted exclusively and extensively to the theme of «face» and «body.» This marks the end of insisting absolutely on the portrait as the negotiation location. The sound aesthetic discussed above was also devised here. At the «NOISEGATE» première at the Museum of Applied Arts MAK it was possible to experience a completely uniform sound picture in the

middle of the central space. Avoiding any directed movement provokes an attention situation that no longer enables and demands observation, but places viewers within an overall sound-picture. Events always occur in the whole field, which makes them mutations of the field and not objects in the space. Viewers watch like listeners in the dark. They can experience the full extent of the sound space and the consistency of the sound mass. The signal is felt once [on the one side] diffusing more strongly into the depths of virtual infinity, and once [on the other] taking place very compactly in the middle, or in your own head. From this central space, visitors moved to the screens in the outer rooms, where the projected material, Michael Krammer's head, was controlled interactively. But we soon abandoned this activity because the animation of the Krammer heads on the screens turned into an animation of the audience, resulting from their movement, which was not what we had intended.

We developed software to address the idea of interactive control in real time; this software drives individual computers in which sound-image grains can be accessed in the computer's RAM in real time. And in