Raumklang invites audiences to listen anew, challenging their embodied, spatial relationships to their surroundings. Visitors simultaneously unveil and affect the installed location-specific sound intervention. Through their interactions revealing different sonic phenomena such as interspecies sound dialogues from critter noise in fallen trees, echolocations from bats juxtaposed with resonant frequencies from buildings. The work emphasises the potential of sound, acoustics and interaction in order to move beyond the visual dominance of spatial being in contemporary society.
The installation fosters a mutual cognitive extension with a hyperlocal and precise spatial sonic augmentation of location specific sounds, aiming for a culture of sentient auditory spatial awareness and a new understanding of the spaces we share.
Raumklang premiered in 2021, followed by a development for outdoor application in 2022. In 2023 the current hybrid version was realised. This digital bridge connects onsite and online audiences in a shared experience. Mapping personal trajectories of onsite visitors into a virtual replica, the work democratises access, allowing online participants to engage with the piece from the perspectives of those physically present. These onsite visitors reveal through their explorations the innate qualities of the spatial sound architecture and the relation between visitors and the physical surroundings.
By the use of specialised recording methodologies we are able to access non-human sound and consider the build environment as living sounding matter based on re-amplification and listening through the substrates. Raumklang introduces sonic archives of societal and environmental histories, informed by the site. With this, we hope to preserve a diversity of narratives embedded in architectural spaces, offering a socio-acoustic instrument for the exploration of cultural histories and shared experiences.
Raumklang is a project by Zeno van den Broek & Robin Koek.
The project has been supported by V2_ Lab for the Unstable Media, Creative Industries Fund NL, Mondriaan Fund, Stokroos Foundation, Niemeijer Fund, Gaudeamus Festival, AIAIAI, STRP, Creative Coding Utrecht, FIBER, DigitALL.