The anechoic chamber
Published
ONLY CONNECT FESTIVAL OF SOUND 2015:
SATURDAY 6 JUNE
SEAS speaker factory, Ryggeveien 96 Moss
KL. 11:00 (departure Oslo Plaza/Sonja Henies plass, Oslo)
Kr 100. Limited places. Binding registration. For registration and travel info, please email nymusikk@nymusikk.no by 18:00, 5 June.
Buy festival pass, kr 550/450 (regular/member)
Upon visiting an anechoic chamber John Cage famously heard the singing of his nervous system and the pumping of his blood. nyMusikk invites you on a sound excursion to the high-end speaker factory SEAS in Moss, starting with a bus ride from Oslo that includes a literary lecture on sound by UK musician, author and critic David Toop.
At SEAS you will be given a rare opportunity to experience the anechoic chamber, an insulated, echo-free acoustic environment designed for acoustic research. The chamber will feature the sound installation Lontano by sound artist and composer Trond Lossius, featuring a series of surround (Ambisonics) field recordings.
In the factory space, vocalist and composer Stine Janvin Motland will demonstrate a new measuring and musical instrument that detects and regenerates body frequencies. The audience is invited to get their body resonance measured and translated into sound.
There will also be a tour of the factory with managing director Olav Mellum Arntzen.
Video: Karoline Finnema.
Anechoic chambers are designed to completely absorb reflections of sound waves. Inside the chamber all surfaces are covered with foam wedges made from sound absorbing material. These chambers are also insulated from exterior sources of noise, making them some of the quietest places on Earth.
The architecture of the space, combined with the intense silence and absence of reverberation, makes the space claustrophobic and intimidating.
In spite of the visual appearance, the anechoic chamber acoustically behaves as an infinite open out-door space. The anechoic chamber is used for research in the fields of music, audiology, hearing science and engineering. The fundamentals of our understanding of spatial hearing are to a large degree based on listening experiments carried out in anechoic chambers.
The anechoic chamber has made a seminal impact on contemporary arts practises as well. John Cage’s visit to the anechoic chamber at Harvard University fundamentally changed his understanding of silence, music and noise. Robert Irwin and James Turrell stayed in darkness in an anechoic chamber for prolonged periods of time, and the experience deeply influenced how they engaged with perception in their art practices. (Text by Trond Lossius).
Lontano is an installation / event taking place in an anechoic chamber. It addresses the anechoic chamber as a site of research, and draws attention to our hearing capabilities and in particular the spatial dimensions of hearing and listening, the phenomenology of listening, the rich soundscapes that surrounds us, and how we are situated and immersed in the world through sound.
An audience of only four persons at a time are invited to enter the space along with the artist. They get to experience the space itself, and are then seated in the middle. A series of surround (Ambisonic) field recordings are presented. The situation is open-ended. The group might choose to listen in silence, or engage in discussions concerning how the room is experienced, the sensations, memories and thoughts triggered by the field recordings, or any other topic relevant to the situation.
Trond Lossius is a sound and installation artist based in Bergen. His projects investigate sound, place and space, using spatial sound and multichannel audio as an invisible and temporal sculptural medium in works engaging with the site. Lossius coordinates research and development at BEK – Bergen Center for Electronic Arts.