Das Schwellenstück - live room recording

The festival Espacios Resonantes took place at the site of an abandoned underground cistern and water tower in Recoleta, Santiago de Chile. Daniel Neumann developed a soundfield composition for the peculiar architectural and acoustic space of the cistern, infusing its internal space with artificial tonalities.

He used his Room Tone Generator [RTG] software synthesizer to create 56 tri-phonic (3-ch) tones. Each of the 3-channel tones were placed in 3 of the 8 speakers. There are 56 different triangles in an octagon. This gave the basic spatial form and structure. For the concert Neumann mixed the 56 tri-phonic tones live, shaping them into an expansive dialog with the unique acoustic space of the cistern, 17 meters in diameter, 5 meters tall, made out of concrete, round, with parallel surfaces of floor and ceiling.

Yet, beyond these physical parameters of the performance, listening as a process acted as the main driver. For this process Neumann borrows a term from psychology and applies it to a mode of listening: aural de-centering. Neumann sat in the middle of the audience, the audience on scattered chairs; he mixed and shaped the performance with an iPad mixer. De-centering means taking on multitudes of perspectives, consciously leaving your own center and taking on different standpoints. Applied to listening it guides one’s attention to various points and peripherals of the always dynamic acoustic horizon - a form of active spatial listening.

When listening to spatial sound this wandering of our attention is activated and engaged. We travel around the room with our attention, and when listening to a changing soundscape, as is the case with listening to a musical work, we encounter certain thresholds that will make our listening direction change - fast, or very slowly, sometimes even going back in time! The term ‘acoustic horizon’ (Barry Truax, quoted in Spaces Speak) is a very useful term; it defines the acoustic field around a listener, the subjective perspective of what and how far one can hear. Since sound is ephemeral and changing, the 3-dimensional acoustic horizon is also constantly morphing and changing, contracting and expanding. With the spatial and dynamic shaping that the performance of live mixing is offering Neumann can play, morph and shape those listening thresholds.

He was using his Room Tone Generator (RTG) software synthesizer to create 56 tri-phonic (3-ch) tones. Each of the 3-channel tones were placed in 3 of the 8 speakers. There are 56 different triangles in an octagon. This gave the basic spatial form. For the concert Neumann was mixing the 56 tri-phonic tones live, shaping them into an expansive dialog with the unique acoustic space of the cistern, 17 meters in diameter, 5 meters tall, made out of concrete, round, with parallel surfaces of floor and ceiling. 

For Neumann Soundfield is the name for the multi-dimensional (depth, width, height, time) composed plus found listening space. In soundfield composition sounds are projected into the architectural three-dimensional space using idiosyncratic multichannel loudspeaker setups. Through resonance and reverberation various characteristics of the physical space are being emphasized, articulated, transformed, fluidified, fictionalized and then experienced from within by the listeners. The physicality and materiality of sound itself is foregrounded and varied over time. Sound becomes the sculptural gestalt.