FROM WITHIN A FIELD ##

FROM WITHIN A FIELD is an ongoing electroacoustic live performance or installation for multi-channel speaker systems that started in 2013. Neumann is using the loudspeakers in interaction with the architectural or environmental space as his instrument to live-compose a spatial sound field. It is adaptable to very different situations and has been performed on systems ranging from 6 guitar amps to a 24.4 3D-speaker array.


Continual Concrète Practice

The compositional approach could be described as a continual concrète practice, where sound material is recorded or generated and then applied, diffused, processed and re-recorded over multiple iterations. The sound material therefore is continually shifting, morphing and developing. It leaves it's traces and imprints in time and space, which are layered, staggered, cut and merged. The use of audio tools and procedures and the ways of using sounds are derived from the historical Musique Concrète, so composing starts with concrete sounds, not with an abstract idea. In contrast to the fixed media compositions of Musique Concrète FROM WITHIN A FIELD does not result in a finished, hermetic work. Each iteration is responsive to the its concrete surroundings and the different speaker types and systems. The sound material - over time, not for one finished piece - is unfolded, processed, recorded again, modified and re-applied again to ever new listening situations. Performances are in a way temporary concretions were the different spatio-temporal fragments and layers are stringed and woven together in the present moment.


Within A Sound Field, The Listener

Listening as a process is being foregrounded in this series. Sounds are chosen to encourage a simultaneous attentiveness to the sound field one is sitting in and to an inner field that is resonating and/or expanding. So rather than following Pierre Schaefer’s call for a “reduced listening” Neumann is inviting a spatially expanded listening. And the reduction (of narrative and semantic content) becomes the responsibility of the composer. Walter Branchi says: “The effect of a musical composition as such on the listener is secondary to the way in which it harmonizes in a set of systems of which the listener is part. The pulsing of a composition interacts with the surrounding space and perception is of the global interaction of all the entities that partake in the musical event.”  

In Neumann’s slowly growing fields of tones listening from within becomes more important than listening to something.


FROM WITHIN A FIELD - past concretions

#00.a A CORNER AS A FIELD - MAY 2013 Dimmena Center NYC
Corner speaker, plus 4.1
The starting point of sonically thinking about field theory.

#00.b A CORNER AS A FIELD - MAY 2013 Spectrum NYC
Stereo PA plus guitar amp front and rear center
Point. Line. Corner. Field.

#00.c A CORNER AS A FIELD - SEP 2013 Blind NYC
6 guitar amps, spread out as far as cables could reach

#01 UNTITLED SOUND ENVIRONMENT - FEB 2014 Sculpture Center NYC
8.1 channel system with a 5-speaker hanging center cluster
Sound Field as Sculpture

#02 lvl UPLOAD - OCT 2014 Pratt Institute NYC
8.1 vertical array over 4 floors of the Pratt Atrium

#03.a FREE FIELD / PRESSURE FIELD / DIFFUSE FIELD - JUN 2015 Institut für Zukunft Leipzig
Stereo club PA, incl. an 10ft. subwoofer stack, plus 2 dispersed monitor speakers

#03.b FREE FIELD / PRESSURE FIELD / DIFFUSE FIELD - JUN 2015 Spinnerei Chemnitz
Outdoors on a 4.2-ch system

#03.c FREE FIELD / PRESSURE FIELD / DIFFUSE FIELD - JUN 2015 NTS Radio Leipzig
Stereo for the radio space

#03.d FREE FIELD / PRESSURE FIELD / DIFFUSE FIELD - JUL 2015 Fridman Gallery NYC 
4.2-ch

#04 NEXT TO NOTHING - AUG 2016 Fridman Gallery NYC
8.4-ch system
Focus on low-frequency spatialization.

#05.a FROM WITHIN A FIELD - NOV 2016 Medialab-Prado Madrid, Spain
10.2-ch system
Widening the field.

#05.b FROM WITHIN A FIELD - NOV 2016 Centre del Carme Valencia, Spain
8.2-ch
One of the loudspeakers was pointed into the empty exhibition hall.

#6.a FROM WITHIN A FIELD - FEB 2017 Roulette
12.2 3D Sound

#6.b FROM WITHIN A FIELD - FEB 2017 Collider Studio
Quad sound

#6.c FROM WITHIN A FIELD - JUL 2017 Fondazione Lac O Le Mon, Lecce,Italy
6.1 channels as sound environment for the villa

#07 PHASE FIELD small/large - JUL 2017 Fergus McCaffrey Gallery
Installation and performance for REMAINS

#8 FROM WITHIN A FIELD - AUG 2017 Cube Fest, ICAT Virginia Tech