Bernhard Leitner: HörSaal

HörSaal is a site-specific, localised sound-space work. The equipment is the in-built sound system with 832 audio channels in the lecture theatre H104 at the TU Berlin. This instrument is one of a kind in terms of its size and makes it possible, using the technology of wave field synthesis, to devise and realise complex wide-ranging scenarios.

As opposed to a concert-style usage of the room with strictly arranged rows of seating (for a lecture), HörSaal has been conceived as an openly traversable sound-space composition. Wave field synthesis allows the sound from a sound source to be produced at any given position in the room. The work HörSaal aesthetically implements this in a dynamic sound-space and in a static sound-space.

In the dynamic part, Verwehter Raum (Windswept Room) sounds are moved between various abstract positions in the room. This movement is layered with a second movement between other abstract positions. Both are then covered with a third, fourth and fifth layer of varying movement-structures within the room. This complex spatial web suggests a free fluctuation, although it exhibits an exact and by no means aleatoric design.

In the static sound-space, Inselwelt (Island World) the listener explores different positions in the room, which are visually and architecturally designated. From a diffused sound in the whole room that is built up by over ten individual voice parts (channels), the listener enters a precisely measured sound-position in order to experience, in these completely individual sound-spaces, the sound-world of the spoken word of influential physicists such as Planck, Schrödinger and Einstein.

Bernhard Leitner