Maryanne Amacher, winner of the 2005 Prix Ars Electronica for digital music, is currently showing “Gravity”, the newest piece of her Music for Sound Joined Rooms Series in the tower of Parochialkirche in Berlin. This series she has been developing since over twenty years in the pursuit of getting closer to the relationship between music and space. In doing so, she distinguishes between the conventional airborne sound coming from free-standing loudspeakers and structure-borne sound, which is rather produced by the interplay between the source of the sound and the surrounding walls, corridors and resonating spaces. Almost all of the doors are open so the adjacent spaces can create a “resonant theater which visitors can follow physically as well as acoustically”. You can even stick your head (sadly just that because of security) in the giant wooden roof and hear the sound travel through.

Yesterday, Maryanne was so kind to animatedly accompany me through the whole 90-minute “sound screening”, which intentionally has the length of a movie-like narrative. The piece has very different passages, including her trademark Earsounds and in some parts it is really mesmerizing. I can’t help comparing it with what Carsten Nicolai did next door at Tesla in his visual installation Fades – like he achieved an almost bodily presence of a projection in empty space she does the same with sound. As I was told, she also links up her work with contemporary science, especially experimental particle physics where she sees some relation to the nature of her sounds – although the formulas you will find here and there on the ground might be meant slightly ironic.

Those photos just for the sake of showing the space. Here’s another one of her performing at Ars 2005.

At Hoergalerie Singuhr, through October 29th.