Zeitraum Limassol

Zeitraum is a sound environment exposing the interrelation of time and space in acoustic communication and the implications thereof for music and sound art. The environment is composed of many identical sound sources distributed over a large area, playing an aleatoric ostinato of percussive sounds. When listened to from a particular location, the pattern is perceived as an accented but isochronous beat. The ostinato is structured such that the sounds from all sources arrive at a regular time interval at one particular location (white square on floor), compensating for the differences in propagation time. When walking away from that location, the regularity of the pulse gets more and more distorted as the distances to all sound sources change and with them the propagation delays. What starts as almost imperceptible deviations, and passes through various zones with different kinds of grooves, ends up in a rhythmically completely disrupted and apparently chaotic sequence of events when listened to from far off the reference location. By moving about, the audience explores a space literally made out of time, a time space (German: Zeitraum) resulting in a bewildering experience enacted through one’s locomotion, revealing the always baffling relativity of observation. Zeitraum marked the end point in a series of case studies conducted in the course of the artistic research project The Choreography of Sound (2010–14) funded by the Austrian Science Fund FWF (AR 257). The work was created to embody central research results and make them accessible through aesthetic experience. With Zeitraum, an aesthetic formulation of some of the basic constraints shaping the composition of spatial sound textures has been found, while touching upon fundamental conceptual and artistic conditions of possibility in electro-acoustic music composition and sound art. Zeitraum Limassol is a site-specific reformulation of the previous versions of the sound environment: Zeitraum Graz (2013), Zeitraum Göteborg (2016) and Zeitraum Online (2016).

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