Since the Renaissance we have had an agreed visual perspective, and language to speak accurately about images. This we still lack in the world of sound, where words fail us to even describe for instance the complex waveforms of an urban environment, much less what those sounds do to us and how they make us feel. We are lost in a storm of noise with no language for discussion.

Odland and Auinger are learning to make sense of the sound environment we live in by listening with attention, hearing, exploring, and attempting to understand the cultural waveform as a language. In a primarily visual culture where decisions and budgets are often arrived at through visual logic, we must note that thinking with your ears tells a very different story. Why does the MoMA sculpture garden, bastion of High Art sound like any taxi stand in midtown NYC? Why is an expensive "quiet" car quiet only when riding on the inside? O+A collect, filter, and expand resonances found in nature and cities and try to unlock their meaning. These sounds are often shut out of our mental picture of a space as "noise". By listening to and studying these noises, they become useful sound sources.

O+A have developed a set of compositional tools to sculpt and transform our sonic environment. These tools allow us to extract the harmonic material from city noise, filter it, shape it and play it back in the moment to transform the feelings, atmosphere, and sound design of that environment. We are able to extract the melodies and make the hidden voices hearable. This alters the psycho acoustics of a site, shifts the emotional landscape, allows the people present to perceive the world through their "musical" brain instead of the part which decodes noise.

O+A
O+A, Sam Auinger and Bruce Odland are sonic alchemists developing a Hearing Perspective of our culture. Their work has altered the sonic identity of major architectural spaces including Trajan’s Forum(Rome), Kongresshalle(Berlin) MASSMoCA(US), Salzburg, Castle of Linz(Austria), Miro Labyrinth, St. Vence, (France), West Side Highway(NYC), MAK(WIEN). Erasmus Bridge(Rotterdam), Alexander platz and Potsdamer Platz(Berlin). This ongoing dialog with public space, resonance and architecture hopes to provoke a returning of our shared industrial soundscape.

www.o-a.info
www.bruceodland.net
www.samauinger.de