Det Preller Af Stemmer

• a generative sound work for synthesised animal calls and acoustic reflections.

Two loudspeakers are placed in the landscape so that their sound reflects off the mountain on the north-west–facing side of the bay. The mountain becomes a spatial reflector in front of the speakers: sounds are deflected and bounce back towards the shore. The work runs along two strands — an imitative one and an acoustic one. The first is made inside the computer; the second is handed to the rock and the air.

The imitative strand is driven by a small computer running SuperCollider, configured as a cybernetic loop: it listens to its own output and resynthesises it, over and over. Each pass is analysed and rebuilt from its cepstrum — the mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC) that act as a compact fingerprint of timbre — and the result is fed back in as the next input. With every cycle a little more information is lost and distorted. It begins by resynthesising recordings of otters and other animals, but through this repeated self-listening it gradually drifts away from its sources into something else.

These calls sit close to onomatopoeia. A sound-word is part of language and yet outside its edges: in linguistics it is the connection, or symbolism, between a sound and its rendering within a language, usually derived from imitation — a kind of pictorial language. The machine treats the animal call in much the same way — a sound to be imitated, recognised, and slowly misread — as speculative animal forms emerge in the interpolation between otter, bird and frog.

Each time the installation plays it is unique: a stochastic system built into the spatial composition varies the signals slightly, making them surprisingly and unpredictably different from one pass to the next. The subjective dimensions of sound underpin the work — it shifts with each listener, as much with their physical position as with their preconceptions and points of reference. Listening is often driven by a desire for understanding: an attempt to form associations, to recognise sounds as familiar, to sort what is heard into known categories.

Thanks to Janne Kruse and Espen Friberg

DPAS was commissioned by Hvitsten Salong, 2024