The somewhat cumbersome title aims at the context of what happens on a stage of any kind from the audience's point of view. And what is always already there, with the exception of pantomime. The fact that a spokesman speaks, a choir sings or an orchestra plays and that tones, sounds and noises are used as effect intensifiers in the sense of an action, has been beyond question since the introduction of music theater. However, when we speak of sound in a scenic context, not only does the concept of music expand. But it ultimately elevates everything audible to the status of design material.

Most of the time I listen when I am either curious about what comes next, (-i.e. how it will continue, or whether it will continue as I think it will) or because I hear something so extraordinary. These situations open a new associative window in me and I either want to experience what it is or where it comes from, because it suddenly exists as if it comes from nowhere hitting my perception unprepared.  

It is revealing to investigate the question of why one is actually listening at all. If, for example, it is not an exchange of linguistic information, then the ear must be stimulated by something else in order to stay with it. Perhaps our receptive senses always react according to the scheme of reality analysis and the interrogation of meaning, and, derived from this, according to the principle of listening away when something is recognized and identified. Perhaps it is only through this ability to fade out that urban life becomes bearable, listening away as a strategy. This, however, is currently only a secondary consideration.

Rather, a scene often consists of an audiovisual offering, a highly complex relationship of gestures, announcements and content. How something can be "meant" is often the result of an immediate comparison of similar experiences and a precise perception of nuances - in any case, a continuous and immediate analysis with the help of our extensive repertoire of experiences. Here at this predetermined breaking point, peculiar tensions arise from the contrast between reflection and emotion. Anything that does not seem to fit our analysis perfectly, suddenly arouses our interest. For the musicalization process in the scenic presentation, this is a possibility of choreographing a latent hunger for associatively occupable moments. For it is precisely these open meanings that transport themselves, causing a seemingly purposeless noise to become the actual impulse carrier of another form of audiovisual staging.

It is this kind of purposelessness which is also the goal of sound art, especially in its installative and performative forms, using electroacoustic sound productions and electronically generated sound worlds. Here in the spectrum of computer music, the periodic oscillation (tone) and the harmonizing periodic oscillations (sound) exist only as special cases in the cosmos of sounds. With this acoustic tool, auditory impressions can be staged, which can be used as sound material itself in a completely abstract way.

In addition, there is the possibility of freeing the sound production as a theatrical form. The audio-visual does not take an image as its theme, but focuses on the moment of hearing and the visualization of the sounds and noises as a motive for action and is brought to the center stage to be performed. Embedded in an operational framework, in which audibility determines the dramatic action, sound or noise, becomes a new explanatory approach for this behaviour. Interesting at this point are those dramaturgically designed manipulations as acoustic experiments that evoke and disappoint, or sublimate a concrete expectation, or offer unrealistic and completely exaggerated phenomena as a solution.

Norderheistedt, February 2009