The acoustic interplay between sound and space is more than a physical fact. As the legacy of sound art demonstrates, such interplay is rich in detail, laced with a potential to activate perception, redraw architectural borders, fashion forms of inhabitation out of transient sparks of sonority, create new relations in and amongst the crowd. In this regard, “sound” and “space” are no longer separate entities or concepts but a synthesized totality whose definition is specific to each location, each event, each instant of their interplay. A radical ecology, the sound-space interplay is an organism spawning dramas of perception and interaction, and of what it means to be situated.

Bringing together artists, composers, architects, producers, and musicians since 2003, the freq_out project was built upon such dramas, seeking to invade architecture with sonic imagination. Curated by Carl Michael von Hausswolff, a Swedish artist working for many years in the visual and sonic arts, freq_out has appeared in Copenhagen, Høvikodden (Norway), Paris, Berlin, Chiang Mai (Thailand), Budapest, Kortrijk (Belgium), Amsterdam, and Marrakesh (Morocco). The last event was held in Vienna. Structured as a collaborative sound environment in which authorship was determined by group effort, each of the participants was assigned an individual “zone” within the given space, determined by location or speaker position, and a specific range of frequency with which to produce a sound piece. Working in the space, discovering its features or exploring sonic material, sound pieces were developed through this social framework, according to intuitive notions of musicality, narrative, sonicity, structure, fantasy, etc. Collaboration ensued as an embodied response to what already existed, either as spatial textures or the given currents of each of the participants’ work. Decisions, discussion, and arguments occurred primarily through and by sound. As a final presentation, most zones were equipped with their own loudspeaker system and CD player from which the individual pieces were amplified. Such a strategy offered an element of autonomy to each participant, while creating the possibility that any interference between works would only function to heighten the sonic experience.

The sound environment partially functioned “through” interference by creating overlaps, overtones, intersections, and deflections across the frequencies and between individual pieces, according to a visitor’s movements through the space and the durational evolution of the sounds. While trends in sound art display and presentation often struggle to shield individual works from each other, to lessen the disturbance or interference between, freq_out intentionally sought out interference and interruption. In this way, it suggested potential models for the presentation of sound art (and the construction of sound-spaces) based on incorporating the collective intermingling sound inevitably presents rather than ignoring or attempting to close it off.

As von Hausswolff put it, freq_out was based on a notion of collectivity that does not overshadow the individual. Thus, each participant was implicated into the greater whole, not so much through democratic imperative in which majority always rules but through nurturing a rather anarchic field of cooperation. For each participant was able to extend beyond their individual practice as a way to meet the others “in” the space, and importantly “through” the sound. The exhibition or presentation space not only functioned as an architectural and acoustic partner but also as a meeting point for cooperation and interruption—in this sense, the sound-space interplay not only drew out other conditions for experiencing place but also enmeshed individual perception within the folds of a greater event found in coming together. For freq_out was plurality raised to the xth degree, splintering space, ricocheting through the mind, dislocating the individual body, and planting new arrangements within the ecology of temporal experience. Though this is not to say that what resulted was pure utopia, in which each participant or sound was represented fully, for certainly in the resounding frequencies intermingling and intermeshing, beating against walls, surprising the ears from every perspective, any sense of musicality or cooperation might bleed into cacophony. This in the end provided a way to think through what it means to cooperate and collaborate through sonic experimentation, “to meet through sound”: that the framework of this cultural action is just as much about conflict and the potential of noise as it is about resolution.

Text: Brandon LaBelle