Sam Auinger - A Hearing Perspective
18. February 2009, 11:04:47 unter: Audio, Berlin, German, Germany, Podcasts, Portraits, UdK Berlin, UniversitiesPeople go through life with open ears – they cannot close their ears, as they can their eyes, to the sounds of the world, unless they physically block them. The ear is a completely closed off sensory organ. We hear, even when we sleep. We hear sharply only rarely and perceive differently, those noises which surround and penetrate us. If we tune into ourselves and back in time, not only the sounds from streetcar, cow-, door-, recess, fire brigade, church, or bicycle bells resonate within us, but also an amazingly extensive audio cosmos. We come to learn that sounds have emotional connotations, that our feelings have different intonations.
A Hearing Perspective
| send feedback 
Sam Auinger is engaged with the world of sounds, tones, and noises and their geographical-cultural as well as historical differences. He thereby carries on a tradition of artistic involvement with sound in which people such as Erik Satie, Luigi Russolo, John Cage, and Murray Schäfer made history. Trained at the Bruckner Conservatory in Linz and University Mozarteum Salzburg, he made himself a name as a composer and sound artist, as well as a researcher and architect in the world of sound and its effects. His works, which depict different worlds of sound, are presented worldwide as performances, installations, experiments, films, and videos, and invite a conscious recollection of ones own horizon of sound. In his work, “Sechse läuten”, for example, he collected noises from his childhood, listening for which tones followed him into adulthood, determining which came to him out of joy, obedience, feeling left out, familiarity, or fear.
Not only sounds themselves, but their location have a character. The location as a sound object, an aspect of sound emphasized by the American avant-garde artist John Cage, is at present part of the research of the artist, who is active as a guest professor for experimental sound organization at the University of the Arts in Berlin. In his search for a new language of hearing, Sam Auinger often works in various collaborations, and publishes under the names “O+A”, ” berliner theorie”, “tamtam”, and “stadtmusik”. CastYourArt interviewed Sam Auinger in Berlin. (wh/jn)
