Time Project

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The Time Project is a live music installation and at the same time a multimedia experiment with the aim of influencing or almost canceling the perception of time and space. Matthias Loibner's idea was first implemented for a larger audience on June 13, 2008 as part of the Oerol Festival on the Dutch island of Terschelling .

history

The original idea for the Time Project began for Matthias Loibner while listening to a Swiss cuckoo clock and considering the perception of time while making music. The almost finished idea (before the musicians were selected) took on new forms through the collaboration with the production team from the Graz Festival La Strada , in particular Werner Schrempf. All selected music groups accepted the invitation to work together and a first meeting to discuss and test some acoustic phenomena took place in Vienna in September 2007. The Dutch director Jos Thie was brought in for the overall artistic direction. He brought Ania Harre into the project for the videos, Stans Lutz for the stage design and Raier Pos for the lighting design. After rehearsals in November 2007 (joint surround programming of the beats ) and April 2008, the setup for the first public performance in June 2008 on the island of Terschelling in Holland followed. The Time Project was performed there nine times for the Oerol Festival, and in August 2008 at La Strada.

Time Project is a co-production with in situ , the European network for art in public spaces, funded with support from the European Commission, the Festival La Strada and the Oerol Festival.

construction

Time Project Structure, Terschelling 2008

Around 1000 listeners play four music groups from north, east, south and west of Europe at a distance of approx. 30 meters on four stages oriented towards the cardinal points. There are screens for video projections between the stages. Each stage / music group has its own stereo PA system (octophony).

The video projectors are located on a structure in the middle, the audio technology outside the stage circle.

procedure

To the constant sound of a ticking clock, the music groups always play slowly in relation to the tempo of a second, then alternately faster and faster, finally interlocking and finally with each other music for a duration of one hour (3600 seconds).

Contributors

North: Snö

The band Snö from Sweden combines traditional Swedish dance music played on old Nordic folk instruments with live loops and samples . The musicians come from the leading folk music groups in Sweden such as Hedningarna , Garmarna , Hurdy-gurdy, Godrun and Boot.

East: Mitsoura

Mitsoura from Hungary is the band around the Roma singer Mónika Juhász Miczura and combines old Pannonian vocal traditions with ambient and breakbeats .

South: Pallyria

The band Pallyria from Greece merges music from the Mediterranean with electro .

  • Panagiotis Kaperneka - vocals, Madura
  • Andreas Arvanitis - Lyra
  • Kostas Haller - live electronics
  • Takis Tsourgiannis - electric bass, percussion
  • Panos Katsikiotis - drums, voice

West: Familha Artús

The band Familha Artús from Gascony combines traditional Occitan music with progressive rock and electronics.

team

  • Video: Ania Harre (D, NL)
  • Stage design: Stans Lutz (NL)
  • Light: Raier Pos (NL)
  • Sound technology: Stefan Bauer (A), Joseph Jabbour (A), Hendrik de Winter (NL)
  • artistic director: Jos Thie (NL)
  • Idea: Matthias Loibner (A)

content

The music always follows the tempo of one second or its simple divisors (60, 120, 180, 240 bpm ) during the course of 3600 seconds (60 minutes ). At certain times the type, the sound, the cultural origin, the musicians, the melody, the rhythm, the harmony and the direction of perception of the music change simultaneously, while the tempo (the beat ) remains the same. The power of changing these essential parameters makes the meaning and perceptibility of the physical unit of a second almost disappear in relation to the conveyed content.

The same thing happens with the perception of the space, in which the 30 × 30 meters for the audience are juxtaposed with approx. 5,000 × 5,000 kilometers of geographical distance of the different cultural origins and even greater distances, associations caused by the musical material used.

The sudden changes in the content (the music, with the support of video projections, mostly to the left and right of the respective stage) take place rarely at first and then more and more often, up to 4 times per second (240 bpm). This is a tempo at which it is no longer clear to the listener whether the individual music groups are making music one after the other or together. Accordingly, from a certain point in time the music merges acoustically into a whole (comparable to the optical phi effect ). No musical group approaches another in terms of style, culture, sound or location.

This merging is a central element of the Time Project. The experience of union (of the different cultures, musical styles, sounds, music groups but also of the audience) takes the place of the dimensions of space and time that have been withdrawn from perception.

Inspired by the compositional technique of selective music , as also occurs in Basque ( Txalaparta ) or East African ( Amadinda ) xylophone music , in which two independent voices complement each other to form a third, these interlocking patterns in the Time Project result from the sounds from North, East, South, West a fifth musical element.

In the process, the 3600 seconds of the Time Project are also interpreted as years, seasons, months, weeks, days of the week, days and hours. The points in time calculated by simple division are the basis of the musical changes during the course and are intended to combine different European time models in one point.

The famous sequence of numbers by Leonardo Fibonacci is used in reverse order to speed up the process. This also has the consequence that the lengths of the individual music fragments move further and further away from the golden ratio, so the order of the sequence is increasingly dissolving.

The composition of the Time Project largely relates to the chronological sequence of the musical fragments, the music itself comes from the existing repertoire of the music groups or was composed by them for the Time Project.

Through the entire structure and process, the right half of the brain is strongly stimulated with its own tasks of intuition, feeling, spontaneity, volatility, curiosity, synthesis, overview, art, dance, music, holism, connections, spatial awareness and the left half of the brain (responsible for language , Reading, arithmetic, ratio logic, rules, concentration on one point, analysis, time perception, linearity) deliberately confused. For reinforcement, subtly different images are used to the left and right of the stage being played on. This supports a dream-like state and opens the listener to inexplicable phenomena.

The regional sounds, instruments and their playing styles are alien to many listeners and are perceived as from another time / world. A seemingly superficial similarity of the music groups, however , supports a dream-like chain of associations in which the foreign appears in ever new variations (e.g. Swedish and French hurdy-gurdy , Cretan lyre and Bulgarian gadulka ).

The choice of music groups is another central element of the Time Project. The four bands (Snö, Mitsoura, Palyrria, Familha Artús) combine traditional music from their region of origin with today's musical styles, whereby the following common characteristics are essential:

  • Deep examination of the musical roots and years of playful approach to contemporary music styles
  • Development of an individual imaginary folklore
  • Traditional melodies, sounds and playing styles have a lasting effect on other styles (e.g. through your own sample banks with the sounds of acoustic musical instruments)
  • balanced balance between acoustic and electrical, between low and high, as well as between powerful and fragile sounds
  • a regionally typical, acoustically easily identifiable instrument in a central role
  • Use of singing and regional languages

The use of traditional music in the Time Project is based on the assumption that traditional music is particularly rich in nuances that affect the emotional level of the music due to the fact that it is passed on aurally, as this is experienced before it is learned to perform. The often multi-layered arrangements with the ornaments of traditional music result in particularly dense textures.

Traditional music, which also includes younger popular music styles such as pop, rock, jazz, techno, etc. with all its variations, has the property of being subject to constant change (compare: “Tradition is not keeping the ashes, but passing on the flame. “ Thomas More et al.) And is therefore a particularly meaningful symbol for the" now ".

The stage design with the tent and sail-like elements combines the archaic character of a nomad village with the utopian notion of a space settlement and creates a closed framework for the audience, but at the same time leaves gaps in the perception of the surroundings.

The four independent videos combine excerpts from the musicians' private recordings, elements typical of the region with modern and urban impressions in often impossible proportions of size and perspective.

technology

Music, light and video of the Time Project run synchronously .

A hard disk recorder acts as a central timer and supplies word clock and midi time code (MTC) . This is initially for a central display and split two audio computer (master and backup) when the slave 4 per stereo tracks and 8 mono Click -tracks for in-ear monitoring play of the musicians, midi control to the digital Send mixer and also generate MTC as a backup to the hard disk recorder. Then the timecode is distributed further to synchronize the light, the 4 independent video projections and another 4 audio computers on the stages, to generate synchronized audio effects and to display the process for the musicians. The live sound of all 4 PA systems and 8 stereo monitor paths are controlled via a central mixer (Yamaha PM1D) so that each signal can be positioned anywhere in the room. Samples and effects that move in space are largely automated.

swell

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