For modular synthesizer, Machine listening software, sound system, and radio-transmission headsets. 

Speaking of Liszt’s transcriptions of Isolde’s Liebestod, Peter Szendy writes that the arrangement invites us to “listen to the way another has listened.” In comparing the orchestral original to Liszt’s piano reworking, we can hear not only Wagner’s composition but also Liszt’s own act of listening — a listening folded into another listening.

The Arranger extends this idea into the domain of machine listening. The work consists of a live electronic performance by Stefan Maier in dialogue with autonomous software trained to generate new “arrangements” of incoming sound through machine-learning–driven granular processing.

Composed specifically for the auditorium of the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, the performance unfolded across a multichannel loudspeaker system, while the machine’s parallel transformations were transmitted through personal headphones originally intended for translation. Audience members were invited to shift freely between these two auditory spaces — to compare Maier’s live performance with its machinic interpretation, and to hear, as Szendy might say, the way another has listened.

By activating and instrumentalizing the human sensorium through psychoacoustic phenomena such as otoacoustic emissions, Shepard tones, the tritone paradox, and stream segregation, Maier foregrounds the idiosyncratic biases and thresholds of human hearing. In contrast, the machine’s arrangements expose a radically different mode of auditory attention. The explores how listening — whether human or computational — is always an act of transformation — a translation from one ear to another.

Commissioned for the opening of Haus der Kulturen der Welt’s Radiophonic Spaces exhibition as a part of Der Ohrenmensch. 

https://www.hkw.de/en/programm/projekte/veranstaltung/p_144243.php

Released on PP-01 by Party Perfect