Son[i]a #361
Edwin van der Heide
![Son[i]a #361](https://img.macba.cat/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/dscn8279.jpeg)
Edwin van der Heide is an artist, composer and researcher in the fields of sound, space and interaction. He expands musical composition and musical language in spatial, interactive, and interdisciplinary directions. His often site-specific, highly immersive installations don’t just take up space: they are a very deliberate inquiry into space itself and into its affordances as an artistic medium and material. Edwin’s pieces create space, modifying its actual and perceived boundaries. They make space present, apparent, and even tangible. They are carefully designed explorations of a host of physical phenomena—from vibrations in water to electrical sparks—, which evoke a sense of wonder through highly situated experiences and bodily kinesthetics, frequently inviting the audience to become an active part of the piece.
In this podcast, we talk to Edwin van der Heide about art in public space, air pressure, sounds under water, loudspeakers, networks, odd spatial experiences, and sonic phenomenology.
Music quotations
00:22 “Pneumatic Sound Field”
08:04 “Shape KWS”
27:55 “Wavescape”
46:20 “Impuls#2”
56:47 “Pneumatic Sound Field”
66:18 “Impuls #5.1”
76:56 “Daylight”
Edwin van der Heide
In this podcast, we talk with Edwin van der Heide about using radio as a way into the public, outside world, and about radio as a highly regulated space that sometimes resists experimentation. We discuss his early interest in short and medium wave radio and how it came to be expressed in these immersive, awe-inspiring installations, and we speculate about the production of meaning inherent in each of them.
Deleted Scenes
We dig up some unreleased bits of our conversation with the Tasmanian-born, Berlin-based experimental cellist and sound artist Anthea Caddy. We talk about the dialogue between her practice and science and academia, but also about infrasound, long wave data, mirrors, reflection, the ungraspable and the negotiation with the environment and space.
Anthea Caddy
Anthea Caddy is a Tasmanian-born and now Berlin-based experimental cellist and sound artist who explores projected sound energy through spatial practices that highlight acoustic and physical phenomena. In this podcast, Anthea walks us through her journey from playing cello in rock bands as a teenager to her ongoing research into projected sound energy. She explains her long-term research on directional speakers and the results of the iterations and testing of the parabolic speakers. She also talks about documentation and about the difficulties of approaching large-scale sound performance.
EVOL
Roc Jiménez de Cisneros talks about EVOL’s very free deconstruction and reinterpretation of György Ligeti's 'Continuum' and Hanne Darboven’s 'Opus 17A', and how these works relate to the duo's current artistic practice. Unusual notions of time in relation to music, algorithmic reverse engineering, complexity through simplicity, anti-climax, ancient trance music, weird mental states and Dick Higgins’ Superboredom concept pop up in the conversation.
Jessica Ekomane
Jessica Ekomane is a sound artist and composer, and a lecturer in Sound Studies and Sonic Arts at the Universität der Künste Berlin. Ekomane’s quadraphonic performances and installations approach algorithmic/computer music as a social practice that is grounded in questions such as the relationship between individual perception and collective dynamics, and explores listening expectations and their societal roots. In this podcast, we talk about the freedom of play, eMule, pipe organs, the limitations and flexibility of Max/MSP, early non-Western sound synthesis, DIY research, quotas, minimalism, and her early love for Ligeti and Destiny's Child.