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.

Artist, composer and researcher Edwin van der Heide 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. In this podcast, we talk to Edwin about art in public space, air pressure, sounds under water, loudspeakers, networks, odd spatial experiences, and sonic phenomenology.

Edwin van der Heide's Spiral of Time offers a gentle, non-intrusive auditory portrait of Plaça dels Àngels in Barcelona’s Raval neighborhood, inviting us to observe changes in temporal and meteorological patterns, the varied uses of the space, and the subtle shifts that occur from day to day. By presenting soundscapes over different intervals—hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, and even yearly—it helps listeners perceive the scale of time differently and understand how the square evolves with each season and moment. In this podcast, we sit down with Edwin van der Heide exactly to discuss this work. We reflect on concepts of time travel and spirals, on creating staged memories and living archives, on the far-reaching sounds that traverse the square, and on the intriguing possibility of expanding Spiral of Time to encompass diverse, non-human landscapes.