Map and Territory, Moritzplatz
Audiowalk, 15 min

Jakob Köchert

The audiowalk maps the encompassed territory of the collectively conducted research last week through the acoustic phenomenon of the echo. Weaving together the sites of investigation, it proposes the experience of their different spatial characteristics through the practice of listening to their reverberant quality after being excited by a pulse generator.

Instructions:

1. For the duration of the audiowalk, make listening your main focus.

2. With the first generated pulse by the sound source, the audiowalk begins. With the last pulse it ends.

3. Follow and circulate freely around the sound source, choosing and modifying your distance and orientation to it as you feel.

4. Direct your listening focus on the echo of the spaces you encounter during the walk, isolating it from the soundscape.

5. Notice how the echo transorms, depending the spatial relation of your body, the sound source and the surrounding space.

6. Don't worry to get distracted by other sounds, enjoy their present. You can use the sound source to pull you back into listening to the echo.

"If sound generally occurs through displacement, moving from a point in time to another, the echo renders this to such as degree as to make concrete the vectorizing, temporality of sound - the echo exaggerates the passing of sound, staging it as a performance. The echo literally continues the vector of the sound, staggers it, and supplements it with a further set of sound events that ultimately fill a given space. The echo brings back the original event, through, reshaped or refigured, thereby returning sound and rendering it a spatial object: the echo turns sound into sculpture, making material and dimensional its reverberating presence. In this regard, the echo contradicts sound's temporal behavior. Making sound into an object, the echo displaces the linear relation of origin and horizon, past and future, by prolonging the sound event to a point where it takes over; it overwhelms by turning the time of sound into a spatial dimension - the ehco moves into space to replace it with its own compounded and repeating energy."

Brandon LaBelle, Acoustic Territories, Sound Culture and Everyday Life p.6