Sam Auinger is a composer, sound artist, and sonic thinker. He collaborates with city planners and architects, gives lectures, and attends international symposiums on urban planning, architecture, media, and the senses on a regular basis. From 2008 to 2012, he was a visiting professor at the University of the Arts in Berlin, where he directed the Experimental Sound Design department of the Sound Studies Master Program. He is currently a Harvard Graduate School of Design associate. He’s been collaborating with composer Bruce Odland as O+A since 1989, investigating the fundamental issue of hearing perspective. Their sound installations in public spaces are famed for transforming city noise into harmony in real-time. He’s also a founding member of stadtmusik, a collaboration involving Berlin-based composers Sam Auinger and Hannes Strobl and Dietmar Offenhuber, a media artist and urbanist.
This is one of the projects he mentioned in the lecture. I was very interested in this project. I sometimes really feel that art is another way of expressing science. O+A is a collaboration between Bruce Odland and Sam Auinger. The soundscape of New York Harbor was re-tuned into a harmonic series by this temporary installation, which was combined by the moon and tides. It reintroduced visitors to the natural world, including tide and moon cycles, as well as the rhythms and might of modern city transportation. With music, light, and street furniture, Harvard Design School’s 5 cube loudspeakers changed the social interaction on the plaza for O+A.
I thought it was really interesting to combine art and technology. He also explained some of the principles of the device in the lecture. I didn’t fully understand it at first, but then I went back and listened to it again and thought it was incredible. It really takes a lot of knowledge and a certain amount of inspiration to make it.
Q&A
What draws you to work with urban spaces?
Cities have kind of a vivid narrative that they have vivid communication and discussion. And to make myself somehow competent for this discourse, I think you need to have experience (of City).
Auinger, S., Schulze, H., Schulze, H., Schulze, H., Schulze, H., Schwesinger, S., Schulze, H., Schulze, H. and Schulze, H., n.d. Sam Auinger, Author at. [online] Soundstudieslab.org. Available at: <http://www.soundstudieslab.org/author/sam-auinger/> [Accessed 6 December 2021].
BLUE MOON 2004, O+A, Bruce Odland and Sam Auinger. 2021. .