Part I – Fluktuierendes Geflüster, 2023
Eight-channel sound installation, 8:32 min
Voice: Kathrine Børlit Nielsen
Commissioned by Internationales Musikinstitut, Darmstädter Ferienkurse
From the solo exhibition Fluktuationen at Kunsthalle Darmstadt, Germany, 2023
The work Part I - Fluktuierendes Geflüster unfolds as a fragile and vulnerable soundscape of whispers. They form a multichannel “choir” that moves into more defined moments of highly intensified expressions where the polyrhythmic and musical qualities of the impalpable voices engage and collapse with the majestic and diffusing acoustics of the great reverberant hall. The piece is constantly co-created by the listeners’ physical movement and attention in relation to the sound sources. Part I - Fluktuierendes Geflüster is in context with Alexander Tillegreen’s ongoing work with the phantom word illusion and is his first psychoacoustic work with whispering as a leading motive and material.
The whispering words ebb and flow between the comprehendible and impalpable. In spurts of formations, they disperse into the hall and materialize into massive blocks. In the next moment, they suddenly fade away. The whispering voices are blurred, and identity markers such as gender, age, and health, usually present in the human voice, have disappeared. Whispering may carry associations of the secretive or the intimate. As a social and communicative tool, whispering can be aimed to include a single listener while excluding others.
Part I – Fluktuierendes Geflüster, 2023
Eight-channel sound installation, 8:32 min
Voice: Kathrine Børlit Nielsen
Commissioned by Internationales Musikinstitut, Darmstädter Ferienkurse
From the solo exhibition Fluktuationen at Kunsthalle Darmstadt, Germany, 2023
The work Part I - Fluktuierendes Geflüster unfolds as a fragile and vulnerable soundscape of whispers. They form a multichannel “choir” that moves into more defined moments of highly intensified expressions where the polyrhythmic and musical qualities of the impalpable voices engage and collapse with the majestic and diffusing acoustics of the great reverberant hall. The piece is constantly co-created by the listeners’ physical movement and attention in relation to the sound sources. Part I - Fluktuierendes Geflüster is in context with Alexander Tillegreen’s ongoing work with the phantom word illusion and is his first psychoacoustic work with whispering as a leading motive and material.
The whispering words ebb and flow between the comprehendible and impalpable. In spurts of formations, they disperse into the hall and materialize into massive blocks. In the next moment, they suddenly fade away. The whispering voices are blurred, and identity markers such as gender, age, and health, usually present in the human voice, have disappeared. Whispering may carry associations of the secretive or the intimate. As a social and communicative tool, whispering can be aimed to include a single listener while excluding others.
Part II - Water + Vælge (intermezzo), 2023
Four-channel sound installation, 2:32 min
Voices: May Lifschitz & Kathrine Børlit Nielsen
Commissioned by Internationales Musikinstitut, Darmstädter Ferienkurse
In Part II - Water + Vælge (intermezzo the voice is raised from what before was a whispering stage to a more erect and defined stage of speech. More voice characteristics seem to unfold but are still in a blur.
First, in cabinet one, the listener is presented with a more dry and systematic demonstration of the phantom word illusion. A simple panning is initially used to illustrate the original word (“water”) that then soon is “phantomized” into the simple stereo speaker setup. When composing the illusion, a two-syllable word is fractured and played through several loudspeakers in rhythmic displacements. The phantom word illusion is conditionally linked to the listener’s personal life. The listener’s situation forms the inner streams of words in the meeting with phantom words. Culture, language background, gender, and social experience are defining factors. Furthermore, the listener’s bodily movement and engagement in the space can alter the inner word stream. In this way, the listener becomes a co-creator. The gender of the voice also may become difficult to decipher, and often it is also the case that the listener may experience a blurry state and multiplicity of voices coming from each loudspeaker.
In the second cabinet, the work continues with a deconstructed and multilayered use of the phantom word illusion. Having the word “vælge” (Danish for “choose”) as the starting point of the departure, several layers of illusion are multiplied at different speeds and at different pitches, which in a short time accumulates to a mass of phantom word illusions.
Part II - Water + Vælge (intermezzo), 2023
Four-channel sound installation, 2:32 min
Voices: May Lifschitz & Kathrine Børlit Nielsen
Commissioned by Internationales Musikinstitut, Darmstädter Ferienkurse
In Part II - Water + Vælge (intermezzo the voice is raised from what before was a whispering stage to a more erect and defined stage of speech. More voice characteristics seem to unfold but are still in a blur.
First, in cabinet one, the listener is presented with a more dry and systematic demonstration of the phantom word illusion. A simple panning is initially used to illustrate the original word (“water”) that then soon is “phantomized” into the simple stereo speaker setup. When composing the illusion, a two-syllable word is fractured and played through several loudspeakers in rhythmic displacements. The phantom word illusion is conditionally linked to the listener’s personal life. The listener’s situation forms the inner streams of words in the meeting with phantom words. Culture, language background, gender, and social experience are defining factors. Furthermore, the listener’s bodily movement and engagement in the space can alter the inner word stream. In this way, the listener becomes a co-creator. The gender of the voice also may become difficult to decipher, and often it is also the case that the listener may experience a blurry state and multiplicity of voices coming from each loudspeaker.
In the second cabinet, the work continues with a deconstructed and multilayered use of the phantom word illusion. Having the word “vælge” (Danish for “choose”) as the starting point of the departure, several layers of illusion are multiplied at different speeds and at different pitches, which in a short time accumulates to a mass of phantom word illusions.
Part III – Augen & choir (epilogue), 2023
Eight-channel sound installation, 3:36 min
Commissioned by Internationales Musikinstitut, Darmstädter Ferienkurse
From the solo exhibition Fluktuationen at Kunsthalle Darmstadt, Germany, 2023
The third and final part of the cycle is also a return to the main hall, marking an architectural loop in the building and the structure of the entire composition.
The word "Augen" ("eyes" in German) introduces this final piece. This phantom word illusion was originally used as scientific stimuli in one of the interdisciplinary studies that Alexander Tillegreen conducted with scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, and it has generated many multilingual meanings for participants over the course of the study. It performs as the baritone backbone of the composition while it is soon accompanied by several singing voices forming a choir. Gradually sighs, stuttering outbursts, moans and groans, and other respiratory paralinguistic sounds are introduced until an accumulative cacophony is held within a few moments. A gentle group of vibrating voices phases out the cyc
Part III – Augen & choir (epilogue), 2023
Eight-channel sound installation, 3:36 min
Commissioned by Internationales Musikinstitut, Darmstädter Ferienkurse
From the solo exhibition Fluktuationen at Kunsthalle Darmstadt, Germany, 2023
The third and final part of the cycle is also a return to the main hall, marking an architectural loop in the building and the structure of the entire composition.
The word "Augen" ("eyes" in German) introduces this final piece. This phantom word illusion was originally used as scientific stimuli in one of the interdisciplinary studies that Alexander Tillegreen conducted with scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, and it has generated many multilingual meanings for participants over the course of the study. It performs as the baritone backbone of the composition while it is soon accompanied by several singing voices forming a choir. Gradually sighs, stuttering outbursts, moans and groans, and other respiratory paralinguistic sounds are introduced until an accumulative cacophony is held within a few moments. A gentle group of vibrating voices phases out the cyc
Correspondence (before thought), 2021
Six-channel sound installation with subwoofer, 6:56 min
Voice sample of Mary Vieira extracted from 1969 interview, synthesizer, field recordings
Transcript available here
Created for the solo exhibition Upsweep Paradox at Museum FuturDome in Milan, 2022
Archival material: © International Institute of Futurist Studies
A part of Alexander Tillegreen’s practice is to create dialogues with artists’ works he finds himself connected to. The Brazilian artist Mary Vieira worked with co-creational principles - an idea that Alexander Tillegreen continuously circles when composing his sound installations where the listener often takes part in finishing the work. Correspondence (before thought) is based on archival interview material where Mary Vieira speaks of cosmic forces, natural coherency, and her thoughts on co-creation:
“A person from the audience is necessary, someone simple or educated. People need to participate to finish the work, the conditions are already there.”
Mary Vieira’s voice is rhythmic and energetic. The artwork can be perceived as an intimate dialogue between two artists, suspended in time, reflecting on common themes.
Correspondence (before thought), 2021
Six-channel sound installation with subwoofer, 6:56 min
Voice sample of Mary Vieira extracted from 1969 interview, synthesizer, field recordings
Transcript available here
Created for the solo exhibition Upsweep Paradox at Museum FuturDome in Milan, 2022
Archival material: © International Institute of Futurist Studies
A part of Alexander Tillegreen’s practice is to create dialogues with artists’ works he finds himself connected to. The Brazilian artist Mary Vieira worked with co-creational principles - an idea that Alexander Tillegreen continuously circles when composing his sound installations where the listener often takes part in finishing the work. Correspondence (before thought) is based on archival interview material where Mary Vieira speaks of cosmic forces, natural coherency, and her thoughts on co-creation:
“A person from the audience is necessary, someone simple or educated. People need to participate to finish the work, the conditions are already there.”
Mary Vieira’s voice is rhythmic and energetic. The artwork can be perceived as an intimate dialogue between two artists, suspended in time, reflecting on common themes.
Assimilate (in words), 2015/2021
Two-channel sound installation, 6:31 min
Transcript available here
Mix and tape recorder by Mike Sheridan. Archival material: © Thomas Lopez
From the solo exhibition Fluktuationen at Kunsthalle Darmstadt, Germany, 2023
The investigation of language and communication takes another form in the work Assimilate (in words), where archival material in the form of a recording of Syd Barrett interviewed by Meatball Fulton (aka Thomas Lopez) in London, in August 1967, is transformed into an embodied questioning of the limits and borders of spoken language as interpersonal communication. Also featuring the psychoacoustic octave illusion, discovered by Diana Deutsch, and reworked, manipulated samples from Erik Satie’s composition Trois Sarabande (1887), the work carries friction and complexity in its use of disparate music historical references.
Assimilate (in words), 2015/2021
Two-channel sound installation, 6:31 min
Transcript available here
Mix and tape recorder by Mike Sheridan. Archival material: © Thomas Lopez
From the solo exhibition Fluktuationen at Kunsthalle Darmstadt, Germany, 2023
The investigation of language and communication takes another form in the work Assimilate (in words), where archival material in the form of a recording of Syd Barrett interviewed by Meatball Fulton (aka Thomas Lopez) in London, in August 1967, is transformed into an embodied questioning of the limits and borders of spoken language as interpersonal communication. Also featuring the psychoacoustic octave illusion, discovered by Diana Deutsch, and reworked, manipulated samples from Erik Satie’s composition Trois Sarabande (1887), the work carries friction and complexity in its use of disparate music historical references.
Episodic currents (phantom streams for O-Overgaden), 2022
Episodic currents (phantom streams for O-Overgaden), 2022
Phantom Streams (Zyklus I), 2020
6-channel sound installation, curtains, lights, bench, 10:20 min
From the exhibition INHABITING basis at basis e.V. in Frankfurt, Germany, 2020.
Out of a dense field of voices, streams of words materialize, then disappear; fade away or become entwined, forming new structures. What is being heard is affected by the positioning and movement of the listener in the space. The voices flicker, alternating between concrete and abstract, male and female. It is a dynamic and continuously reactive process, a listening experience that resists being repeated. Instead, Alexander Tillegreen‘s sound installation Phantom Streams (Zyklus I) opens up an acoustic space that addresses the act of listening itself as an activity that is never fully conscious or controllable and can only be described subjectively and individually.
By means of seriality, Tillegreen uses a specific technique of voice recording, editing and a spatial multi speaker setup, to evoke an immersive experience in which the real is destabilized with illusory elements in the listener‘s mind. In this way, language is experienced as something that is not simply there but that must be filtered and interpreted out of a mass of acoustic information. The work thus takes a phenomenon from music psychology as its starting point in order to address the question of how language is perceived. So-called “phantom words” may have the potential to create auditory illusions in the listener and expand the original meaning of a source word to the extent of hearing other words and even whole sentences that are not there. The material used for the sound composition and its artistic arrangement was developed through interdisciplinary research conducted in dialogue with scientists and sound technicians at the Max Planck Institute including an ongoing laboratory study on psychoacoustics.
Tillegreen’s work plays with the fact that the act of listening does not merely involve the reception of acoustic signals but that the incoming information and the understanding and attribution of meaning to it largely depend on the listener’s individual experiences, expectations, language background and cultural and subjective situatedness.
Phantom Streams (Zyklus I), 2020
6-channel sound installation, curtains, lights, bench, 10:20 min
From the exhibition INHABITING basis at basis e.V. in Frankfurt, Germany, 2020.
Out of a dense field of voices, streams of words materialize, then disappear; fade away or become entwined, forming new structures. What is being heard is affected by the positioning and movement of the listener in the space. The voices flicker, alternating between concrete and abstract, male and female. It is a dynamic and continuously reactive process, a listening experience that resists being repeated. Instead, Alexander Tillegreen‘s sound installation Phantom Streams (Zyklus I) opens up an acoustic space that addresses the act of listening itself as an activity that is never fully conscious or controllable and can only be described subjectively and individually.
By means of seriality, Tillegreen uses a specific technique of voice recording, editing and a spatial multi speaker setup, to evoke an immersive experience in which the real is destabilized with illusory elements in the listener‘s mind. In this way, language is experienced as something that is not simply there but that must be filtered and interpreted out of a mass of acoustic information. The work thus takes a phenomenon from music psychology as its starting point in order to address the question of how language is perceived. So-called “phantom words” may have the potential to create auditory illusions in the listener and expand the original meaning of a source word to the extent of hearing other words and even whole sentences that are not there. The material used for the sound composition and its artistic arrangement was developed through interdisciplinary research conducted in dialogue with scientists and sound technicians at the Max Planck Institute including an ongoing laboratory study on psychoacoustics.
Tillegreen’s work plays with the fact that the act of listening does not merely involve the reception of acoustic signals but that the incoming information and the understanding and attribution of meaning to it largely depend on the listener’s individual experiences, expectations, language background and cultural and subjective situatedness.