[13/02/2025 / 19:00 ] World Premiere of "Tripel Helix"

Triple Helix researches the flowing relations and interferences between instrument and space and such develop a new concept: space becomes an instrument!

Reinhold Friedl is known for his virtuous piano playing, especially his extended techniques on the grand piano and astonishing sound results. These piano sounds will be  spatialized in real time. Like a helix, two entities will be closely interwoven. For this purpose Gerriet K. Sharma uses a prototype of omnidirectional 3D audio beamforming loudspeakers that allow to create sculptural sound formations. This enables him to "play the room" and to confront the piano sounds with their spatial and sonic derivates, creating spatial and sonic interferences.

In real-time, the sounds of the piano are spatialized and such spectralized with the 393 beamforming loudspeakers, sometimes feedbacked with the microphones transmitting the piano sounds. These interactions lead to a triple helix: Three sonic spaces at the same time: the piano, the sptialization and the interferences. These layers are hard to distinguish as they are spatiotemporally interconnected, forming one augmented spectromorphology, live and in situ.

The interwoven spatial and instrumental setting creates the musical composition based on a concrete research focusing on amplification, sound projection and acoustic interferences of this augmented spatial setting.

The 393 beamforming loudspeaker was developed at the Institute of Electronic Music and Acoustics (IEM) Graz. Gerriet K. Sharma was part of the related research group (2019). By producing very narrow sound beams – with Higher Order Ambisonics – the 393 loudspeaker creates virtual sound sources using reflections from all kinds of surfaces. The listener perceives sound coming from walls, floors, ceilings, etc. and occasionally directly from the loudspeaker. Sound becomes a plastic event sculpturing spatial artifacts, causing decoupled "zones of (sonic) intensities" (E. Varèse, 1930).

Setup: The piano stands at a central place in front of the audience. The omnidirectional 393 loudspeakers will be installed at a precise distance left and right from the instrument (figure 01), depending on the acoustic properties of the space. As they work with the reflections of this very space, the concrete sonic room functions as an additional instrument: Triple Helix!