Auditerium

The meaning of word Auditérium

Auditerium: noun, proper noun, a name of an event; Meaning: covered with artificial grass, a scenery and experience park equipped with special sound technology, first time in Hungary; usage: bounded to time and space, organized between 13th and 20th August within the framework of Concert of Joy, in front of Parliament on Kossuth square; regardless age or sex; visited by men, women and children, they can walk on designed tracks, listening, searching for the musical experience most interesting to them or relaxing in the park sound-free areas, contemplating.

The concept

On the third week of August, current year, in front of the Parliament, on the Kossuth square an extraordinary public park and sound design installation is waiting for the visitors, amended with an astounding merger of amazing high technology creating an irregular open-air area in the heart of the city.

The Audio Spot Light ® technology is a world sensation, which until now sounded mainly human sounds. It is the first time when that the strange equipment turn from simple speakers into musical instruments due to a special acoustic and technical composition.

Sound director of Auditerium, Ivan Solano, marks several international production in the fields of theatre, cinema, video installation as well as new multimedia art. It is the first time that he works together with Barbara Szöllőssy and Zoltan Pyka, designers of Urban Landscape Group, who designed the public space concept of the event. www.vtcs.hu

The Auditerium is an unusual urban garden, planted with sounds and non-sounds (silence).

A garden where nothing is what it seems, nothing behaves as we used to it in a natural environment. Silence broods over the scene yet it is “loud” with music.

Walking on the glade of Auditerium, one can find a wonderful melody just as a special flower or a never seen before mushroom in the forest

A piano, a jazz trio, a wheel fiddle, the sea, the wind, a symphonic orchestra, the rain, a river or a Bach-suit all of them creates a marvelous space around the garden. Here, in the beating heart of the city, thus creating for all of us the opportunity of walking around deeply in our thoughts, to sit down, read, chat, dream, now to find a melody bringing up remembrance, then leaning back and enjoying the silence.

Sound gardening

The essence of emotion provoking arrangement of music, sounds and silence is the time. The exact determination is not easy, still in general there is concordance that music is a conscious procedure of sound arrangement.

Music is a form of art expression, in general, a conscious order of sounds and non-sounds (silence) varied in time, which does not command you to a specific act however provokes passion and evokes thought and emotions.

It depends solely on observer viewpoint what he or she considers music or noise. These two definitions do not exclude each other: under certain circumstances music can be noise, another time we can interprete noise, in its everyday meaning, as music. It is hard to define, when and to which group can the sounds of nature or even different forms of human speech be categorized.

Music has many scopes, where it does not loose any of its attributes but associates with other similar forms of expression.

It even happens, as in case of Auditerium, that music is exploited, asked for assistance by other fields of art, that it emphasizes one of its characteristic while pushing others aside and together with the associate field take effect on receiver.

In Auditerium the observer’s point of view is decisive. Here the observer is not passive as at home in front of the TV or the player or even in a concert hall. Here the observer can decide how would he want to play with music, if he is in a mood for searching sounds and find emotions, passion, thought, memories evoked by sounds and even if he wants to use the Audeterium freely, for his own pleasure thus reshaping it into its own form.

In this place the music does not fill up the entire 4000 square meters, does not reign upon all of the people on square, does not sound from every speckle of air.

Iván Solano 2007

Technical details

The human ear

The human ear is a marvelous organ. If healthy it can distinguish up to 400,000 different sounds. Hearing is the most direct connection to the outside world, the most important link between human and its environment. All of the acoustic signals refers to movement of air. Sound waves are transmitted by the air. The pinna is constructed on a way that it receives sound waves on optimal way and transmits them through ear canal to middle ear. Sound waves hit the eardrum thus vibrate it. The ossicles pass the vibration to cochlea. In cochlea there are extremely sensitive hair cells which transform the mechanic energy of vibrating air molecules into electric energy. This energy in form of nerve impulses transferred to brain trough auditory nerve.

Speaker

Speaker is every instrument that capable of transforming the electric siglans into music. The most widespread type is the so called “home speaker” which operates in a frequency range that human able to here (30Hz – 20 kHz) – we sense this as sound. These general speakert move the air between the membrane and our ear. In this case sounds move in the air like waves on the water.

Frequency, sound and ultrasonic sound

Sound is a longitudinal pressure surge. Its propagation velocity in the air is 330 m/s, in water and solid environment depending on material can even reach 1500 m/s. We hear sounds mainly with our ears although our skin and cranial bones also participate in perception. Roughly 20 Hz is the lowest and 20.000 Hz is the highest sound that we, humans, are able to hear.

Vibrations lower than 20Hz are called infrasonic above 20.000 Hz ultrasonic. Although we can not hear the ultrasonic sounds we can feel them.

Audibility

Audibility is the level of intensity and strength of sound our ear can perceive. It represent strong ties of sound as vibration flows and its amplitude and it depends on the consistency of sound, its spectrum and i case of musical sound its height.

This connection is extremely subjective and can be determined only by laboratorial methods.

Perception of sound strongly depends on its frequency. In case of a clear, sinusoidal sound sensibility of human ear constantly increases from the lowest frequency it can hear to 1000-5000 Hz afterwards it decreases again. This is true about the threshold of audibility, that represents the minimal intensity sounds we are even able to hear and which pressure surge level we perceive equally loud on different frequencies.

Iván Solano