How does sound affect our relationship with an environment? What can sound reveal about the world around us?
On Thursday night, Interface, EMPAC’s monthly interview series, shed a spotlight on Felix Deufel, sound engineer, artist, composer, sound ecologist, and founding member of ZiMMT (Centre for Media Art, Music, and Technology) in Leipzig. Across from him sat RPI composer and technologist Matthew Goodheart, and together they discussed acoustics, composition, and Deufel’s piece Lost in Liquid Noise. Lost in Liquid Noise is a part of Deufel’s catalog of “sound ecology” pieces. Through the use of natural soundscapes, Deufel seeks to capture the environmental changes happening throughout the world in a way that might otherwise have gone unnoticed.
The session began with a preview of Deufel’s piece, which was to play the following Saturday at EMPAC. To create his piece, Deufel accompanied a group of ecologists to Greenland's ice sheets to set up shop. Through a deep fissure in the ice, he lowered various microphones to capture the sounds of the ever-changing Arctic in an attempt to audibly portray the 600 million tons of ice the sheet loses every day.
The piece began with what sounded like softly pelting rain, but built as the sheets themselves, which are constantly in motion, began to envelop the soft trickle in a thunderous, echoing bass. The highs and lows kept crashing, eventually punctuated by the howls of distant whales, like sirens from below the depths. As the crescendo reached its apotheosis, the sound seemed to be imbued with what can almost be described as a physicality as it completely encompassed the listener.
Deufel began the interview by describing his journey with music over his years as a sound engineer and artist. A drummer from a young age, Deufel spent most of his life saturated with music. At a certain point, however, Deufel began to appreciate the sounds of the world around him more, whether that be the sonorous hum of a metro line against the always vibrant city soundscape, or the beautiful call of birds in the country. To Deufel, all music is spatial. It is from this idea of soundscapes that Deufel began his endeavors in sound ecology.
Deufel now works diligently as an artist and a master in acoustics and sound design. In tandem with new artistic endeavors and rigorously tailoring his tightly woven tapestries of three-dimensional sound to fit new auditoriums, Deufel finds time to further the field of spatial sound with his work with the ZiMMT and through his new software Grapes 3D, an audio control software designed to create a more intuitive flow for spatial composition. To cap off the interview, Deufel reflected on his excitement for the future of spatial sound performances and future projects in which he seeks to tone-shift seismic waves.
Interface brings together artists, engineers, scientists, and designers, exploring the creative process through hour-long interviews. Interface takes place on the second Thursday each month. The next performance will be Cognitive Science, with Heidi Latsky and Brett Fajen, on November 12th.
