Ludger Brümmer - The Gates Of H [1993] @SebastianArsAcoustica
Ludger Brümmer - The Gates Of H [1993]  @SebastianArsAcoustica
Uploaded April 2014 | Updated September 2026, 2 days ago
The Gates of H." is generated out of a 120 second sample containing a folk song sung by a female choir. Algorithmical structures are applied to the sound by changing pitch and time-position to portions of the source sample so that a granular-synthesis structure is generated. The idea of modifying a sound image in this way is to apply a new structure to an already existing image and place it like a mask above the sound, while this mask is in time and pitch instead of space and colour.

The result is a sound which exposes either the algorithmical structure while the sound image becomes unrecognisable or the sound image when the duration of the grains is long enough and the pitch is not extremly modified. I was especially interested into the transient states of the grain, where dependant of the lenght of the sounds timbre or voices become audible: The listener seem to hear events which create an association to a human voice but it does not really sound like a voice. This keeps the perceptive process of the listener toggling between the context and the content of the sound grains.

The tension between the source sample and the algorithms gives a lyrical or a dramatical effect to the resulting sound while the recognisable voice images seem to create surrealistic scenes with strong associative power. Since I passed the Rodin Sculpture la porte de l' enfer "the gates of hell" nearly every day on my way to the studio in Stanford a connection between the bronce plastic and my piece was unconciously drawn.

The sound processing techniques are restricted to sampling-rate conversion and pointer operations. The piece was created exclusively digitaly on the NeXT-Net of the CCRMA using Bill Schottstaedt's "Common Lisp Music" synthesis language, Rick Taube's "Common Music" score/composition language and Paul Lanski's "RT" mixing program. It won the "Prix Ars Electronica" 1994. The piece was made possible by a scholarship of the DAAD by the German Government.

Ludger Bruemmer lives in Essen, Germany and teaches currently at the electronic studio of the Folkwang Hochschule Essen and at the Studio of the Technical University of Berlin. He holds a masters in psychology/sociology and a masters in composition, which he studied with Nicolaus A. Huber and Dirk Reith in Essen. Mr Bruemmer worked with the Nederlands Danstheater in Den Haag and choreographer Susanne Linke and the Susanne Linke group for 2 internatiolly performed dance productions. He also worked with several solo dancers for solo productions. For his works he was awarded with the Busoni Award/Berlin, the Folkwang Award/Essen and the WDR broadcasting Award/Cologne, "Prix Ars Electronica" Austria and got a honorable mentioning at the Luigi Russolo Award/Italy and Stockholm Award 1995. His pieces are performed in South America, US, Europe, Asia and Mid East.


Video created with Sonic Visualizer and Vokoscreen on an OpenSUSE 12.3 Linux System.
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Ludger Brümmer - The Gates Of H [1993]

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