Hearing Varèse's Poème Électronique Inside A
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Proceedings of ICAD 05-Eleventh Meeting of the International Conference on Auditory Display, Limerick, Ireland, July 6-9, 2005 HEARING VARÈSE’S POÈME ÉLECTRONIQUE INSIDE A VIRTUAL PHILIPS PAVILION Vit Zouhar∗, Rainer Lorenz†, Thomas Musil‡, Johannes Zmölnig‡, Robert Höldrich‡ ∗ Department of Music, Palacký University, Olomouc, Czech Republic. [email protected] † Institut für neue Musik und Medien, Hochschule für Musik, Karlsruhe, Germany. [email protected] ‡ Institute of Electronic Music and Acoustics, University of Music and Dramatic Arts, Graz, Austria. {musil,zmoelnig,hoeldrich}@iem.at ABSTRACT realized by designing an amplifier that would "span" a group of speakers, iterating through them five speakers at a time... This was Topic of this paper is an interactive sound reproduction system to one of the most elaborate site-specific projects ever created. The create virtual sonic environments to visual spaces, called Virtual sound was written for the space and vice versa.”[1] Audio Reproduction Engine for Spatial Environments (VARESE). Using VARESE, Edgard Varèse’s Poème électronique was recre- Eight minutes in duration, its performance is followed by an ated within a simulated Philips Pavilion (a construction originally electro-acoustic composition: Concrete PH by Xenakis, ’PH’ be- designed by Le Corbusier and Iannis Xenakis for the 1958 World ing an abbreviation for “paraboloid hyperboloid”. Fair in Brussels, then dismantled after its closing). The system Due to being not a permanent construction, the Philips Pavil- draws on binaural sound reproduction principles including spatial- ion was dismantled in January 1959; therefore the physical space ization techniques based on the Ambisonics theory. Using head- for an authentic experience of the multimedia work ceased to ex- phones and a head-tracker, listeners can enjoy a preset reproduc- ist. Only a two-channel version of Varèse’s Poème électronique tion of the Poème électronique from their individual standpoint as had been recorded and was subsequently published. Today, few they freely move through the virtual architectural space. While drawings, sketches and other materials remain that illustrate - with VARESE was developed specifically for its use in reconstructing limited degree of exactitude - principles of the original spatializa- Poemè électronique, it is flexible enough to function as a standard tion [1][2]. interpreter of sounds and visual objects, enabling users to design their own spatializations. The system runs on a standard laptop PC with a modern graphics card, using Miller Puckette’s computer music software Pure Data (pd), plus an extended graphic interface (running equally on Linux and MS Windows operating systems 1.1. Reconstructions and featuring a maximum of five sound sources using Ambison- ics). Although there were attempts to rebuild a copy of the original pavilion in Eindhoven, not one project was realized in the end [3]. Various other performance reconstruction projects were un- 1. HISTORICAL BACKGROUND AND CONCEPTION dertaken over the last twenty years. The common aim of these From 1956 until 1958, the star architect Le Corbusier, composers projects was to recreate the original sound spatialization as closely Iannis Xenakis and Edgard Varèse and film director Philippe Agos- as possible and to combine this with the film and colour-projections tini co-authored a Gesamtkunstwerk commissioned by Philips for of the 1958 performances. The first such project was presented by the World Fair EXPO 1958 in Brussels. An important part of the the Asko Ensemble and Bart Lootsma on 11th of February 1984, work was a spatialized reproduction of the electro-acoustic work in Eindhoven, Netherlands. Taking place in the Grote Zaal Au- by Varèse and multiple projections of a film by Agostini. Marc ditorium Technische Hogeschool, with 72 loudspeakers situated Tribe describes the construction: on large panels, this performance matched the setup in the Philips Pavilion. Sound Paths, as the performance was called, was con- “The audio component was to be a demonstration of the ef- trolled by computer via Midi data. fects of stereophony, reverberation, and echo. Sounds were meant to appear to move in space around the audience. Varèse was fi- Another reconstruction was realized on the Musica Sczienzia nally able to realize the movement of sounds through space from festival, on the 1st and 2nd of June in 1999, at Giardini della Filar- different directions. The audio tape consisted of three tracks, to monica in Rome. It resulted from a collaboration between the ar- give the illusion of three simultaneous sound sources that could be chitect and musician Valerio Casali and the artistic-scientific team moving around the space. There were 350 speakers in 20 amplifier of the Centro Ricerche Musicali. This production also featured a combinations (six amplifiers assigned to track one, eight assigned film projection. Kees Tazelaar (from the Studio of Sonology in The to track two, and six assigned to track three). A fifteen track con- Hague) created a reconstruction at the Musica Viva 2004 festival trol tape sent signals to the projectors and amplifiers. A series of in Lisboa. Tazelaar’s setup included 34 sound sources. Tazelaar "sound routes" were conceived so that the sounds could appear used digitizations of all original production tapes, which had been to move through the space from different directions. These were made by de Bruin and Varèse in Eindhoven. ICAD05-1 Proceedings of ICAD 05-Eleventh Meeting of the International Conference on Auditory Display, Limerick, Ireland, July 6-9, 2005 1.2. Virtual reproduction plates for the reconstruction. Additionally, research in various archives supplemented these materials, providing additional pho- Presently, our team at the Institute of Electronic Music and Acous- tos, diagrams, and other documents. The result is a computer aided tics Graz has been experimenting with the 3D simulation of Varèse’s 3-D simulation of the building, upon which the present real-time Poème électronique since 2002. It was a logical next step in the ap- visualisation is built. plication of spatialized and binaural systems developed at the IEM In contrast with the already published, three-dimensional re- (Institute of Electronic Music and Acoustics) during the past few constructions of the Philips Pavilion that are limited to a represen- years[4]. The essential sources in use are the four digitized tapes tation of the building as a mapping of the twisted and bent plane of the original production tapes collection (3 mono, 1 stereo). We surfaces (hyperbolic paraboloids) of the outward appearance, the have kindly gained access to these sound materials (which were goal of the present emulation was to reconstruct the inner chamber made by Tazelaar) with the permission of Konrad Boehmer, head of the pavilion, in accordance with the original performance of the of the Institute of Sonology at the Royal Conservatory in The Poème électronique being held in the pavilion’s interior. Hague. Other source materials were the figure published by de There were additional constructions, struts and supports, that Bruyn[5], a sketch of the sound paths by Xenakis[1] and various were not visible in any available documentation, and this created additional letters, diagrams and papers.[6] a problem; these important construction elements can only be as- The first spatialization of Poème électronique in the IEM CUBE certained and incorporated into the structure of the building by concert space at the IEM Graz took place in 2003. The IEM means of photographs. Arising from this problem is the placing of CUBE’s reproducing sound equipment can generate an unlimited additional walls and entrance and exit doors. Figure 2 shows all number of virtual sound sources. It meant that approximations of supports, struts, and pillars with the additional walls in the entry the original sound paths could be positioned into space, involving area as well as the exit. Midi and the software Samplitude and pd (see Fig.1). Figure 2: Construction elements of the Philips Pavilion Another difficulty arose from the fact that no illustration of the exit area of the inner chamber exists. The photo in figure 3 shows a door inside the pavilion. One can see here how the sculpture is placed on the roof over the door near the entrance in the audito- rium. However, this photo was mistakenly published in reverse, Figure 1: Layout and vertical section of the sound paths in the IEM and this perspective could lead to the assumption that the picture CUBE deals with the exit, which is not the case. From this, the conception of the system VARESE developed. In 2004, the graphics model of the Philips Pavilion and the audio- engine were implemented, leading to the current version as demon- strated in this paper. Now, a listener or interpreter can modify existing and record new paths of sound sources via pd, using a graphical interface. 2. VISUALISATION OF THE PHILIPS-PAVILION The basis for the visualisation of the Philips Pavilion at the ’58 Figure 3: Reversed and corrected photo of the entrance World-exposition in Brussels is a virtual reconstruction of the build- ing that was made in a 3D-animation program. Because of in- complete original source material, schematic drawings and pho- Plans of the technical facilities of the pavilion allowed for fur- tographs which had appeared in several publications served as tem- ther conclusions to be made regarding the physical form of the ICAD05-2 Proceedings of ICAD 05-Eleventh Meeting of the International Conference on Auditory Display, Limerick, Ireland, July 6-9, 2005 inside. Combined with existing photographs of the inner chamber, The main idea is to compare a sound field created by several this made the present reconstruction possible. The construction of sound sources with the sound field created by the reproduction sys- the wall surfaces above the exit remains speculative, as well as the tem and equate them.[8][9] exact placement of all loudspeakers (most of which are recognis- The Ambisonic theory takes only plane waves into account.