About The Project

text2field-recordings
A sound art project by Wolfgang Dorninger

texts are played on a keyboard: every letter triggers a specific fieldrecording that was previously filed in a thematic sound container. the text is the composition. the performer controls only the length and velocity.

The sound intervention text2field-recording is based on field recordings gathered by the artits an/or workshop participants during a longer stay on a location, focussing on nature and technology. The recordings will be gathered in ‘Sound Containers’, unveiling the sound patterns and –systems of the cities/environments. The citizens or environmentalists will be invited to provide short texts describing “the sound of their city/environment“. These texts will be transformed through a self-written software, to become a composition based on the previously created ‘Sound Containers’.

How it started

I work with field-recordings since 30 years when I bought my first Sony Professional Walkman. Over the years I created many compositions with field-recordings which led into a controversy: Do I still work with fieldrecordings or is it just a kind of strange form of sound synthesis? I have to explain that sometimes I used very short segments to loop them to create layers of tuned sonorities. I lost the aleatoric of the recording-situation completly and so I had to find new ways of composition and presentation.

"text2field-recordings" uses text as a method to perform music. The text comes by the audience or project related sources and will be projected on a screen as played. Active characters are highlighted others are grey. So the audience can follow the text to sound transformation. The fieldrecordings are collected by the artist on site or from his archive. There are several sound-containers available - the audience can choose - with more than 60 field-recordings in each of them. As the text comes from the audience the text defines the composing process, the performer only decides how long and loud the fieldrecordings are played. This close interaction between audience and performer and the audience itself as a text-contributor creates a very close (intimate) realtime-interaction within a music performance. The text and the liverecordings will be collected on a project page of the artist to create a social text-/soundcomposition.

May 2012: First tries with Arduino, PD and other software. No results. Restart with Usine as host. Programmer Thomas Gangl programmed the plugin "text2field-recordings" end of 2012/early 2013. First test performances April 2013. Premiere at plattform: #11[no budget] Tübingen, Germany (May 31st).

The plugin „text2field-recordings“ was supported by bm:uuk, Linz Kultur and the Kulturabteilung Land OÖ im Jahr 2012. "text2field-recordings" creates a realtime text, sound and live action role play.

Artist Biography: Wolfgang “Fadi” Dorninger (*1960) is an Austrian musician, producer and artist. He composes music for movies, theater, modern dance and sound installations.Sound is the main focus of his artistic work, be it as musician (DORN, Wipe Out, …), label-owner (base), sound artist or lecturer at the Art University of Linz. Two opposite worlds of sound occupy his work: Dorninger oscillates between musique concrète and digital sound-production in a range spanning sound installations, multi-media performances, music for theater and techno.

Links:
Homepage: https://dorninger.servus.at/
Label: http://www.base.at
Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/text2field-recordings
Vimeo: http://vimeo.com/dorninger

You can reach Dorninger
via mail: dorninger[at]base[dot]at
phone: ++43(0)677-63771214
homepage: http://dorninger.servus.at

24hours_t2f-rec_part-03_1h from Wolfgang Dorninger on Vimeo.