Radio Art Zone # Jörg Köppl: zellen-silben (a dreaming machine)

Radio Art Zone is a 100-day radio art station by Radio ARA and Mobile Radio for the European Capital of Culture, Esch2022. It is broadcast in the south of Luxembourg by Radio ARA on 87.8 FM. It is also live-streamed for a worldwide audience and transmitted by a network of international partners.

zellen-sylben (a dreaming machine) is an algorithmic composition that has since been performed in various versions and languages ​​in Zurich, Dartington (UK), at the Bienal de São Paulo (Brazil) and at the Tsonami Festival in Valparaíso (Chile). The composition consists of a sound and a language level, both controlled by a non-hierarchical algorithm consisting of nine interacting cells. These control sound generators and samplers as well as the sentences, which are mostly composed of monosyllabic words.

The version in Valparaiso was already multilingual (German, English, Brazilian and Spanish). For the request from Radio Art Zone, multilingualism is increasingly becoming the focus, since the work is being performed in a bilingual region and Luxembourgish is in a process of emancipation from dialect to written language. The languages ​​in the new version have been expanded to include French and Luxembourgish.

Context: Orpheé
A young man sits in the car and listens to the radio. The car doesn't drive; it's in a garage. The young man listens feverishly to the sometimes absurd and sometimes poetic sentences and writes them down. It is Orpheus, the poet. The radio voice comes from another world. Untouched, she oracles to herself. I have a vague memory of Jean Cocteau's 1949 film Orpheé, but I liked this radio and it has become a silent placeholder for what I think of as radio art. The radio is not a transmitting medium here, but becomes an active subject itself. There is no face behind it, no person - the voice falls along with the device. The whole balances on the membrane to another world.

Like surreal dreams, the randomly generated sentences can serve as inspiration, as an oracle that opens up new perspectives. Dice machines for the names of God in Kabbalah and the random compositions of Cage (who worked with I Ching) share a desire to escape one's anticipation.

If someone talks insane, it is often not because he or she has not mastered the basic rules of logic, but because one's own needs cannot be formulated in the enclosure of the grammar accepted as meaningful, which is marked out by power.

Nine interacting cells
The controlling algorithm of the algorithmic composition is not hierarchically organized. It consists of nine interacting cells and behaves in its dramaturgy in an unpredictable yet musical way. The way in which these new cells interact is copied less from our brains and more from our society. On the one hand, the cells tend to move randomly up and down a frequency scale. On the other hand, they look for harmonic ratios (1:2, 1:3, 3:2, 3:4, 4:5, etc.) in other cells and sometimes adapt to them. The cells control sine wave generators as well as the playback speeds of nine samplers. Depending on their similarities with other cells, the dynamics of each cell ebb and flow. We can observe something similar with groups of people, who sometimes become very loud when they have synchronized. Through this principle, the samples are musically related to each other and a lively dynamic results.

cell-syllables

samples
As a guide for sine wave generators, sample players and as an impetus for word sequences, this principle produces an astonishingly organic soundscape. The tuned and clocked samples are adapted, revised and supplemented from version to version.

syllables
At certain intervals, the nine cells trigger impulses that trigger an archive of recorded monosyllabic words. The computer constantly creates imaginable sentences from the words that offer the listener – sometimes more and sometimes less – meaning. The archive is organized by voice and the sentences by strict verse forms (e.g. A - O - EI - AU). The monosyllabic nature of the words and the choice of words, which also includes slang and power words, create a rough and direct character. What they tell is reminiscent of oracles or dream stories. Touch the meaningful and tip back into surreal scenarios. An atmospheric meta-narrative develops through interactions between the different voices (languages), through changing verse forms and emotional charging.

text linked words

In contrast to the efforts of "artificial intelligence", which tries to create meaningful statements with machines, zellen-sylben (a dreaming machine) strives for the opposite: to disrupt our mental imprints productively.

zellen-sylben (a dreaming machine) is supported by pro helvetia, swiss arts council and Caroline Döhmer, Center for Luxembourgish Language.

Jörg Köppl lives and works as a freelance artist and composer in Zurich. He is interested in social synchronization processes, which he explores in mostly auditory settings. He designs experimental radio and sound projects that have been performed at festivals such as Ars Electronica, Artprospect (St. Petersburg) and Bienal de São Paulo, or he has directed them (Zurich and Cairo).

Jörg Köppl initiated and managed the Swiss National Science Foundation-funded research projects NOW1, which deals with the auditory perception of time, and NOW2, in which extremely long radio works were produced and broadcast. In 2011 Jörg Köppl founded the ensemble metanoia, which takes up current trends in composed, improvised and electronic music. In the ensemble's performative and partly participatory productions, the distribution of roles between composition-interpretation and performers-audience are questioned.