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Interview With Tim Otto Roth Part II

Can you please describe your latest work, Heaven's Carousel, for the AWB community? The Heaven's Carousel creates a kind of accelerated sound universe translating light physics into acoustics. It consists of carousel of 12 arms pending at a height of 10 meters. On each arm hangs a double string of seven meters with three loudspeakers on three different levels playing sine waves. When the carousel starts to turn the sine wave frequencies change according to the visitor's position. This is due to the so called Doppler Effect: The pitch is higher if they approach and becomes lower when they disapproach – the same effect you know from an ambulance. The clue of the Heaven s Carousel is, that the visitors can move under the turning structure. So they discover that in the middle of the installation there is no Doppler Effect at all as the distance to the loudspeakers remains constant. This changes if you slowly move outwards. Then more and more oscillations do appear resulting in an oscillating microtonal sound tapestry. In fact the installation plays with the idea if we could hear what happens in the night sky: For our eyes the nocturnal sky is a very flat black and white affair. With the help of telescopes we discovered that the celestial objects reveal some colours. But as we have only three colour receptors we get a rather simplified idea of these colours as sum of simply three colour values. This would be very different if we could „hear“ the colours as our... Read More..