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Franz Pomassl

Sonax, 2011

Multi-channel audio work encoded for 47 channel The Morning Line Sound System

Commissioned by Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary

The skeletal metal spine of The Morning Line is occupied, transformed in its entire extent into a multilateral sine wave sonorium, and expanded—a walk-in virtual modular audio architecture that can be imagined as a model of perception, an oversized prototypical instrument, an experimental arrangement, or a sort of sono-radiator.

Sound is examined and explored in its various qualities: the frequency spectrum, the sonic resonance body as a physical and immaterial object, the perceptive faculty, the human body-ear at the focus of a panauditory stimulus-response mechanism, spatial and site-specific parameters, acoustic phenomena such as three-dimensional stationary waves, interferences, spatial clustering, refractions, diffractions, malfunctions, instabilities, discharges …

The sonic source material and components consist of sine waves—the atoms of tones, from which sounds and sonar waves of any kind can be assembled.

The compositional dynamisms and processes result from a polar interplay between cooperating (a) controlled oscillatory relays and self-generating device-immanent algorithms derived from complex mathematical structures and (b) static sound fields—exclusively as the visitor traverses (dependent on and determined by the position and movement dynamism of each individual visitor) the Sonax sound space.

Lives in Vienna and Lower Austria. Sound artist and curator, musician and composer in advanced electronic music, founder of the music label Laton, curator of TML Vienna.