drawing and 2-channel sound installation, 6’57”
Voice: Ece Canlı

This wall-sized, hand-drawn piece presents a non-linear historical framework bringing together two distinct moments in the history of technical listening in Germany.

The first being the development of a musical instrument in early 1960s East Berlin, at the „Laboratory for problems at the acoustics/music interface“: the „Subharchord,“ a one-of-a-kind synthesizer which sought to explore other ways of thinking and playing music for the aesthetic, political, and ideological advancement of the DDR. Its design included a specially-designed Filterbank tuned to the „Mel-Scale,“ which approximates differences in tones to the ways in which human beings listen to them.

The second moment concerns the deployment of the so-called „automated dialect recognition software“, a one-of-a-kind machine learning solution in use by the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees since 2017 in cases of undocumented asylum seekers. This software, like most state-of-the art speech and dialect recognition systems, makes use of a digital Filterbank tuned to the Mel-Scale to derive acoustic and mathematical assets for further analysis and processing.

As a multi-layered and multi-sensorial look at the history of technical listening in Germany, CROSSOVER/CROSSTALK (Version) seeks to avoid the traps of linear causality. Rather, this map traces a pathway where each instance is an echo of past and future occurrences, in which technological development begets violent othering, but at the same time holds within the possibility of its radical uprooting.

• Sektion Section: Exhibition
• Programm Programme: Feelers, Sensors