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The small broadcasting room at the Haus des Rundfunks has never seen anything like this before. One conductor and his orchestra. 24 musicians who, though playing together, are isolated from one another.
In the concert hall, you normally sit there and the music comes from the front and passes over your head. For the composer it's like standing in front of a painting, to keep to this metaphor for the moment. And now we are moving into the painting.
The challenge in composing this piece was always to think how can I create an interesting and yet different impression at every point throughout the entire field of stelae?
And the unique concert took place on 9 May 2008, at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.
24 musicians performed Vor dem Verstummen by Harald Weiss.
The musicians stood within a 100 metre radius at various points within the field of stelae that makes up the Holocaust Memorial. This means that the sound experience was different for each listener depending on his or her location.
It was a truly fascinating experience. But seeing how much effort and cost is involved in such a production, there is just no way to perform it every year. Given the wonders of modern technology, like smartphones, we came up with the idea of offering listeners a virtual concert.
It's a special smartphone app that uses geodata to map where the instruments were when they were actually played and where the app user is at the moment.
Listeners can use the app to walk through the field of stelae and virtually experience the original concert.
The app will be very easy to use. You just download it, at the memorial or at home, press play and the app will locate you and know whether you are on the memorial site and if so, at what point.
It will then reproduce the concert as you move through the field of stelae.
The Berlin-Brandenburg Broadcasting Company provided the technology, expertise and broadcasting room to have each instrument recorded separately.
This allows the app to adjust the volume of each instrument depending on where the listener is standing.
But it wasn't at all easy to create 24 individual soundscapes while all the instruments were playing in the same studio at the same time.
It took us a few hours, but we managed to collect all of the sound panels from every room in the building and set up what looked like a large office space with each musician placed in his or her own little cubicle.
This is not the type of working environment that orchestra musicians are used to, but it worked perfectly.
The partition walls made it possible to record each instrument on its own while still allowing the musicians to hear one another and see the conductor.
It makes for more direct contact and of course makes it easier during the recording to develop the music together and achieve the maximum effect, particularly here in a broadcasting room like this one.
Everyone involved in the project succeeded in creating a new form of music that is, technologically speaking, unique in the world.
The app should be ready by spring and will give everyone the chance to virtually relive the listening experience of 2008.