This incredible dynamic sculpture created by Tim Otto Roth channels some of these feelings about the accelerating universe.
Adam Riess (Nobel Prize in Physics 2011) on the occasion of the premiere in Rome in 2014.
The Heaven's Carousel is the fruit of an extraordinary collaboration with the Hubble Space Telescope and is largely inspired by one of the central discoveries of the space based observatory: the accelerated expansion of the universe. The Heaven's Carousel, however, does not accelerate light but tones, which mix in space in a very special way to create a very unique sound universe. 36 illuminated sound sources circle suspended from a crane construction up to a height of 10 metres and with a span of up to 16 metres above the heads of the listeners. Due to that rotation, the pitches change continuously. The Doppler effect makes a tone sound higher when it flies towards the visitor and lower when the sound source moves away again. The clue of this sound accelerator is that the effect is cancelled out in the centre, but the more the visitor moves outwards, the more it comes to bear, creating an oscillating microtonal sound carpet. In his opening speech at the 2014 premiere in Rome, the Nobel Prize winner for physics Adam Riess emphasised that important astrophysical discoveries are thus musically echoed in the immersive light and sound sculpture.
Musicologist Rainer Nonnenmann is also fascinated on the occasion of the presentation of Cold Harmonies in St. Gertud in Cologne in 2021 and emphasises the special interaction of space and time: "Through pure mechanical rotation, we experience something like an amplitude and frequency modulation, which once again transforms the whole sound characteristic in a very peculiar way." Past presentations have demonstrated that this microtonal music captivates audiences of all ages.
A brief look back at past presentations
The Heaven's Carousel celebrated its premiere in March 2014 on the occasion of the fourth Hubble Space Telescope Conference in the Palm Garden of the Accademia dei Lincei in Rome. Since then, it has been presented in various venues, from Baltimore, USA, as part of the 25th anniversary of the Hubble Space Telescope, to Karlsruhe, Germany (Globale) and Offenburg, Germany - Roth's home district in the Black Forest. A special experience was the first indoor presentation in the church of St. Gertrud in Cologne, built by Gottfried Böhm. In cooperation with the SFB 956 of the University of Cologne, studying the conditions of star formation, Tim Otto Roth composed a fascinating acoustic journey through the cold gas and dust clouds of the Orion Nebula.
It was also a special experience for composer Tim Otto Roth to use the Heaven's Carousel symphonically as an orchestra: In the summer of 2021, the Humoreske on Mahler's 1st Symphony Wie ein Naturlaut (Like a natural sound), was created as a composition that sets the voices of two singers, as well as sounds of a distant trumpet and distant Alpine horn, in rotation on the Heaven's Carousel
Further presentations are in preparation and will be announced here.