Sonic Revolutions
27.6.-13.7.2025, Kunstareal Munich
On 27 June 2025, the Heaven's Carousel landed on the lawn in front of the Alte Pinakothek for the Kunstareal festival in Munich - a brilliant start to the completely new production Sonic Revolutions. Every evening after sunset until 13 July, the 36 illuminated loudspeakers of the electro-acoustic music theatre will lift into the air. On the last three presentation days, a special Beethoven interpretation can be experienced with Joseph & Ludwig.
Timbre combinatorics As early as the 19th century, Hermann von Helmholtz used tuning forks to demonstrate that sounds and their characteristic timbre can be described as the sum of individual tones. The Heaven's Carouseluses the same principle of additive synthesis with the sine wave generators in each speaker. The combination of different tone sequences with different intensities creates complex timbre patterns. In contrast to a large number of instruments whose sound is based on a fundamental tone and a series of overtones in integer interval ratios, Heaven's Carousel is tonally freer and predominantly uses microtonal scales - a spectral music of the spheres of the 21st century.
Overtone compositions For Munich, Tim Otto Roth has expanded his microtonal combination repertoire by drawing on the ideas of Georg Simon Ohm. Based on Joseph Fourier's method of analysis, Ohm was the first to describe the composition of sounds as the sum of individual tones.
Beethoven meets Fourier Roth breaks down the sounds of instrumental music into partials and recomposes the individual overtones on the 36 loudspeakers. From 11-13 July, this will be demonstrated in Roth's recomposition of the 'GroßeFuge' op. 133, a string quartet by Beethoven that was composed at the same time as Fourier's discovery in the 1820s.
Kollaboration Sonic Revolutions are collaboration between the TUM Center for Culture and Arts, the TUM Professorship of Audio Information Processing and the artist and composer Tim Otto Roth.
Special Thanks Sonic Revolutions are supported by the TUM University Foundation, the Aventis Foundation and the Kulturstiftung der Stadtsparkasse München.
Venue:
Lawn south of the Alte Pinakothek
Barerstraße 27
80333 München