So hello everyone. My name is Til Bovaman and I'm very happy to have been invited by the tangible music lab so thank you for that. It's wonderful to be in Linz and Martin already started to introduce me but because it's quite likely that you do not know me so well, I'll tell you a little bit about myself first, and then I go into a little bit more detail of the sounding infrastructure presentation. So as Martin mentioned, one part of my life I dedicate to teaching sound art at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater in München, where I run this two-year master's program. So if you know anyone around that place, tell them that they are more than happy to apply for the master's program. Another part of my life, and together with Konstantin Engelmann, I run Plonk, which is a small company dedicated to the development of contact microphones and general assistance for artists that want to realize interactive artworks. And additionally, I'm an independent sound artist working mainly with live coding and field recordings. Finally, I'm conducting artistic research related to sound and interaction. And this is the webpage in case you're curious. So with this out of the way, let's get to the main part of my talk relating sound making with its infrastructure. I will first focus on the term infrastructure before connecting it to the term sound, that being a sound, now, we are here at Tangible Music Lab, you may already be quite familiar with. Linguistically, infrastructure is a combination of the prefix infra, meaning below, beneath, under, and the word structure, meaning to arrange, to build, to construct. The word infrastructure thus denotes an arrangement below, beneath of something and under construction the framework of our society. In 2009 Falmer thus described infrastructure as the physical components of interrelated systems providing commodities and services essential to enable, sustain or enhance societal living conditions. Let's have a look at some examples of such infrastructure. Landlines, mobile phones and data networks such as the internet form a prominent example of infrastructure that of communications. Water distribution and management is another prominent example such as the power plants, overland lines and transformers that make up our electricity network. Supply of food and other goods is an essential part of our infrastructure network, completed by waste collection, landfills and recycling centers that form waste management. All this and more needs to be transported, which requires roads, railways, airports, but also public transport systems. We have housing, that means all kinds of buildings, tenement, housing, schools, universities, EDC, is yet another part of infrastructure. My final example here is healthcare, formed by hospitals and pharmacies, but also an immaterial infrastructural element, the medical service itself. Drawing from these examples and on Fulmer, who, as you might remember from earlier, stated that infrastructure is a complex framework intended to support society living conditions, it is possible to derive plenty characteristics of infrastructure in itself. In this talk, I will focus on three of those. In this talk I will focus on three of those. Infrastructure is a complex system made up of various entities that interlink with each other. Extending Falmer's description that only mentions hardware, I want to extend it to explicitly include immaterial entities such as the aforementioned medical service, but also certain computer programs, protocols and standards like those provided by the ISO. Furthermore, I would like to differentiate between the term infrastructure as a whole and infrastructural elements, its individual parts. Infrastructural elements are thus the entities that facilitate the continuous and unobtrusive supply of goods and services for society. They as a whole form its infrastructure. Another characteristic of infrastructure and its elements is that they do not exist on their own. They are always the support of something. Identifying something as an infrastructural element is highly subjective. In order to recognize an artifact as part of infrastructure, one needs to recognize the context in which it is used and the society that uses it. For example, electricity is not provided for its own sake, but to power devices, machines and systems that serve a society. Water is provided to quench thirst, to wash, to grow food. A telecommunication framework is provided to enable communication between people, machines and systems within a society. This contextuality of infrastructure leads to questions such as how is infrastructure perceived from within its context? What does it mean to be part of a society that uses a specific infrastructure? How does infrastructure and its elements influence the society and its members? Not being part of a society, possibly not even being aware that the society exists in the first place, means that an infrastructural element of that society is not necessarily recognized as such. What is it then? How do bystanders perceive infrastructural elements they do not participate in? Do they recognize it as infrastructure? How do they relate to it? How does it affect their lives? Since we are unable to remove ourselves from our own context, we can only speculate about the answers to these questions regarding our own society. However, we can observe and document the infrastructure of other societies, thus gaining glimpses into the contextuality of their respective infrastructure. Ants are a good example of a society that builds infrastructure to support its members and the society as a whole. They build complex nests, tunnels, and chambers to provide shelter, food storage, and nurseries for the young. This is how an art nest built into a tree trunk sounds like, hopefully. There we are.. And this is how another ant nest, this time built as a hill covering a fallen pine tree trunk sounds like. Aplausos. Another example of non-human infrastructure is the beehive. Curiously enough, bees and humans have a strange relationship with each other in terms of infrastructure. Humans have been exploiting bees for their honey and wax for countless generations of both species. This has led to the development of various types of beehive structures built by humans to allow humans to harvest honey and wax without destroying the hive itself. Whose infrastructure is it then? SILENT PRAISE Lyset er i dag. Let us get to the third characteristic of infrastructure and its elements. We humans are limited in our cognitive capacity. We cannot pay attention to everything that surrounds us. Therefore, we chunk information, a process by which small individual pieces of a set of information are bound together to create a meaningful whole. One could say that we are compressing information into manageable units, naturally abstracting from the details that are not relevant to us. Relevance, however, is subjective and depends on the context in which we find ourselves. Things that are functioning without our interference tend to fade into the background. Since infrastructure is designed to unobtrusively provide us with the necessary support, it easily becomes imperceptible to us in our daily lives. One may argue that this is a good thing. It allows us to focus on our tasks without being distracted by the infrastructure itself. There is one obvious exception to this rule. When infrastructure malfunctions, it becomes very noticeable in its ability to disrupt our daily routines. In a Heideggerian sense, it becomes forehunden, present at hand hand and we are forced to deal with it. One may also argue that the imperceptibility of infrastructure is a bad thing. For one, it easily supports a certain disconnection from the systems that support our lives, leading to a lack of awareness and understanding of the consequences of the operation. It gets even more complicated when we consider long-term side effects of infrastructure that we hardly perceive at all. Such long-term accumulations of effects or imperceptible infrastructure has resulted in complex, wicked problems such as climate change that we as a society seem not to be able to find manageable solutions for. A lack of understanding, therefore, results in a lack of accountability for the people and organizations and ultimately the society that maintains and operates the infrastructure. We are visual creatures. We tend to focus on the visual aspects of our world. Sound, however, in its ephemeral nature offers a unique perspective on infrastructure that is often overlooked. Sound can reveal the hidden workings of infrastructure, the processes and interactions, the rhythms and patterns of those systems that support us. Let us therefore spend some time listening to infrastructure and its elements, if only to initially become more aware of its presence, more insights might be possible. The Kilpysjärvi Biological Station is a research station located right next to the three-nation border between Finland, Sweden and Norway. It is operated by the University of Helsinki and serves as a base for biological and ecological research in the Arctic Circle. Next to sleeping and working facilities for visiting researchers as well as regular staff, it features a bio lab, a library and a kitchen that provides food for the researchers and staff.このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、このように、 Norske Norske The Vågstavnsfjell Kjell Ragnarok We here in this room are familiar with sound as a medium of communication, expression and creativity. Sound as a modality is a powerful tool for understanding and exploring the world around us. Interestingly, the word sound has a second meaning that is closely related to our topic. To sound something may also mean to examine it, to try it out, to test it, to probe it. In a more general sense, it means to explore or investigate something in order to gain a better understanding. explore or investigate something in order to gain a better understanding. What kind of probing or testing can we do with sound with respect to infrastructure? The least intrusive method to approach infrastructure sonically is simply to listen to it. Long-form, concentrated listening can reveal hidden processes, interactions and patterns. It takes time, but time is always needed to contemplate and possibly understand. Field recording techniques enhance our senses and allow us to record sounds for later, whereas non-standard recording equipment allows us to listen to electromagnetic fields, structure-borne vibrations, or other physical phenomena that are not directly audible to the human ear. Particularly public venues require air conditioning to maintain a comfortable environment for both performers and audiences. The accepted challenge is to do so without disturbing the sound quality of the performance by introducing noise from the ventilation system. I had the opportunity to record such a ventilation system at the future art lab of the MDV in Vienna, which is designed to be as quiet as possible while still providing sufficient air flow for the space. It does so by incredibly large ventilation ducts that are designed to minimize turbulence and noise. Norske Norske The The Norske Norske Next to airflow, heating is another important aspect of public venues. In the air flow, heating is another important aspect of public venues. In European countries, heating is often provided from a district heating system that is supplied by a central power plant. We will now listen to the heating regulation at the same future art lab at MDB, housed in the same basement as the ventilation system we just heard The The The The The Nettopp, Rengar computing often plays a crucial art in the creation of electronic music and sound art, especially with generative and electronic pieces. Computing is the process of utilizing an automata to perform calculations, process data, and execute algorithms. It is often supported by a complex infrastructure of servers, data centers, and cloud computing services that provide the necessary computational power and storage capacities. In 2025, I had the opportunity to record the AI server infrastructure at the Musikhochschule Trossingen. It is used for their master's program in Künstliche Intelligenz in der Musik, Artificial Intelligence in Music. program Künstliche Intelligenz in der Musik, Artificial Intelligence in Music, and is by the way although on campus only accessed remotely by its users. Norske Nearly all of the above relies on electricity. More often than not, it is supplied via mains power and hence through cables spanning over and under land and sea. My listening example for this is a recording I collected at MUMUTH, the House of Music and Music Theatre, which has variable acoustics to facilitate the presentation of acoustics as well as electronic multi-channel compositions. Røde Røde Contemporary music practice would not exist without electronic means of communication and data transfer. Its infrastructural elements being cables and radio masts often sharing sonic features with electrical counterparts. In 2024 I visited the small island Ahvensaari in the Finnish archipelago, which is home to a radio mast and people as well, used for mobile communication, the mast. The sounds I recorded there are the mechanical vibrations of the mast swaying in the wind, as well as electromagnetic fields generated by the emitted radio signals and technical equipment accompanying the mast. The I'm going to take a walk around the city. Norske Råd I'm going to take a short break and then head back to the hotel. The The So While some infrastructural elements make sound by themselves, others may require a stimulus to make them sound. Often a simple feedback loop is sufficient to make them sound without too much interference and crosstalk from external sources. It turns out that these two methods, observation and feedback, seem to be sufficient to explore and document a broad variety of sonic qualities of infrastructural elements. As a case study, let us now identify some infrastructural elements of sound art and how they relate to sound making practices. practices. My first audio interface was a Moto Traveler. That's a Firewire-based interface, which I bought somewhere around 2006. Making it sound by itself rather than use it as a means to create sound, I devised two feedback systems that allow me to listen to some specifics of its inner workings. The next one is a four-channel feedback system in which one audio output is fed into an audio input whose signal is in turn rendered through the next audio output, and so on. All in all, the signal is fed back into itself four times with analog-digital and digital-analog conversions and corresponding gain stages in between. Writing the gain stages results in a sound that is surprisingly digital in character. There are also some impulses that are played into it. I'm going to make a The The second feedback system incorporates the LED meters for the four input channels of the traveler. Pickup coils are placed around the LED meters, generating a signal that is fed into the analog inputs of the traveler interface. Thank you. Sound diffusion, that means the process of turning electrical signals into air pressure waves, is another crucial part of our infrastructure. As a contrasting example, I chose to feature the built-in speakers of my Apple MacBook Pro feeding back through the internal microphone. Rather complex internal gain staging and signal processing on hardware and operating system that is very specific to this particular model.. I'm going to make a Thank you. Last but not least, in the category of feedback as a method to listen to infrastructure, we examine virtual tools and codecs that are used to process and generate sound. I chose two examples to illustrate this point. Audio codecs representing technology that is mostly serving as a utility for storage and VST audio filters representing creative tools. Codec is a portmanteau of coder-decoder. decoder and in analog to I am sitting in a room by Alvin Glossier the repetition of encoding and decoding an audio signal with a codec gradually replaces the original signal with artifacts that are characteristic to the codec itself. For demonstration purposes I chose the ubiquitousitous MP3 codec in its lame implementation on the prototypical Amenbrake sample to illustrate this process. With all these examples, we are already quite close to artistic interventions. That means here the interpretation and narration of and with infrastructural elements. Let me, therefore, briefly give you an overview on the term sound art, which is where I'm coming from here. Yeah. Tate Modern defines sound art as art which uses both sound, sound both as its medium, so what it is made out of, and as its subject, what it is about. Whereas Schultz in 2002 described it as an art form in which sound has become material within the context of an expanded concept of sculpture, for the most part works that are space shaping and space claiming in nature. Over the last year or so, I ventured into the challenges of combining generative sound, field recording, and nonlinear narration on infrastructure. And the first result is the piece that's working title is Hinterbühne that I will play for you hopefully tonight at Stadtwerkstatt. The piece itself is based on several recordings that I made of this infrastructural element of the Hinterbühne. So this is like backstage actually. And there are these four tracks that go into a sound shaping algorithm that is partly generative and there's a kick device with a thresholding in there and I also have a that's not really visible there like on the upper left corner there's an interface that I play to complement it with something that is not as noisy as all the recordings that you might notice in these examples that everything is kind of noisy static, so I add these elements into it. I hope this makes you a little bit curious of what it will sound like tonight. Conclusion. This broad overview on infrastructural elements of both our society and sound art practice in particular has shown that infrastructure is not only a support system for our sound-related practices, but also shapes them in various ways. To open the room for discussion, let me share a personal, possibly obvious, hopefully even debatable note about this infrastructure that we are working with. Sonically, infrastructural elements we use in our sound art or musical practice are either designed to be transparent, that means to draw as little attention to them as possible, or serve as fundamental tools to carve out new sonic experiences that go far beyond the original source material. Our aim for transparency in our tools is particularly reflected in our sound recording and diffusion systems and the spaces they inhabit. Most of the time, we try to produce a proper and transparent reproduction of the original sound source. If infrastructural elements are noticeable, we tend to perceive their sounds as noise, as an unwanted side effect of the sound, for example caused by the diffusion system. Utilizing the infrastructure's own sonic capabilities is, at least in Western culture, a less trodden path. When left with the option, at least our academic centers are inclined to build systems which explicitly target towards black box or white cube designs where supporting infrastructure is hidden away, rather than to spaces with unique characteristics embracing infrastructural elements as part of the sound making process. So that would be my thesis. And we can start discussing about it either now or over a beer tonight. Thank you. Thank you. I guess we have time for one or two questions before we move on to the next guest lecturer. Any questions from the audience? Maybe because I was also at the same keynote in Graz. Ah, yes, you know this already. I have like kind of how many months for thinking my question. So, yeah, I think it's really interesting to be aware of how many noises we produce for being silent in a hall, like for music, for example, and the things which are around our practice. And I think that's really interesting. It makes me feel also how much money, how much infrastructure organization there's behind everything we do here, for example. And in that sense, I think my question is about the fragility of these infrastructures. How now, for example, in Europe, we are facing a lot of challenges in terms of infrastructure that we thought that they were just as stable, so to say, and then they become now a kind of the material of our study. If we were thinking maybe 20 years ago, going to nature with our microphones, probably now we go to these buildings for recording them as a kind of, you know, the same idea, like protecting them for being aware that they exist and how fragile they could be somehow, that they could just be erased or misused, or who owns these infrastructures and for what, who decides, who has access to those infrastructures. There are many political and social aspects about this work, and I think it's talking about infrastructures and how we are aware through this listening method. I wanted to ask you what's your kind of take on that? What's your, how you think your project, this research you are conducting could actually, you know, contribute somehow to this new vision of, well, infrastructure is there, but also we have to somehow protect it now? JOSE ANDRES GARCIA- Yeah. I think like what I try to do with it, like generally I'm genuinely interested in these kind of infrastructural elements. So this is kind of like a personal interest out of wherever this is coming from. I cannot really tell you, but I think what I notice is when I go around, like I also do workshops in this direction with composers, with electronic music composers, for example example or with people like your master students and I think it is a lot about like raising this awareness that this is actually there because the the this invisibility and this is kind of an atypical place for that because we see all these air ducts here but but it is kind of it is rather an aesthetic element than actually seen as something that is making this place run and work and i think like raising awareness around this issue and telling about the complexity and also the immense amount of work and energy that goes into that like That I can sit here and we have this live streaming service that people can watch me doing this performance up here at stage is something that we always tend to undervalue in a way because we are simply not aware of it. And I think this is at least what I'm trying to do, just kind of like just put it on the table and say like, hey, this is something that we are using. And it's also not a particularly new idea, but I think it fits into this kind of societal situation that we have. And looking at Central European countries at least and Germany especially, because I know about this because I live in Germany, we have an infrastructural crisis. Like we haven't done for 30 years anything about infrastructural elements and kind of supporting that and we are also thinking about them in a certain way. So we think about it as something that has to be transparent and just bringing it into the community itself and deciding also what's like understanding the prices that we pay that we have these kind of things and this is like energy prices but also community prices and cultural prices that we pay and just like having this as a part of a conversation really i think that's important for me and this is a reason why i'm sitting here with this yeah here you get a microphone political beyond the political and social question is also an aesthetic question. How is it designed? Because it's not designed obviously, or most of it. Do you see any chance that future infrastructural elements that obviously have to produce noise because there's energy somehow used, that they get in a way designed acoustically, sonically. Yeah, like when we look... It's a bit provocative, I know. But when we look at the future ArtLab air duct system, for example, that is specifically designed to be as quiet as possible in the places where it matters. So they have the giant performance space and below that there's a room that is equally big that has all these air ducts in there so this is so there is a design process as as soon as it is about actual sound and music production yeah but on the other hand this like something that i like when you read murray scheffer the tuning the World, or the Soundgate book. There he explicitly mentions that as a society, we tend to actually embrace sonic misqualities of certain elements of things that we accept that they are necessary. Like the car was something like the old school car with the gas motor. That's something that went into this direction that went really quiet now. But like leaf blowers, for example, is for me this classic example. Yeah. So there's this idea that you have to have a leaf blower because that does something and it has to make this sound. So we are kind of in a culture where that is where you kind of also announce this is important by making it noisy, in a way. Yeah, does that answer your question? In Munich, I think even that it's only half of the years only allowed for this. I'm not sure if it was Munich, some European city, the leaf blowers only from October to December. Yeah, and then you have to move in with regulations. Yeah. There was another. Yes, I was wondering what is your own approach as a composer or musician? So do you more see it as a found composition already or do you sometimes have the wish to work with this as a composer? Yeah, this is a challenge I have to say for me and this is something that I try to address within the last year. I I come from computing, music computing, and I studied computer science very, very early in my career. And I do lots of live coding and generative works, but this is not with field recording material. And then I started this field recording trips and also went into the nature and did all these kind of things. And it was always a challenge to to kind of mix these two because one is additive like you you build up from from an empty space and the other one you're kind of like have something already like the field recording stuff is always very rich spectral very rich and has a lot that there's a narrative in there and it's very difficult for me to kind of disturb that when I do not see the sound as material. So this is very nice to shape, but I still want to kind of keep the character and keep the context. And I hope that I have some kind of compositional answer to that that I can present to you this evening. But, yeah, that's it. Maybe I would like to expand on the question of can you really think of it as an instrument? Yeah. Can it be playable? With mallets? You can play everything with mallets. Yeah, I think this idea about instrument, for me the difference between an instrument and a performance is that I can use an instrument in different contexts. So if I have a, I don't know, the classic example would be I have a violin, I can play extended technique on it and I can play a baroque concert on it and there is lots of content and material that I can use for this. Whereas this material for me is kind of very specific. So I think I would need to like, I would not necessarily think of this as an instrument, but I will think of it as material that I can put into an instrument yeah I don't know yeah yeah yeah not my style but but yes you could possibly yes for sure do that yeah well I think we have to conclude the discussion for now because we have to move on to our next guest lecture. Thanks a lot, Tim.