3 Profiles - sound installation by Bernd Schurer

'Sound Reasons Festival' for sound art and electronic music presents 3 Profiles: Vector Streaming Waveform Segregation Version - a sound installation by Bernd Schurer.

'Sound Reasons Festival' for sound art and electronic music in collaboration with Pro Helvetia – Swiss Arts Council and British Council New Delhi presents
3 Profiles: Vector Streaming Waveform Segregation Version 
a sound installation by Bernd Schurer   

Opening on 16 November 2012 at 7 PM at the British Council, 17 Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi. Installation on exhibit from 16 - 20 November 2012   

Brief on installation: 
"3 profiles" presents 3 different segregated audio stereo- streams that run in parallel, each of these 3 in turn get visualized by the vectorscope. The image is written into a matrix, that is used to modulate the sound profiles' properties of frequency, phase and amplitude and therefore create a recursive audiovisual system.

Examining a shared interest in the inherent connection between auditory and visual elements, the contrasts of sensory aspects constitute the foundation for these audiovisual studies, generating “beautiful” visual displays from the combination of basic synthesized waveforms through the lens of a vectorscope (an oscilloscope’s x-y mode). This metering device originally used in audio engineering for the process of vinyl mastering, where the precise parallel correlation of phases is essential for record pressing, is a common device, that has since been integrated into stereo image monitoring equipment to deliver a graphic representation of the stereo signal.  

The meter displays a two-dimensional rectangular coordinate system. The device can visualize three different attributes of sound - it’s amplitude, frequency and phase correlation. Here, the left channel of sound is represented by one axis and the right channel by the other. The resulting visual output is affected by the difference of the input signals, and something referred to as lissajous patterns appear and move on the display, which was what ultimately drew my curiosity.    

Throughout the experimentation phase, the idea of the image as a functional accompanist to the sound was abandoned and the audio element was subordinated in favor of the image, which creates an aesthetics that is otherwise mostly absent from technical audio metering.   

Bernd Schurer 
Schurer’s artistic focus lies on the work with sound in a broad spectrum of different contexts: a constant shift, although, mostly investigating the experiential relationship between sound and what one would generally describe as space and the body. There is a strong fascination in the study of the perception of sound and our interpretative patterns, and there has been done artistic research in the domains of Psychoacoustics, Architecture, Auralization, Sonification and Audio- Visual Representation Systems. Presentations may vary from Computer Music Diffusion to Installation work to abstract Sound Art. Some of it has been exhibited internationally on various scales, from micro galleries to public space, from “art at home” to the Venice Art Biennial. Since 1996 he is co-editor and curator for electronic sound pieces at the domizil.ch imprint in Zürich, together with Marcus Maeder.  

Bernd Schurer was born 1970 in Zurich, and currently lives in Berlin. He studied Philosophy and Film Science at the University of Zurich and Visual Art at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts. He is currently a Masters student in Electroacoustic Composition and Theory at the Zürich Univeristy of the Arts with Professors Germàn Toro- Peréz and Dr. Martin Neukom.  
More:
http://heterophenomenological.net/
 http://domizil.ch/