Sam Auinger is a sonic thinker, composer and sound artist. He lives and works in Berlin since receiving an invitation to the Berliner Künstlerprogramm des DAAD in 1997. His interest is the sonic and auditory as material phenomena that embed information about our shared global interdependence and emotional triggers. Central to his artistic research aims to deepen understanding of acoustic/aural qualities in our urban living environments, precisely public spaces.

Auinger talks about the factors that go into perceiving and making sense of sound. On one hand there is the acoustics of said sound. The frequency, the envelope and the volume of which a sound travels to our ears. There is the psychoacoustics, or how our ears and hearing apparatus might manipulate or change the original sound. For everyone this may be different due to ear shape, age etc. Finally, the culture you are coming from. Say we hear a bell sound, to a christian who grew up spending time at church this sound will be perceived differently, or trigger an emotional reaction. To someone with no strong relation to this sound they might perceive this as a sound that doesn’t hold enough meaning to the individual for it to stick out from the soundscape and environment they are in. I think this is an interesting line of thought and something I would like to research further in the future, or even making an installation playing on the audience’s expectations of sounds. Making an installation that can only be understood by a certain demographic of people ignoring language, age etc. I would imagine this would have to fit with the main demographic of the audience. For instance, if the installation is in London then sounds should have an emotional or perceptive effect on the majority of the inhabitants eg. using sounds that are found only in London.