2005. Sound studies
Auditory context
Now the work on BRUCKNER'S NINTH SYMPHONY became scientific, because now it was a matter of evaluating the invaluable musical insights acquired in Mondsee and transferring them audiovisually to my contrafactum.
Interestingly, according to well-known biomagnetic and neurological studies, the individual way a sound ultimately sounds to someone depends on certain structures in the cerebrum. That is to say: those who hear more overtones and thus tend to hear longer, deeper sounds have more gray matter in their auditory cortex in the right hemisphere (Heschl's gyrus). Conversely, those who hear the fundamental tone more strongly or prefer short, sharp tones exhibit this characteristic in their left hemisphere.
In every natural sound, in addition to the fundamental tone that determines the pitch, a multitude of higher tones are produced in unison. These overtones complement the frequency spectrum of a sound and, as is well known, also give it its characteristic timbre. Applied to a concert, however, you only really hear them, if at all, by ideally sitting directly in front of the respective instruments – but how is that even possible?
To make matters worse, every normal person is either a fundamental tone listener (they are characterized by a more delicate perception of tone structure and better processing of complex rhythms) or an overtone listener (they, in turn, can perceive long-held sounds and timbres more intensely). Therefore, at a conventional concert, one doesn't consciously perceive the other form of a tone acoustically. These other tones would thus have to be—as Bruckner intended in his Ninth Symphony*—"concealed" to the listener.2 - are played "unconsciously" through other means, such as acoustic and visual.
It is precisely this kind of meticulously intoned additional information from Bruckner that needs to be highlighted in a visual presentation of Bruckner's Ninth Symphony, because only then does this music free itself from the aforementioned concentration on a mixed soundscape and thus become the pure and clear Bruckner's Ninth Symphony.
sinfonìa visìbile in re minore regeneratione Bruckner.
Folks, it is only through this new way of hearing and seeing music that the audiovisual (creation) story crystallizes, which the composer, due to a lack of resources and in the face of his death, unfortunately did not have enough time to illustrate!
__________
*2As a music educator and conservatory professor, Bruckner was of course familiar with Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz († 08.09.1894) and his work on the so-called auditory cortex (structural, functional and perceptual differences in the auditory cortex of musicians and non-musicians).
