1984
Time Piece, Geneva, 1984

Image: Poster Max neuhaus

Lake Proposal

 The Time Piece concept is a form of sound work which creates moments of silence over an urban or rural terrain.  Extensions of the traditional public aural signals of church bells and public clocks, but opposite in nature:  silence instead of sound.  They also differ in that they are not announcements of time or calls for activity, but simply special reflective moments which occur daily, among people involved in their separate daily lives.

 The works are permanent entities, sounding once or several times a day, at a time chosen in relation to the history and meaning of aural signals in societies of their locations.

 A work is realized by composing a sonority which is fine-tuned to the specific aural surroundings in such a way that it is imperceptible when projected across the terrain.  For a period of twenty minutes the sonority grows gradually, imperceptibly augmenting the aural environment until it reached its peak, when it suddenly disappears.  This sudden hush of something not directly perceived creates the moment of quiet.

 The project for Geneva proposed a Time Piece which would be perceived in a border along the Lake Geneva shore line.  The drawing shows a sound source group placed at a point equidistant from the lake shores.  The group is made up of twelve separate audio channels, providing the means of matching the varied aural environments by creating a sound / shape which has different dimensions and timbre in each of twelve vectors.

Max Neuhaus