In my youth I lived free and unattached. Of course there were the structural cuts of the school, which I also perceived with interest, but other things were much more important for me. For example, I spent a lot of time in nature and not only during the day, but also at night. I remember very clearly the eerie moments, alone in the dark and the sound perception coming over me in the noise of the nocturnal forest. With these experiences and a growing ability to listen, I experienced already as a child the ever - developing interpretation of the urgent, up to the point of knowing. In the nocturnal forest there is no unheard-of phenomenon, everything is present: present and oppressive. In contrast to hearing by day, there is no optical distraction in the darkness. Very quickly and progressively the ability of subtlety and interpretation develops.

In the installative artistic discourse with sound I encounter this early realization of hearing again and again. Like an ineradicable dramaturgy, the directors of the acoustic reception always hope for an instantaneous concentration on the unheard-of, using the same trick. This is: lights off - sound on! Simplifications have an astonishingly long breath and are repeated especially where specific expectations are dealt with. Theater and music stages are apparently the ideal place to achieve an immediate, focused perception and concentration, or at least to ritualize it.

In the urban noise environment of the city, this simplified way of acoustic reception does not work. Here, listening in real time is like a kaleidoscope of unexpected contexts and instantaneously changing conditions. Loud and quiet, near and far and ever changing acoustic perspectives shape the listening process and compete with a wealth of visual impressions. We are always in the center of a more or less changeable density of sound, depending on where we are, sometimes close to an acoustic state of emergency. Mostly we do not listen in the sense of listening. However, if our ear finds an interesting sound in the mostly exuberant simultaneity, the entire listening process involuntarily becomes a context of acoustic events. It becomes active listening for a few moments.

Karlsruhe, April 2015