Snail Piano

The sound sculpture sees itself as an offer of reflection on music, on sounds and noises and their meanings and symbols.

A grand piano, as a basic instrument of occidental music tradition, serves as a base for an arrangement of empty whelk shells or their segmentations with small speakers. The sound of the sculpture is a highway noise, raised and lowered in volume like a wave, but permanently audible in opposite directions with a time delay. This multifaceted, rustling sound backdrop, in the visual association of the snail shells, quotes the sea. An urban and rather negatively perceived sound of civilization mutates into a sound of nature when looking at the snail shells. The rustle on the ear when listening into such a snail shell - the self sound of one's own body as an audible reflection of the form - is also the motif and occasion for the sound sculpture, but here the forms sound automatically. The view into the partly complex segmentations of the spiral forms and the allocation of small speakers to pairs of objects further this image. The placement of the elements on a closed grand piano stands in the previous tradition of object-like sculptural piano and grand piano works of visual and acoustic art. The spectrum of associable worlds of sound and noise in the work also questions one's own assessment of what music could be.

I found the sound in a highway tunnel under the ICC in Montréal, my first whelk at the age of 5 years somewhere on a beach. My own noise, audible with the snail on my ear, sounds like the sea itself or like the test pattern of the TV's after the end of the show or like the Niagara Falls (about one kilometer away) or even like the inner-city soundscapes of road traffic.

• Konsumverein, Braunschweig 2006

• Usedomer Kunstverein-Usedomer Musikfestival, Usedom 2007

black grand piano; 98 whelks; small speakers; cable; 12-channel composition; electronical equipment