2025.08.26-30

The last week was a contention of time and space. The plan was to have four days in the Hörraum at the Humboldt Forum, from the 26th to the 29th of August. But Maurice managed to stretch the schedule, offering us another day on the 30th before the Long Night of Museums. That gift turned four days into five, which would prove crucial.

Translating the work from the TU electronic studio into the Hörraum was not as simple as carrying a suitcase across town. On paper, the two systems look like siblings. The Hörraum was built by the same engineers from TU Berlin’s Sound Spatialization Department, and TU still manages its upkeep. But institutional siblings do not always speak the same language. On the first day, we discovered that what sounded precise in the TU lab turned into cacophony in the Hörraum.

The first day dissolved into waiting. The Hörraum is an enormous architecture of sound: forty ambisonic speakers and nearly 260 wave field synthesis speakers embedded in a white elliptical acoustic wall summing to about 300 energy fields ready to breathe sound into the space. But the sound singals refused to synchronize. The DAW could not talk cleanly to the speakers. Between them was a layer of institutional mediation — the museum’s internal network — and no one in the media department knew exactly which IT staff in the building were responsible for the updates. Nico tried to bypass the coding manually, patching one pipe after another, but it was a futile workaround. By the end of the first day, we had lost almost all our time to waiting for systems to align, for permissions to unlock, for the silence to break.

By the second day, the room opened up. When the system finally responded, it was like a sonic floodgate releasing. We began to hear what the room could do, and suddenly the compositions took on new dimensions. Ambisonics and wave field synthesis speak different dialects of spatial sound. Ambisonics, with its forty speakers, envelops you in a spherical field, allowing a field recording to bloom in three dimensions. In Alcala, Pangasinan, I recorded a rice field with my ambisonic microphone. In the Hörraum, that same field unfolded: a single cricket, faint in the original recording, could be heard from one specific corner of the room. If you walk towards its little acoustic clearing, you might hear their solo chirping.

Spoiler alert, or perhaps an invitation. If you plan to listen to Pagtatahip in the Hörraum, you might prefer to encounter these moments directly, without my framing. You can return to these words later, to see how the composition unfolded in process. But if you are still reading, let me share a burst of monsoon storm.

Wave field synthesis works by a different techno-sorcery. Its hundreds of speakers do not only project sound; they cancel and reinforce each other to place a sound precisely in space. A tone could be positioned five meters beyond the wall, or hovering in a spot where no speaker exists, yet your ear swears it is there. Working with these two systems required different compositional imaginations, and together they stretched my sense of what listening could mean.

Dynamics became questions of distance, not volume. In stereo mixing, balance is a matter of volume. A sound becomes clearer when you make it louder, another recedes when you make it softer. But in spatial composition, balance is a matter of distance, of position, of perspective. Depending on where you stand in the Hörraum, a drum may whisper or a murmur may thunder. The listener’s movement becomes part of the score.

In an orchestra, dynamics shift when a flute swells or when the violins fade. They are still static in position, their energy moving through intensity. But here, dynamism meant movement through space. A voice could grow not by growing louder, but by moving closer, or by circling around your head. Sometimes, Nico and I debated whether a sound should be pushed in the fader or pushed three meters behind the wall. These decisions taught me that dynamics in spatial sound are no longer only about loudness; they are about movements and mobilities, about how sounds and bodies travel and inhabit the room.

Some sounds revealed their secret kinships. Auntie Milagring’s lullaby, recorded in Pangasinan in 2025, revealed itself to be sung in E-flat, a few semitones lower than today’s concert pitch. One archival recording of oggayam chanting from Kalinga in 1933 was also in E-flat, almost identical. I had intended to juxtapose them, not realizing they were already kin. Their tonal closeness tempted the composition toward resolution. But I am suspicious of the tonic, suspicious of how Western harmony imposes its gravitational pull. I did not want the lullaby and the chant, separated by ninety-two years of history, to be welded together under the hegemony of tonality. So I turned instead to granular synthesis. From the archival voices, I built an instrument, which in the beginning one sounded like a brass instrument, another an organ. Played on my MIDI controller, they grew into crescendos that echoed the logic of the church mass — a cantus firmus? But those were not the vibrations I wanted to ensound.

A tone, a hum, a fluttering insect? When Nico and I spatialized the granular instrument, it transformed. The sound no longer rose like a hymn; it fluttered like an insect. A mosquito buzzed past your ear, or a fruitfly darted across the ceiling. Sometimes you wondered if you had heard it at all, or only imagined it. In the Hörraum, the granular voice became a fleeting presence, teasing the boundary between sound and hallucination. Harmonically, the brassy granular synth sound danced around the dominant, the fifth in relation to the lullaby — not proposing resolution, but suggesting a leading tone, a gesture that leans toward parallel closure without ever delivering it. Was it stability, or only the illusion of it? The answer flickered, like the bug itself, never still long enough to decide.

An organ? A storm? While shaping this section, I kept returning to the rice field in Pangasinan — not just as a metaphor, but as the acoustic reality of evening. Crickets, buzzing insects, the low hum of the ground. Out of the archival voices, I had created another layer of granular synthesis. At first, in stereo, it sounded like an organ: the kind of sound designed to saturate a workship room, to engulf you from all sides with the ostensibility of harmony, of an omnipotent god. It hinted at a tonic resolution, as if it might pull everything together into closure. But I did not want the omnipresence of the organ, nor the hegemony of the tonic it implies. So I redesigned it as a storm. The organ became a monsoon. You hear and feel it arriving. It drenches you. It momentarily engulfs the room in its downpour. But then you sense the clouds lifting, and the storm passes. What remains are only trails of rainwater, the memory of its presence. The monsoon collapses harmony into weather, refusing cadence, leaving space for the delicate voices to return: the crickets, the mosquitoes, the fragile balance of the field.

Listening as a meditation on chance. History, too, is like this. It does not always resolve; it sometimes overwhelms, sometimes scatters, sometimes leaves us in the residue of chance. The lullaby of 2025 and the chant of 1933 do not converge into a single truth. They brush against each other in passing, like two insects crossing paths in the dusk, like voices meeting under a rainstorm, before parting again into their own flight.

The Hörraum is the only place this exists. Three hundred speakers hold the piece in suspension. No stereo reproduction can capture its multiplicity; no headphones can simulate its spatial depth. Even for me, as the composer, the only way to hear it again is to step back into the Hörraum. This room is not just the stage for the piece—it is its instrument, its body. The work exists nowhere else. ☐