Third Places

‘Third Places’ is a sound-art project, consisting of twelve compositions derived from twelve distinct points in Berlin, Germany.

This collection of music is the result of an independent study entitled ‘Twelve Views of the Fernsehturm: ‘Klangunst’ Born from the Sights and Sounds of Berlin’, a study funded by the Chappell Lougee Scholarship, which supports second-year undergraduate students at Stanford University pursuing full-time immersive projects in the humanities, creative arts, and qualitative social sciences. Along with this collection of twelve compositions, I also created twelve corresponding paintings that reflect the sonic environment of each explored point.

In June and July of 2022, I travelled to Berlin and began this project by identifying twelve points, all of which faced the Fernsehturm. The Fernsehturm served as an anchor which connected each piece together, and established a common thread between each sound piece. This step was inspired by Hokusai’s Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, wherein Mount Fuji is present in all thirty-six prints, however the depiction of the periphery takes center stage.

In the same vein, I sought to create a series of pieces that use a common anchor, but depict completely different aspects each location; the layers of history, the monumentalized loss, and the myriad of sounds that reflect Berlin’s diverse population existing within this transformative environment.

‘Third Places’ attempts to map – and, consequentially, compare – the audiovisual environments of different points in the city while simultaneously demonstrating a new way in which artists can produce work that is both informed by the environment, and informative to viewers and listeners. This project reveals the differences in the built environments of twelve distinct points in the city and the interplay between sound and space in each location, adding yet another layer to the immense suppository of knowledge surrounding socioeconomic, political, and architectural differences between various points in the city.

For each identified point in the city, I considered the spatial characteristics of the points I explored, and identified a word or short phrase that acted as a ‘spatial descriptor’. Each descriptor then became the guiding theme for each sound piece. In each piece, both the lyrics and the instrumental strive to reflect the descriptor as accurately as possible.

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