INTEROBJECTIVE SOUNDSCAPES is the title of a new project that explores different ways of experiencing music and sound. The first piece called 4 rooms was premiered in art gallery Kunstbanken, Hamar, on May 25th 2022. The audience were able move freely during the performance, walking "into" and "through" the sound of the piece, listening to it at a distance or examining it up close. The premiere was performed by myself on double bass, but the piece is not exclusively written for double bass and may be performed by whichever or by as many instruments as one likes.

The video features a very basic sound recording of the performance, coupled with a simple video I made of the rooms in which the piece was performed. The installation by artist Tone Bjordam is called Morph - Transformations in Lichen Landscapes. This was not a planned collaboration between the two of us.

As I continue to develop this project further I will both compose more short pieces, as well as longer pieces for larger ensembles in which the different parts of the work are performed in different rooms simultaneously. The idea is for the audience to be able to walk into, and through, different layers of the music.

INTEROBJECTIVITY

The main title, Interobjective soundscapes, is inspired by a nascent philosophical movement called object-oriented ontology, and more spesifically by the writings of Timothy Morton. Object-oriented ontology rejects the privileging of human existence over the existence of nonhuman objects, as opposed to the more mainstream view of anthropocentrism which says that human beings are the central or most important entity in the universe.

In his 2015 book "Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End Of The World" environmental and object oriented philosopher Timothy Morton introduced the term "hyperobjects", of which inter-objectivity is a core aspect. One of the central hyperobjects of our time is global warming:

"We can see, for instance, that global warming has the properties of a hyperobject. It is “viscous” — whatever I do, wherever I am, it sort of “sticks” to me. It is “nonlocal” — its effects are globally distributed through a huge tract of time. It forces me to experience time in an unusual way. It is “phased” — I only experience pieces of it at any one time. And it is “inter-objective” — it consists of all kinds of other entities but it isn’t reducible to them."

Timothy Morton