plastic pseudopodium, 2024
4-channel piece for digital voices and complementary energies
In this sound installation, the human voice merges with an artificially generated voice, interacting in a way that deconstructs linguistic phonemes.
In this process, the arrangement of the loudspeakers plays a crucial role in how the listener engages with the voice.
Each loudspeaker, positioned to face the listener, embodies its persona that mediates the voice—distinct yet part of a collective.
The tension between the individual voices and their interdependence creates a different form of subjectivity, inviting a mode of listening in which the voice is both singular and at the same collective expression.
Concept: Verena Lercher
Voice & Composition: Verena Lercher
Premiere: Sound Chamber Funkhaus Berlin, 2025
delta sirens, 2023
performative sound installation for vocal identities & IKO
Concept: Verena Lercher
Voice & Performance: Verena Lercher
Premiere: Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, 2023
Using an omnidirectional headset and the IEM Granular Encoder plugin, I zoom in on small speech fragments carrying phonemes and sibilant sounds to create non-existing prosody, which is then projected into the space through the IKO.
The signals I feed into the IKO are intentionally delayed by 2-4 seconds before they are played back with randomized sound beaming.
While the live voice interacts with its fragmented duplicates in a dynamic, ever-shifting dialogue, I continually shape this interaction, lending rhythm, structure, or musicality to the voice and its spatial echoes.
The spatialised sonic textures are picked up by the omnidirectional headset and played back through the IKO once again. This feedback loop between my voice, the sound beaming, and the space becomes a crucial element, with the space itself participating in the performance as a resonant body that shapes the vocal performance.
The space itself becomes an instrument, with its natural reverberations amplifying and diminishing certain frequencies, while my voice becomes inseparable from the inherent acoustics of the architecture in which it resonates.
This culminates in the act of distancing myself from the headset and projecting my voice more bodily into the space, complicating the question of what the voice is and how it exists within the architected sonic landscape produced by the IKO.
