Especially for the opening of the City Museum in Lviv composer Ostap Manulyak created a sound installation “Illusory” for which I was lucky to join by recording a Violin part 🎻
Auditory perception of the city is an extremely important component not only of our impressions when traveling to exotic countries or childhood memories. Sound is one of the key elements of orientation in space to which we usually do not pay attention. The sound atmosphere of the city that accompanies us every day is not only such bright acoustic dominants as the beating of the clock or the trumpet playing in the town hall. It is also a constant background noise of wind, voices of people, cars and aggressive acoustic pollution of the city center by a spontaneous influx of street musicians. Only rain from time to time radically changes the sound landscape, washing away the aggressive pollution with uniform background noise with accents of individual close drops.
The sound installation “Illusory”, created especially for the space of the “City Museum” of Lviv, consists of six different sound layers built on the basis of the audio archive of the Experimental Educational Studio of Electroacoustic Music (EESEM) at the Lviv National Music Academy named after Mykola Lysenko. These are live “field recordings” from the city center, recordings of Lviv trams, trains, artificially limited by a narrow acoustic spectrum recordings from the moving streets of Lviv, as well as compositions created on the basis of multilayer transformation of acoustic material. The sound material is complemented by the composition “Elements of Structure” and the audiovisual installation “Atmospheric Precipitation”.
“Elements of Structure” is a composition for violin performed by Michael Romanyshyn and recorded at the EESEM studio. It is a kind of counterpoint to the transformed audio material and sound layers and is based on the spectral analysis of the used recordings and on the interaction with the resonance of the premises of the City Museum. Atmospheric Precipitation is an audiovisual installation created in 2011 together with Mykhailo Barabash. The active spots of “Atmospheric precipitation” contrast with the apparent delicacy and sterile white purity of space.