As the installation Modifikation—stetig steigende Steine (Modification—Constantly Climbing Stones, 2009) was being built, the idea arose of translating the columns into a tonal structure. The mathematician Stefan Sechelmann, the sound artist Masayuki Ren, and the art historian Gregor Stemmrich contributed to the realization of this idea. The resulting sound piece implements a crucial shift in medium: in Modifikation—Constantly Climbing Stones, the viewer can see only the outer face of the brickwork that encloses two load-bearing pillars of the building; the installation Sound Column : Circling Sound, by contrast, allows one to step inside a circle of eight speakers suspended from the ceiling. Only there can the circling motion of the sound flowing from speaker to speaker be perceived in an act of “somatic hearing.” If one decides to adopt a perspective from the “outside” and walks around the work, one will hear a circulation of sound, but it will remain strangely abstract.
