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This orchestra of loudspeakers produces sounds that shift as listeners change their position 🔊⁠
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Composer and sound artist Elvio Seta, known as Elvio Seta, conceived his work as an inhabitable sound sculpture. Acousmonium ODAE, an advanced sound system, houses 87 membranes that resonate at varying degrees and from different locations, constructing an acoustic geography. Some speakers sound as if they were whispering into the listener’s ear, while others echo and envelop the room with frequencies, vibrations, and hums.⁠
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As Neuf Voix tells Type 7, “The experience is not frontal but physical and perspectival, since certain frequencies seem to emerge from very close by, while others recede or recombine within the space.” The design draws from the technical and aesthetic language of analog technologies from the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. Its forms take cues from electroacoustic diffusion systems, cinema loudspeakers, horns, speaker membranes, amplifiers, and machines developed before the digital standardization of sound.⁠
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“I’m particularly interested in technologies where sound retains a tangible, almost architectural presence: large loudspeaker cabinets, compression drivers, modular diffusion systems, analog synthesizers, and devices conceived to shape sound as a physical mass in space,” Neuf Voix adds.⁠
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The shape of the speakers varies, carefully chosen to best reproduce the audio range assigned to each. The tubed ones have removable heads and take the form of an enlarged eye with a dark pupil. Then, there are those that resemble monolithic blocks with small cabinets. They’re modular and individual, so they can be assembled into a fortress, immersing the listener in an auditory performance.⁠
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The artist describes his work as a sonic landscape that turns sound design into a physical and tangible experience rather than just an interface. In a way, it shapes the space it occupies and crafts an electroacoustic sound system.⁠
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Images by⁠ Elvio Seta
Words by for Type 7