Seven Trumpets
Maria Wildeis
Immersive sound installation of the swim series / April 13–22, 2023
For thousands of years, seven trumpets have symbolized the impending collapse.
In the biblical Book of Revelation, their titular sound heralds the end of the world: seven angels blow seven trumpets, and with each new sound, a new calamity of the apocalypse unfolds. In the Old Testament’s martial tale of the Battle of Jericho, the sound of the shofar trumpets causes the city walls to collapse on the seventh day, leading to Jericho’s fall.
Through resonance, sounds can indeed set other objects and bodies into vibration. Certain tones that share similar frequencies can influence each other: this leads to beats—perceived as a rhythmic swelling and fading of volume. In mechanics, the term “resonance catastrophe” describes the destruction of a structure caused by resonant vibrations being amplified and transferred to the building.
In Maria Wildeis’s immersive sound installation, 32 speakers are individually controlled, and the sound is influenced by motion sensors. Fans generate wind and form part of the soundscape. The music—constantly evolving through interactive interplay—evokes associations with nature and challenges conventional listening habits. Thanks to the custom programming of sounds for each speaker, listeners can immerse themselves in an all-encompassing sonic environment.
Maria Wildeis
Maria Wildeis explores spatial aspects in art and music — artistically through her installations and compositions, and academically through her research on “Community Arts” within the ComArts project at the University of Applied Sciences Düsseldorf. She earned her degree in “Sound and Reality” at the Robert Schumann University of Music Düsseldorf. For many years, she has directed art spaces, festivals, and galleries—currently overseeing the art space “Gemeinde Köln” in the Ebertplatz Passage in Cologne. In addition, she is active as a DJ. Wildeis’s artistic work has been supported multiple times by renowned international institutions, such as the scholarship for electronic composition from the Cité internationale des arts in Paris and funding from the Goethe-Institut.
swim 2023
With the series swim, ZiMMT invites audiences in 2023 to (re)discover their surroundings through the act of listening. Ten concerts and four sound installations offer acoustic experiences that help sharpen our awareness of the environment—either individually or collectively.
Sixteen local and international artists are part of swim. Many of them work with everyday sounds and field recordings, thematically exploring the human-made changes in our acoustic environment during the current era—the Anthropocene. Others focus on psychoacoustic effects. All of them create immersive sound spaces.
Through three-day microresidencies, the artists are given the opportunity to develop their works on-site using 3D audio technology, allowing for new experimental approaches. All concerts are streamed live in high-quality binaural audio—offering a spatial sound experience both on location and worldwide.
