[O+A] allowed visitors to experience the sounds of the city in different ways.
Navigate the city like a bat by listening to the reverberations of buildings. With Songlines visitors were set off with a floating speaker that was activated at certain locations by a GPS-driven network. The architectural environment was made audible through echolocation. There were three separate 'songlines' and routes.
[O+A] captured in Earmarks seventeen special listening experiences in Bruges. Visitors could traverse the city with their ears as their guide and with the walking map as back-up. You would experience the sounds of horses hooves, burbling water, rustling trees and all the other aspects of the city's unique soundscape.
In Bruges Tunes [O+A] converted urban sounds into harmonic vibrations. Visitors had the opportunity to lie down on a bright red platform on Jan van Eyck Square and let the realtime sounds caused by cars, buses and people physically penetrate them. Disturbing and irritating noises were transformed into a Zen experience.
Finally, in Sounding Bruges [O+A] collaborated with city carillonneur Frank Deleu. They personally wrote a carillon composition that activated the historic city centre's acoustics with a series of simple tones and rhythmic patterns.
[O+A]
Bruce Odland (b. 1952, Milwaukee, US) and Sam Auinger (b. 1956, Linz, AT) are composers and philosophers of modern life who like to think with their ears. Bruce Odland describes himself as a sonic thinker, composer and sound artist.