placeholder
solo performer, flute, clarinet, violin, cello, bar ambience
8 min
2023

Earworms are usually 15 to 30 seconds in length. In placeholder, I whistle and hum along snippets of songs, that I listen to on my headphones. Humming and whistling carry something mysterious to me. Hearing someone humming away in a private moment, I rarely perceive these sounds as sounds in themselves. Rather, my hearing tries to imagine itself in the intimate, self-contained and imaginary hearing of the other person. I begin to hallucinate popsongs along audible melodic fragments, trying to match them with songs I know. This piece is a performance that attempts to create a musical moment in which sounds appear both as themselves and as a possibility to imagine another music behind them. A music as an ambivalent invitation to hallucinate about it. The ensemble plays spectral transcriptions of the sounds I make, spatialising them while articulating their material quality. The song snippets I’m listening to were generated using OpenAI’s Jukebox. Rather than composing my own, I was interested in relating a possible imaginary of a community, the audience, to how the algorithms of AI try to sort of imagine an output behind a database.

To give subtle access to these snippets of songs, I furthermore arranged them into a background track for the bar that was open before and after the concert.

performed by ensemble hand werk
Flute – Daniel Agi
Clarinet – Heni Hyunjung Kim
Violin – Jae A Shin
Violoncello – Niklas Seidl

Placeholder was part of Club-Café Forum, a scenic concert I did with Mauro Hertig, Loïc Destremau and Georgia Koumara in Forum Stadtpark in Graz.

commissioned by impuls. Association for the communication of contemporary music. Co-financed by the Creative Europe Program of the European Union within the Ulysses network