The fifth episode of SOMA features a site-specific sound intervention and the first solo presentation of Tobias Maria Koch, a Basel and Turin-based sound artist and composer. Guided by his ongoing research on acoustics, resonance, and the physical properties of sound, the artist transforms his interests into immersive sound experiences that explore how sound waves interact with architecture, objects, and the human body.
For this installation, Koch explores the acoustic phenomenon of the Doppler Effect, the way sound bends through movement. By extending the rotating mechanism of a Leslie speaker into the room’s architecture, we experience athe shift in frequency as sound moves closer or further away from us. It is motion-made music, a warping of sound. Like the rising pitch of a siren that moves through traffic or a plane passing by in the sky: sound warps through motion.
By manipulating sound in space, Koch plays with site-specific frequencies and resonances, pushing them into dissonance, vibration, and collision. He underscores the tension between an instrument’s inner workings, external influences, and its immediate surroundings – allowing for a heightened sense of awareness. The resulting sounds weave a tense, ever-shifting battle between vibrating strings, the resonant frequencies of the space, and the trembling bodies of acoustic instruments—each force clawing for dominance, neither willing to submit.
Tobias Maria Koch is a Basel and Turin-based composer and sound artist working across performance, visual arts, film, and music. He performed his work at Unsound Festival, Serralves Museum Porto, Biennale Son, Trauma Bar Berlin, Palazzo delle Esposizioni Roma, Istituto Svizzero Roma, and various institutions throughout Europe. Koch has previously scored works presented at MoMA New York, documenta 14, Frieze Art Fair, Tate Modern, Centre Pompidou, Volksbühne Berlin, and others. His sound design and music compositions were featured in several award-winning films at Film Festival Cannes, Locarno Film Festival, IFFR Rotterdam, Berlinale, and Toronto International Film Festival. His latest score for the feature film Drii Winter (A Piece Of Sky) was awarded the Georges Delerue Award, and the film was Switzerland’s official submission to the Academy Awards 2023.
SOMA 2024/2025
We listen in order to interpret our world and experience meaning – Pauline Oliveros
Sound is a powerful medium. It’s omnipresent. It has a material-affective power of socio-cultural and political significance. How do you listen? When do you really hear?
Nested in the BACKROOM of KRONE COURONNE, SOMA is a vibrating listening platform that accommodates the practice and research of sound artists through 2024/2025. SOMA investigates the emancipatory and transformative potential of sound and listening practices. Conceived as a result of curator Kristina Grigorjeva’s research and together with Ivan Crichton and Laurens Dekeyzer, SOMA invites to listen, linger, vibrate and hear collectively in a shared, plural, response-able and care-full context.
SOMA is about listening as a transformative social practice and a relational way of hearing the world. In a text referring to Audre Lorde’s “The Masters tools will never dismantle the Master’s House” (1984), sound anthropologist Steven Feld suggests that we need to develop a different set of tools in order to listen to (as opposed to merely hearing) signs and signifiers, songs and birds and insects in a relational practice that performs a sonic phenomenology of the forest we are part of; through touch, smell and sound. Sounding as a “listening with”–from the somatic, interceptive to the social body.
SOMA is supported by Migros Culture Percentage, Pro Helvetia, GVB-Kulturstiftung and Ernst Göhner Stiftung. KRONE COURONNE programme is supported by Stadt Biel/Bienne, Kanton Bern, Pro Helvetia, Gubler-Hablützel Stiftung and Temperatio.
