Saturday 19 October 2024 | 11am - 4pm (1 hour break 1pm -2pm)

Goldsmiths, Saint James Hatcham Church, 26 Laurie Grove, London SE14 6AD

Tickets: £20 (including fees) https://link.dice.fm/C5cb942ee710

Limited places: Max 12 participants

What to bring to the workshop: Your smartphone and charger to participate in the interactive sound experiments

In this immersive workshop, we will explore the evolution of mobile listening and spatial audio. In a world where sound has become a constant companion—through smartphones, headphones, and portable devices—this session offers a unique opportunity to experience how mobile listening has developed over the past century.

Our journey begins with the early days of gramophones, when public parks were filled with the sounds of portable players, and traces the evolution of personal audio devices through the mobile radio and boombox era to the smartphone age. Berlin-based sound artist Sascha Brosamer will guide you through the history of sound technology and its impact on the way we listen today. Using two vintage travel gramophones as our primary sound sources, we’ll revisit the iconic listening culture of the 1920s.

You’ll get hands-on with gramophones and shellac records, discovering the simple yet impactful acoustic technologies that paved the way for modern listening devices. To bridge the past and future, we will also delve into Ambisonics—a full-sphere surround sound technique that enables a deeper, more immersive auditory experience.

You’ll explore spatial audio, noticing how sound shifts based on your position, while using modern tools like "Klangfeld". This tool allows you to create your own soundscapes using your smartphone and experiment with granular synthesis. By the end of this workshop, you will gain a deeper appreciation for the evolution of mobile listening—from gramophones to smartphones—and experience the fascinating intersection of historical and modern audio technologies.

This event is part of IKLECTIK visiting research fellowship at Goldsmiths.

About Sascha Brosamer

Sascha Brosamer’s work bridges the gap between historical and modern sound technologies, creating a compelling dialogue between the past and present. Using mobile gramophones as both instruments and sources of sound, Brosamer manipulates shellac gramophone records through techniques like scratching, cuts, and rewinds, bringing out the raw, tactile qualities of the analog medium. The sound produced by these mechanical interactions is then amplified through smartphone speakers, which add a contemporary layer to the performance. This combination of old and new technologies highlights the contrast between the rich, textured sound of gramophone records and the digital immediacy of smartphones. By repurposing smartphones as speakers, Brosamer emphasizes the interplay between different eras of sound production, challenging the listener to reconsider their relationship with both the devices and the sounds they produce. The result is an immersive auditory experience that merges history with modernity, encouraging reflection on the evolution of sound and its cultural significance.

Sascha Brosamer is an interdisciplinary artist and electronic music performer from Berlin. He is exploring the archaeology of sound and its projection into the digital future.In his current work, Brosamer is researching about: „The gramophone as an instrument“ and the „Materiality of shellac records and their intrinsic links with colonialism and place“. He actually works together with composer Nirto Karsten Fischer on the virtual placement of the acoustic gramophone sound into the three-dimensional space.

Brosamer studied Music and Media Art at HKB in Bern, Switzerland and graduated as Meisterschüler in 2014 with honors in Painting from the State Academy of Fine Arts Karlsruhe, Germany. His work has been shown at Zwinger Gallery Berlin, Club Silencio Paris, Bundeskunsthalle Bonn, WP8 Düsseldorf, BB15 Linz, Oz Gallery Tokyo, Le Case d‘Arte Milan and Cooper Union Gallery New York. He is the founder of Global Forest, an artist residency in the former studio of Martin Kippenberger in the Black Forest/Germany and curator of Dual Sessions, a multidisciplinary format that brings together turntable industry, science, art, music and pop. In collaboration with Graham Dunning (London), he released the album “Glocken” (2019, Invisible City Records). Together they dig deep into the beauty of textural studies, analogue media and surface details. As well as the Transoceanic EP (2020) on BB15/Linz, which deals with the cultural imagination of dematerialisation, historical sound carriers and digital colonialism. His latest vinyl edition „Donaueschingen 2020“ is a sound recording of the Donaueschinger Musiktage 2020, which was cancelled due to the pandemic. Brosamer documented the festival, that did not take place in a performative act of silence on tape. This record was the first release on the Cologne based label “Total Silence”, he co-founded with Manuel Schaub in 2021.

Ph Credits: Moritz Schleiffelder

Picture: Nirto Karsten Fischer