HEAR THE WORLD Magazine 19

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HEAR THE WORLD THE MAGAZINE FOR THE CULTURE OF HEARING

TAKE THAT PHOTOGRAPHED BY BRYAN ADAMS Herzog & de Meuron’s parking garage in Miami Théâtre de la Gaîté Lyrique Jenson Button On the nature and culture of screaming The voice of Adele

ISSUE NINETEEN

Believe in the power to hear more

New The new NaĂ­da S, designed for significant hearing loss, is taking power hearing to the next level. Better hearing in more situations than ever before!

Contact your hearing care professional today and find your own reasons to believe in the power of NaĂ­da S! www.1000reasonsfornaida.com

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HEAR THE WORLD ISSUE NINETEEN

Editorial

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Hear the World Initiative Musician Patrick Nuo helps children with hearing loss in Kenya

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COME AGAIN News Noise

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Frequently Asked Questions

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What’s that sound?

Someone jumping into water

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Products

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SAFE AND SOUND Hear the calls!

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Trees that can sing

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When Tarzan yells – On the nature and culture of screaming

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EASY LISTENING A fairytale come true: Pet Shop Boys’ foray into ballet

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The Boys Are Back In Town – or: Why the music world waited on tenterhooks for the reunion of Take That and Robbie Williams

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Modern dance in the truest sense of the word

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James Blake – The salvation of silence

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HEAR THE WORLD When painkillers do more harm than good: Samter’s syndrome

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Hearing with your bones: The science of restoring hearing

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An orchestral interior

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Herzog & de Meuron’s parking garage in Miami

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Nick Knight – Resounding names and great faces on glossy paper

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In the cabinet of curiosities of digital culture

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The voice of Adele

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Why Formula 1 driver Jenson Button finds it cool to protect his hearing

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IMPRINT

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EDITORIAL

Dear reader, Have you ever wondered why our magazine is actually called HEAR THE WORLD? We get used to brand names very quickly. And HEAR THE WORLD is now a multi-awardwinning brand known the world over. It is the essence of a brand that it has become so familiar and natural to us that we no longer have to think about its “deeper meaning”.

Obviously, it is about good hearing and the complex world of hearing. But we at HEAR THE WORLD also understand “world” in the original sense of the word, namely geographically. This is also evident in the new issue you are now reading. As in all our previous issues, this time too we take you on a trip around the world, to places where the sensory experience of hearing reveals itself just as clearly as its cultural and health significance.

This time, our acoustic tour d’horizon takes us from Miami via Paris and Eindhoven to the mountainous forests of Europe. These forests are home to the spruces that will one day be made into the finest musical instruments: violins. We visit Martin Schleske, one of the world’s best violinmakers. And you can find out why only the toughest specimens among the spruces can provide the wood from which musicians draw the subtlest of notes.

In Eindhoven, the Netherlands, designers Miriam van der Lubbe and Niels van Eijk turned an outmoded concert hall, the Muziekgebouw, into a total artwork. In so doing, they adopted the concept of holistic design, which involves considering all aspects of life and experience, beyond the purely functional, i.e., from the façade of a building to the cutlery in its dining halls and the staff’s uniforms.

We also show you another cultural temple that underwent an acoustic metamorphosis, this time in Paris. Where Jacques Offenbach’s sanguine and dramatic music once delighted the high society of the Second Empire, at the Théatre de la Gaité Lyrique, amazing things are afoot: experimental and electronic music, space and light experiments, video and dance performances are covering completely new theatrical and acoustic ground. And all that in a building steeped in history – a clash of cultures that is not frightening, but enriches and expands our minds.

Even seemingly banal concrete edifices can be exciting.

A fact impressively demonstrated by the famous Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron in Miami. Right next to the famed Art Deco district they built an airy, sculptural, indeed – it sounds like an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms – an attractive parking garage. See for yourself!

And of course, this edition would not be complete without reports on people who are doing extraordinary things in terms of acoustic experiences, music and musical culture.

For instance, an aspiring young singer whose voice has a unique, irresistible appeal: Adele, 22 years old. She has already been dubbed Dusty Springfield’s “granddaughter” and Amy Winehouse’s “daughter”. We are sure to hear much more from her in the future.

I hope you enjoy this issue of HEAR THE WORLD. Best wishes,

Alexander Zschokke

ABOUT THE COVER Take That was photographed by Bryan Adams.

The artists support the Hear the World initiative.

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HEAR THE WORLD INITIATIVE

Musician Patrick Nuo helps children with hearing loss in Kenya Nairobi, Kenya: Children born with hearing loss here have as good as no hope of a normal life. As in other developing countries, in Kenya there are very few ways for these children to receive medical and audiological treatment. The consequences of leaving hearing loss untreated are severe: children with poor hearing have difficulties learning to speak and develop slower than their peers. Especially children from socially disadvantaged families have very little hope of integrating, for they are rarely accepted at schools and receive no support. Consequently, they often live isolated lives and are marginalized in society.

Swiss musician and Hear the World ambassador Patrick Nuo wanted to offer his support and visited a Hear the World Foundation project in Nairobi in early May. He accompanied German ENT specialist Dr. Michaela Fuchs and assisted her in her work. In Kenya, Nuo was able to meet the children affected by hearing loss, see for himself how they live and exchange ideas with local partners. “For me, my stay here was a lesson in humility. I admire these children for their strength, that they radiate so much energy and courage to face life, despite the extreme poverty in which they live and their hearing loss,” says Nuo. With his help and support, Nuo not only delighted the children, but also Dr. Michaela Fuchs: “Patrick gave 100 % in assisting me, and had no reservations whatsoever – which is certainly not a given under these circumstances. His visit has helped raise public awareness of our work and will hopefully lead to further financial support.”

The project: A future for children in Nairobi The Hear the World Foundation has been supporting children with hearing loss in Nairobi since 2008. In close cooperation with Lufthansa Cargo, the Swiss foundation established a Hearing Center at the Cargo Human Care Medical Center. German ENT specialist Dr. Michaela Fuchs offers free medical consultation and conducts hearing screenings at the center. Swiss hearing aid manufacturer Phonak regularly donates hearing systems to the Hear the World Foundation. For example, children from Mathare Valley, Nairobi’s second-largest slum, receive free hearing aids. Moreover, the children at the Joymereen school for children with hearing loss are making excellent progress thanks to new digital hearing aids from Hear the World.

And to be able to offer the children long-term support, the Hear the World Foundation has set up a support network.

In addition to the ENT specialists at the Hearing Center, it includes a local hearing aid audiologist, who fits hearing instruments and offers free follow-up care, and a self-help group for parents. Furthermore, a regular speech therapy program at the center is set to start in 2011. Hear the World partner VARTA Microbattery has also been supporting the project with free hearing aid batteries since early 2010.

Elena Torresani To find out more about the Hear the World Foundation visit www.hear-the-world.com/foundation and become a fan on www.facebook.com/CanYouHearTheWorld.

Many thanks for your donation!

In offering important and long-term support to people with hearing loss worldwide, the Hear the World Foundation is reliant on donations. Every donation helps improve the lives of disadvantaged people and especially children. You can help too! An effective hearing aid can change a child’s life, open up new opportunities and have a lasting influence on their education and working life.

Photo: Philipp Rathmer / Sundance

The Hear the World Foundation is tax exempt throughout Switzerland.

Bank details for donations: UBS AG Zürich, Hear the World Foundation, SWIFT: UBSWCHZH80A IBAN: CH12 0023 0230 4773 8401 U

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NEWS

Noise People who smoke, eat the wrong things or don’t get enough exercise risk their health in the long run. There’s nothing new to that. We also know that permanent traffic noise can increase the risk of sleeping disorders, raised blood pressure and heart attacks.

That said, findings on the effects of traffic noise on humans are rarely clear, as an average value is very difficult to calculate and it tends to be the maximum values that have been proven to harm the human body.

The European Heart Journal has now published a study by the Danish Cancer Society. Over 50,000 people participated and the study proves that there is a link between roaring engines, squealing brakes, honking horns and an increased risk of a stroke.

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According to the study, every 12th stroke is caused by strain exacerbated by traffic noise, the vast majority of those affected being over 65. Even just a ten-decibel rise in everyday city noise increased the risk of a stroke in this age group. Yet there is no need to worry too much: According to the experts, traffic noise is not nearly as bad for you as the above-mentioned risk factors that come from an unhealthy lifestyle.

Sandra Spannaus

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Illustration: CĂŠline Meyrat

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

I was diagnosed with sudden hearing loss in my right ear yesterday. I haven’t had much success finding out the cause, but can rule out stress. Can high blood pressure cause sudden hearing loss? I am 47 and my reading is often around 153/93.

High blood pressure can indeed trigger sudden hearing loss. Another possible cause is tension in the neck area. Yet in many cases you can’t put your finger on a definite cause. Nonetheless, you should still go to your GP for a checkup.

Illustrationen: Samuel Roos

Dr. Michaela Fuchs, ENT consultant, holds a diploma in travel and tourism medicine

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What is the best way to clean out your ears? I have recently noticed a clogged or heavy feeling in my ear. I have always used a few drops of peroxide and have never had a problem.

As of the past month I cannot seem to dislodge my wax.

The best thing is to have the ears checked by a physician or hearing healthcare professional to rule out any contraindications and to advise on a self-cleaning regime – if suitable for you. There are numerous products available on the market but most hearing professionals advise against putting anything into your ear as you can’t see what you are doing. It is best to have your ears cleared out by a doctor, nurse or hearing professional.

Robert Beiny, Director of Audiology and owner of The Hearing Healthcare Practice in Hertfordshire, England

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WHAT’S THAT SOUND?

Photo: Michael Blann

Someone jumping into water

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PRODUCTS

Francesco Tristano – bachCage Johann Sebastian Bach was an important German Baroque composer. John Cage was an American composer and key figure in the “New Music” movement. Virtually irreconcilable, or so we might initially think.

Not for Francesco Tristano. In his new album bachCage, he honors the two very different composers, each of whom has influenced in his own way the life of the aspiring pianist from Luxembourg.

Far removed from Tristano’s (in)famous mix of classical and electronic music, this album is something special, and could also reconcile critics. It features both his own compositions and, of course, pieces by Cage and Bach, which the young artist interprets with a highly personal note.

Quiet sounds almost with a meditative quality alternate with episodes of furious playing and once again offer an insight into Tristano’s diverse style. We’ll have to note his name. And we are glad to.

ASIN: B004KBSQ2E

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PRODUCTS

Typo Lyrics An obvious idea and yet novel: The book Typo Lyrics – The Sound of Fonts, recently published by Birkhäuser Verlag, fuses contemporary fonts and song lyrics from all kinds of genres into a highly expressive presentation. The idea came from the eponymous feature of the magazine Slanted. Music-minded graphic designers were called upon to harmonize all kinds of musical styles and lyrics with well-known font families and contemporary font designs. Over 170 creative minds produced the same number of works, unique design experiments between sound and font, divided into eleven chapters.

Both renowned graphic designers and talented newcomers made use of the entire musical spectrum from swing and pop to krautrock, chansons and hip hop, and infused their fonts with the rhythm. Essays by editor-in-chief of Spex Max Dax, and DJ and producer Frank Wiedemann, as well as interviews with renowned designers that offer interesting insights into their professional lives in acoustic and visual design, round out the book. With a particularly appealing appearance thanks to the color concept (different colored paper for each chapter and varying highlight colors), this hardback book is an informative and inspiring work for typographers, graphic designers and of course music lovers.

ISBN-10: 9783034603669 ISBN-13: 978-3034603669

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PRODUCTS

Plektrum by Deva Jewels We usually associate passion and dexterity with guitar players. It is precisely these qualities that we also ďŹ nd in the jewelry series by Deva Jewels. Beautiful ideas realized with a love of detail.

At ďŹ rst glance it is nothing more than a simple, silver pendant. But if we take a closer look, we see that it is a plectrum. That small, flat tool that guitarists and players of other string instruments use to make the sounds that they produce from their instrument more powerful and distinctive.

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The solid 925-sterling-silver plectrum, usually made of hard plastic and brightly colored, is in this case elegant and with a personal engraving is totally unique. Also available with the additional function of a key ring, this guitar pick attached to a delicate chain or a colored band makes either a subtle or striking neck adornment. Music lovers are sure to want this type of chain! www.deva-jewels.de

PRODUCTS

Naída S – There is no reason not to hear well You are sure to know someone who no longer hears perfectly in all situations. Many people whose hearing is gradually deteriorating put off getting a hearing aid for years.

Unlike people with severe hearing loss. They are reliant on hearing devices and know how greatly they can improve their quality of life. For today’s hearing aids make use of sophisticated technology and moreover have an aesthetically appealing design.

For three years now, the success of Phonak’s power hearing aid Naída has hinged on various innovations: For people with significant hearing loss, eliminating acoustic feedback (whistling) and being able to hear high-frequency sounds are particularly important factors. Thanks to cutting-edge technology, Naída S meets these requirements. That means, for instance, that sounds such as the chirping of birds or ringing of a bell, perfectly ordinary sounds for people with good hearing, can be heard again.

Design and size are also important factors when it comes to selecting a hearing aid. Modern devices are tiny and very discreet. For many other devices however, it is the case that the more severe the hearing loss, the larger the device. Not so Naída, for its high-performance technology is housed in a surprisingly small, robust and watertight casing and has proved itself for many years now. Comments by experts and hearing-aid wearers worldwide can be viewed at www.1000reasonsfornaida.com.

Naída also connects people with severe hearing loss with mobile communication functions. Its wireless and handsfree functions, plus the connection via FM radio technology and Bluetooth, enable wearers to access the wireless world of modern communication systems.

Thus there is no convincing reason why people should have to forgo the many sounds that enrich our lives on a daily basis. Does that someone you know, whose hearing is no longer tip top, know that? www.1000reasonsfornaida.com

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KNOWLEDGE

When painkillers do more harm than good: Samter’s syndrome Samter’s syndrome, also known as acetylsalicylic acid (ASA) intolerance syndrome, is a rare reaction to the active ingredients in common over-the-counter painkillers. As early as three years after aspirin was first introduced in 1899, doctors reported noticing “allergy-like” side effects.

Allergies, generally triggered by pollen, household dust mites, animal hair or foods such as flour, milk, nuts etc., involve excessive activation of the body’s own immune system. In comparison, ASA intolerance is due to a dysfunctional metabolism which shows itself as a complex of symptoms.

Difficult diagnosis

Recently experts have favored the term Aspirin-Exacerbated Respiratory Disease (AERD). Here, the emphasis is on the exacerbating effect of aspirin and other analgesics, as in most cases patients already suffer from a severe chronic respiratory condition, irrespective of the painkillers they take.

The characteristic symptoms of ASA intolerance often do not appear simultaneously, but emerge staggered over a period of several years or even decades. Therefore the early clinical recognition of a causal link between an analgesic intolerance and, for instance, recurring nasal polyps or an asthma attack is often difficult. Moreover, additional influenzal infections, stress or simultaneous allergic reactions to other substances and allergens can complicate diagnosis. The following symptoms indicate ASA intolerance: severe asthma attacks, blocked nose and watery nasal discharge (especially if allergic rhinitis has been excluded by way of allergy tests), inflammatory swellings of the mucous membranes of the paranasal sinuses (sinusitis) or the formation of nasal polyps.

Although a patient’s medical history and an analysis of his/her symptoms often provide clear indications of the existence of an ASA intolerance, provocation tests are the only way to achieve a definitive diagnosis. However, these tests, which involve patients taking aspirin orally, nasally or via inhalation at a hospital, require a great deal of equipment and time, as the patient must be monitored for several hours. In some hospitals and treatment centers, staff conduct provocation tests in the intensive care unit, owing to the risk of an anaphylactic shock.

The patients who are affected

Out of the frying pan, into the fire

ASA intolerance primarily affects female patients from 30 years of age onwards. The intolerance reaction usually appears within one hour of the patient having taken a painkiller. It takes the form of an asthma attack, often combined with a runny nose, conjunctivitis and flushing of the face and neck. In severe incidences the reaction can lead to a potentially fatal case of anaphylactic shock. There is very little data on the frequency of illnesses of the upper respiratory tract owing to ASA intolerance, as only a very few studies with very limited numbers of patients have been conducted thus far. According to estimates, around 8 to 20 percent of all asthmatics are affected by the condition and therefore at risk of suffering severe, life-threatening attacks. Roughly 6 to 15 percent of patients with nasal polyps are affected by this intolerance. According to other publications, every tenth patient affected by chronic inflammation of the paranasal sinuses owing to polyps (polyposis nasi) can also expect to suffer from ASA intolerance.

Nasal polyps are known to trigger migraines and inflammation of the paranasal sinuses, leading to throbbing pain and/or headaches, and unfortunately analgesic intolerance strongly limits pain treatment options. In the case of nasal polyps the body may react to the painkiller, resulting in an intensification of the inflammatory process, which further stimulates the formation of polyps and increases the risk of an asthma attack. Owing to these multiple factors ASA intolerance triggers a vicious cycle.

Today, the following medications are available for the treatment of ASA intolerance: cortisone preparations, beta-2 agonists, which are effective over a long period, and leukotriene antagonists, which improve lung function in asthmatics. The greatest success has been recorded with adaptive ASA deactivation. ASA deactivation, like desensitization in allergy sufferers, is based on the observation that, up to three days after the oral administration of a very small quantity of aspirin, patients with ASA intolerance show no sign of the condition, and the formerly observed symptoms following another dose of ASA diminish. By using this so-called refractory period, in which the administration of ASA has no undesired side effects, and by gradually increasing the dose of ASA, a tolerance of therapeutic doses of ASA can be built up. Aspirin is administered in small doses and the doses are then gradually increased, until the patient can tolerate a 500 mg dose.

While a number of different working groups have reported successful deactivation procedures with maintenance doses of 300 mg per day, other clinical studies demonstrate equal effectiveness with just 100 mg per day. For adaptive deactivation, aspirin can be administered orally or by a combination of oral administration and inhalation.

The symptoms of the condition are: • Sensitivity to painkillers (aspirin, ibuprofen, diclofenac, indometacin etc.)

• Nasal polyps • Loss of sense of smell • Chronic rhinitis • Asthma • Urticarial skin reactions

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Illustration: Hennie Haworth

As well as improving the symptoms of Samter’s syndrome in the upper respiratory tract, the method of adaptive deactivation is highly significant for all patients who suffer from rheumatic complaints, degenerative joint diseases or continually recurring pain and are therefore dependent on ASA or other analgesics. Then, of course, there is the growing number of patients who take aspirin as a preventative measure against heart conditions. However, as not only painkillers, but also numerous foods and herbs contain salicylates, where often only small quantities are sufficient to generate allergy-like intolerances, adaptive deactivation is the treatment of choice in these generally unavoidable cases, too. Common symptoms of the inflammatory processes caused by food salicylates are a blocked nose and loss of sense of smell, chronic rhinitis and urticarial skin reactions such as hives and redness.

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Given the general increase in allergies, medical professionals also expect to see an increase in ASA intolerance.

An important area of research into this rare intolerance is extensive, multicenter, placebo-controlled studies in order to unequivocally determine the optimum daily ASA dosage for adaptive deactivation and thus to create a firm foundation for the treatment of Samter’s syndrome.

Anno Bachem

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Illustration: Stefan Kugel

KNOWLEDGE

Hearing with your bones: The science of restoring hearing It sounds like something out of a science fiction novel, but recent advancements in medical research are opening up new and exciting opportunities for restoring one of the most important human senses – hearing.

Iconic super hero Superman, Christopher Reeve, suffered severe spinal injuries in 1995 from a horse riding accident.

He became a well-known advocate for stem cell research and it is thanks to his lobbying that the term “stem cell” entered the public arena.

The most common, and established, stem cell therapy used today is bone marrow transplantation, used to treat leukemia. In the future, medical researchers anticipate that technologies derived from stem cell research may be used to treat diseases including cancer, Parkinson’s disease, arthritis, spinal cord injuries, multiple sclerosis, diabetes, blindness and hearing loss.

Hearing loss is one of the most common sensory conditions. While studies have shown that noise-induced hearing loss is going to become the next big epidemic affecting the younger generation (ScienceDaily, 2007) there are many other causes of hearing loss including genetic (inherited), environmental (infections, premature birth and ototoxic drugs) or the natural aging process.

Hearing loss – how does it occur?

Hair cells are small hair-like projections that line the cochlea, the sensory organ of the inner ear responsible for hearing. We are born with approximately 30,000 hair cells in each ear. In people with normal hearing, hair cells convert sound into electrical signals, which are then transmitted to the brain and subsequently “heard”. People with sensorineural hearing loss may suffer from missing, damaged or too few hair cells.

Unlike other cells in the body, such as skin cells, the regenerative ability of the cochlea is limited, making restoring hearing a challenge. Interestingly, in nature there are no “deaf” birds or fish as they have the remarkable natural ability to quickly regrow damaged hair cells! In humans some natural recovery of damaged hair cells does occur, leading to partial improvement of a temporary hearing loss. However in most cases where the damage is severe, hearing loss is permanent.

What is a stem cell?

Cells are the microscopic building blocks of the human body and each is derived from a stem cell. Stem cells, often called “the body’s master cells”, divide in the body, or laboratory, to form more cells. These cells either become new stem cells (self-regeneration) or become specialized (differentiate) with a specific function (eg. blood cell, brain cell, liver cell).

There are two types of stem cells: embryonic stem cells and adult stem cells.

Embryonic stem cells, as the term suggests, occur in embryos that are four to five days old. These cells divide into more stem cells or specialize to become any type of body cell. For researchers embryonic stem cells have the highest potential for use to regenerate or repair diseased or damaged tissue and organs in humans.

Adult stem cells are found in small numbers in most adult tissues, such as bone marrow. In the past it was believed that adult stem cells could only create similar types of cells. For example bone marrow stem cells only created blood cells. Current research suggests that adult stem cells may be able to create unrelated types of cells.

The potential of stem cell therapy is that the transplantation of cells from other parts of the body could treat, prevent or even reverse certain conditions. For example bone marrow stem cells could be turned into hearing hair cells to combat hearing loss.

The role of stem cells in reversing hearing loss Researchers hope that they can train stem cells to regenerate or repair damaged hair cells and hence reverse or prevent hearing loss. Recent research around the world is showing very positive indications that this may be possible in the future.

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In Japan, researchers injected bone marrow stem cells into the cochlea of mice with drug-induced hearing loss.

The transplanted mice showed a faster recovery from hearing loss, particularly for high pitched sounds, compared to the mice which were not injected. Researchers were able to show that the bone marrow stem cells had the ability to function like a hearing hair cell and even displayed a similar shape to the healthy hair cells (Kamiya el at, 2007).

Stem cell researchers in Australia have found that patients suffering from hearing problems which began during infancy and childhood could benefit from a transplant of stem cells from their nose! Scientists injected nasal stem cells into the cochlea of hearing-impaired mice. These mice were specially chosen as they display a decline in hearing following infancy. Hearing levels of the mice were tested a month later revealing better hearing in the stem cell-transplanted mice compared to those who did not receive cells. It is believed that the nasal stem cells were able to maintain the health and function of the hair cells, preventing the hearing from deteriorating (Sonali et al, 2001).

The future: What is the possibility of a vaccination or a pill against hearing loss?

Stem cell and gene therapies targeting hearing loss are still relatively new areas of research. It is fair to say that we are still many years away from a vaccination or a pill that can prevent or reverse hearing loss. However, the insights gained by researchers in the last few years are the first steps on the way to potential treatments of genetically based hearing loss or hearing loss caused by hair cell damage.

Hearing loss, while not reversible, is somewhat preventable and treatable. Hearing care professionals advocate prevention measures such as avoiding or reducing harmful noises, and seeking treatment (hearing aids) as early as possible.

Shin-Shin Hobi

Other avenues In the last 10 years, researchers in gene therapy have shown strong and positive results in their quest to find a “cure” for hearing loss. The most promising advance in the use of gene therapy to restoring hearing has been the discovery of a particular gene which stimulates the growth of new hair cells (Hildebrand et al, 2007).

While this may be a wonderful treatment for people who have acquired a hearing loss later in life, gene therapy may also offer a solution for genetically acquired hearing losses. Researchers in America have successfully inserted a key hearing gene into the developing ears of embryonic mice. The researchers were able to trace how the inserted gene effectively led to hair cell production. The result was that treated mice were born with more hair cells compared to non-treated mice.

Antioxidants are touted by the cosmetics and health industry as the solution against aging due to their properties in reducing cell deterioration and inflammation (Lamm and Arnold, 1999). Studies have shown that patients with sudden hearing loss experience better hearing recovery when antioxidants are taken together with standard steroid therapy. In some studies, results indicated that noiseinduced hearing loss could be reduced when antioxidants were given before and after an episode of noise exposure.

There are many studies showing their positive effect on other hearing disorders such as tinnitus, Meniere’s disease (balance disorder) and possibly presbycusis (age-related hearing loss).

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Case Western Reserve University, “Isolation of Stem Cells May Lead to a Treatment for Hearing Loss”, ScienceDaily 6 April 2007, Web 8 April 2011 Hildebrand M., Newton S., Gubbels S., Sheffield A., Kochhar A., Silva M., Dahl H., Rose S., Behlke M. and Smith (2008), “Advances in Molecular and Cellular Therapies for Hearing Loss”.

Molecular Therapy vol.16 no. 2 224-236 Kamiya K., Fujinami Y., Hoya N., Okamoto Y., Kouike H., Komatsuzaki R., Kusano R., Nakagawa S., Satoh H., Fuji M. and Matsunaga T. (2007), “Mesenchymal Stem Cell Transplantation Accelerates Hearing Recovery through the Repair of Injured Cochlear Fibrocytes”, Am J Pathology vol 171:214-226 Lamm K and Arnold W (1999) “Successful Treatment of NoiseInduced Cochlear Ischemia, Hypoxia and Hearing Loss”, Ann NY Acad Science (884): 233-248 Sonali R., Sullivan J., Egger V., Borecki A. and Oleskevich S. (2011), “Functional Effects of Adult Human Olfactory Stem Cells on EarlyOnset Sensorineural Hearing Loss”, Stem Cells (10): 670-677

Stem Cells – The Ethics Stem cell science, like cloning or genetic engineering, is one of the more controversial and polarizing topics in medical research. The religious and moral objection to stem cell research is based on the use of human embryonic stem cells, as it involves the destruction of an embryo.

Human embryonic stem cells used in research come from eggs that are fertilized in a clinic and are no longer required (i.e. not required for implantation). They are then donated for research purposes with informed consent from the donors.

The laws governing the use of human embryonic stem cells vary signiďŹ cantly by country. In some countries it is illegal or severely restricted (e.g. Germany, Austria, Ireland, Italy and Portugal) while others are supportive (e.g. Japan, India, Israel and Australia). The United States also remains very divided, with some states enforcing a complete ban while others give support.

The ethical issues surrounding the use of embryonic stem cells will always be of a sensitive nature. There are strict guidelines and legislations regarding research involving embryos, but for many, research on adult stem cells is the only acceptable alternative.

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THE SOUND OF THINGS

An orchestral interior How Niels van Eijk and Miriam van der Lubbe fused rooms, furniture, uniforms, fabrics, cutlery and cups into a total acoustic experience.

Once, design was considered an holistic means of attempting to improve people’s living conditions “from the spoon to the city”, in the words of Max Bill. Today, however, we tend to place total works of art in design in the past – for instance Arne Jacobsen’s legendary SAS Royal Hotel in Copenhagen, for which he designed, between 1956 and 1960, not only the architecture, but also the complete interior from the furniture through the luminaires to the fabrics and cutlery. Can we still group such different design fields together as a convincing total artwork today?

A few years ago, the Dutch design duo Miriam van der Lubbe and Niels van Eijk received a commission that every designer must dream of: They were asked to conceive a concept, together with Philips Ambient Experience Design, for the comprehensive redesign of the somewhat dated Muziekgebouw concert hall in Eindhoven, built in the early 1990s. It was to include everything “from the façade to the coffee cups”. “The building had brilliant acoustics, but otherwise was terrible,” according to Niels van Eijk.

“Everything was in the wrong place, and in the wrong colors. We wanted to enable visitors to redevelop a connection to this building.” Thus the two designers conceived their design from the inside out and not only focused on the overall impression, but also the tiniest detail.

They designed the high glass entrance façade and the foyers, the stairwells, auditoria, changing rooms, bars and bistros, the carpets, ceilings and furniture, down to the staff uniforms, coffee cups and boxes for the programs.

The designers wanted to enable visitors to find their own way through the building intuitively, without having to follow direction signs. Which is why, aside from a couple of names on doors and in foyers, there are no signs in the building. Instead, the sound-absorbing ceilings in the foyers consist of countless LED-studded tiles that show visitors the way. The high-tech equipment that permeates the entire building is generally hidden. When selecting fabrics for the seats in the auditoria, the designers analyzed the visitors’ clothing. And to spare the musicians from looking at an empty hall on less busy days, they covered the seats in an irregular pattern of blue and green tones that gives the impression of a mixed audience. There is one seat in the large auditorium covered in yellow fabric, as though one lady has gone for a particularly bright dress today.

This playful approach is evident in numerous spots throughout the redesigned concert hall. For instance, the kitsch floral motifs on the coffee cups that van Eijk and van der Lubbe designed for in-house catering turn out on closer inspection to be collages of musical instruments.

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With nine motifs and five colors, they have created a huge number of different designs so that even a regular guest at the concert hall is sure to get a different cup on each visit.

It just goes to show: Even the tiniest detail can ensure a unique evening. The knotholes in the wooden “Silver Knot” tables in the foyers and artists’ areas have not been covered over, but deliberately emphasized and filled with silver. The small mirrored tables and mirrored walls in the artists’ dressing rooms make reference to the typical mirrors surrounded by light bulbs that we know from Hollywood movies.

The designer duo also developed a furniture system for the entire building. It features various shells and tops, from which armchairs and sofas are formed that allow more or less separation between users. Fitted with a hood, the armchair becomes the “Hood Chair”, offering a degree of seclusion. The sofa, combined with the hood element, becomes a “Love Seat”, which even features integrated lighting. For a music shop on the premises, the “Hood Chairs” become music stations complete with screens and speakers, where users can listen to pieces from the database.

According to the designers, the seating furniture does not formally reference music or sound – and yet its angular forms still seem to give the impression of a sharp-edged composition. For some it calls to mind, with its additional elements and bright colors, the loud Memphis design of the 1980s. With its presence and power, it can be considered an expression of a typical Dutch attitude to design. Indeed, in the Netherlands, especially in public spaces, designers often seek rather to demonstrate accessibility and democratic equality than pay too much attention to elegance, restraint and subtleties. Yet perhaps the furniture is just simply holding its ground as a capricious standalone for as long as possible, only to then meld into the orchestration of forms and colors in the end. With the Muziekgebouw in Eindhoven, Miriam van der Lubbe and Niels van Eijk have attempted to create a contemporary total artwork, where huge rooms and headstrong furniture, heterogeneous colors and fabrics, excellent acoustics and restrained optics fuse into a self-contained total acoustic experience.

Including the high-pitched sound of a yellow seat.

Markus Frenzl www.ons-adres.nl www.muziekgebouweindhoven.nl

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Photo: Frank Tielemans

Photos: Iwan Baan

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ARCHITECTURE

Parking under palm trees, the better way Herzog & de Meuron’s parking garage in Miami Thanks to our experience with the noisy purpose-built parking facilities that permeate our urban environment, the idea of an “attractive” carpark that uses a familiar formal language in exposed concrete and neither hides nor disguises itself, seems to us completely improbable. The Pritzker Prize winners Herzog & de Meuron are showing in Miami that there is another way. Located just around the corner from the Art Deco district, the open, sculptural concrete structure at 1111 Lincoln Road is light and airy, bright and friendly, yet with a clear leaning towards the universally scorned Brutalism. Marcel Krenz did some glamorous test-parking for HEAR THE WORLD magazine.

No, carparks are most definitely not among the most popular of modern buildings. Cramped, dark, dirty, somewhat forbidding and unpleasant to drive in: Generally simply clad in raw concrete, they make our lives easier and yet so often offend our aesthetic sensibilities. Not that the new, multi-story parking garage by Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron looks so very different at first glance, but it is nonetheless the chic reinterpretation of an architectural classic. Despite being a functionally naked building structure in what the grand master Le Corbusier charmingly renamed “béton brut”, the six-story garage is far more than just that, fulfilling a great many functions beyond “more attractive parking”: Located on the bustling shopping street Lincoln Road, the building contains three restaurants and several stores on the ground floor and more on the other five levels.

Surrounded by the popular bars and restaurants on Lincoln Road, the expressive garage has become a new and attractive multi-purpose destination. One reason for this is that the architects have contrasted the standard parking garage ceiling height of a little over two meters with a transparent structure with multi-story ceiling heights – of up to seven meters. “The architecture is defined by the loads that have to be borne,” explain the sought-after architects, and indeed, by opening up the conventional stacked stories, they have lent the building elegance and spaciousness, lent a rhythm by slanting supports. The absence of façade cladding, together with very delicate railings, references the city with incomparable views. So chic that the developer has himself indulged in a rooftop penthouse – right next to a restaurant.

is the first parking garage that exhibits autos instead of hiding them,” states the architecture critic of the New Yorker, Paul Goldberger, forgetting that Paul Schneider-Esleben, who designed Cologne/Bonn Airport, already attempted the same thing back in the 1950s with his Haniel parking garage in the Grafenberg district of Düsseldorf.

The project, which has received multiple awards, cost US$ 65 million. According to property developer Robert Wennet, it is simply not supposed to look or feel like a parking garage. Naturally, he had his sights set first and foremost on his business interests, for the additional parking facilities, blended with other uses, enabled him to create more rentable space primarily on the upper levels. German publisher Taschen Verlag and coffee firm Nespresso immediately recognized the style and sophistication offered by a store in the garage. And Jacques Herzog’s description of the building could just as well be said of the nearby beach at Miami Beach: “All muscle, no clothes.”

For his money, Wennet got a good 300 parking spaces, a small bank branch and four owner-occupied apartments in addition to the stores and restaurants. Apartments that sold for around $ 2.5 million. It seems the name and skills of a star architect are required to make living in a parking garage economically viable. Herzog & de Meuron came to international renown with their project for the Tate Modern in London, the Elbphilharmonie concert hall in Hamburg and the Beijing National Stadium, the iconic Bird’s Nest, built for the 2008 Summer Olympics. Now, in Miami Beach, their high art can be admired in a somewhat profane structure. Yet it is almost worth renting a car while visiting Art Basel Miami Beach in the fall just to park it here. If you want to know more about the considerable, but otherwise generally disregarded history of the modern parking garage, you have two options: Either you park under palm trees in Miami and see for yourself the story’s happy ending, or you flick through Simon Henley’s The Architecture of Parking and follow the path from the first parking garage, built in Paris in 1905, to Herzog & de Meuron’s practical, profane building. Either way: Have a good trip!

Marcel Krenz

This is where the building’s multi-functional character shows itself, which focuses on people, not their cars. As an event location it has already served magazines such as Wallpaper* as a background setting, and movie shoots and parties take place on the parking levels. A sculptural stairwell offers auto owners a “parcours architectural”, which, step by step, reveals the building as a temple for the golden age of automobiles, believed to be long gone, and thus makes reference to the best transport buildings of the 1920s, 1930s or 1950s. A treat that for four dollars an hour transforms conventional parking into a pleasant experience. Yet the idea is not completely new: “Lincoln Road 1111 HEAR THE WORLD 33

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ART

In the cabinet of curiosities of digital culture Monumental columns decorated in gold relief and Corinthian capitals support the magnificent dome of the theater foyer. In a bygone age, under Napoleon III, the crème de la crème of Second Empire high society gathered at the Théâtre de la Gaîté Lyrique to attend musical soirées

by Jacques Offenbach. Today, Parisians meet to enjoy electronic music and digital culture in the selfsame historic halls. Manuelle Gautrand has transformed the old opera house in the center of Paris into a lively and modern forum bringing together live concerts, performances, video shows as well as spatial and light experiments, plays and dance performances. The historical façade and grand foyer of the building in the third arrondissement were preserved, but as regards the other rooms and halls, which were largely destroyed, the Marseille-born architect was given carte blanche for an extensive redesign.

In place of antique crystal chandeliers, reduced modern pendant luminaires allude to the building’s new use as soon as visitors enter the foyer. Their projecting, cylindrical lampshades are digital canvases, communicate with each another and act as projection screens for programmed light shows, which pay tribute to the building’s name and seal its significance in the digital age, too. “Gaîté Lyrique” roughly translates as “lyrical joviality”. With a sense of playfulness and lightness, an experimental world opens up behind the historic façade that immerses visitors in a universe full of discoveries and perceptions with its exhibitions and special installation rooms, concert halls and audio boxes. It sheds light not only on the historical development from the phonograph to the iPad, and from the cinematograph to 3D technologies, but also on current events, presented in concerts, live performances and multimedia installations. “What we want to do here is shed light on the contemporary phenomenon of digital culture and offer visitors a key to understanding what is going on today,” explains Jérôme Delormas, Director of the Gaîté Lyrique. As a kind of toolbox of digital culture and a lab for cultural encounters, the Gaîté Lyrique shows projects by young, experimental theater companies and the Rimini Protokoll collective, offers avant-garde musicians like Brian Eno space for their 3D performances and presents personal perspectives, such as those of the British group of artists Matt Pyke & Friends, on the world of new technologies. In the ferocious installation “Rien à cacher / rien à craindre”, created by British group United Visual Artists for the reopening of the building, light, space and sound merge into a comprehensive multimedia orchestration, with the boundaries between each disintegrating and the elements combining to form an overall sensory impression.

Photos: © Vincent Fillon

“It is important for a building to have a number of stories and lives, especially a public building. I personally found it a very exciting idea to create a connection between digital art and electronic music on the one side and the past on the other – and all the more or less glamorous sides that have shaped the character of this building,” says Manuelle Gautrand, explaining her design approach. The theater in central Paris opened in 1862, yet the splendor of the Second Empire was only a brief phase in its eventful history. The building was modified and converted several times until it degenerated in the 1980s as an entertainment complex and was distorted beyond recognition. When it closed in the late 1980s, the city lost a cultural center, and the Mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanoë, has been committed to its renaissance ever since his election in 2001. The city awarded total funds of €85 million for its transformation into a modern forum. After around eight years of planning and construction work, the Gaîté Lyrique was reopened in March 2011. Its diverse cultural program now appeals primarily to a young audience aged between 15 and 35.

Digital joviality

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Black box for sound and multimedia installations

Architecture and encounter

Three rooms for concerts and performances form the core of the new Gaîté Lyrique, which with a total area of 9,000 square meters can accommodate 1,500 visitors and makes five of its seven stories accessible to the public. Like individual modules, the rooms host a wide range of cultural events, offering artists and audiences alike diverse artistic possibilities and experiences. For acoustic reasons, the large hall is conceived as a black box, located at the center of the building like a theater within a theater. It is sealed off from the surrounding architecture so as not to affect the Gaîté’s neighboring residential buildings. The hall’s 300 seats in total can be arranged flexibly in various constellations and like the stage, can, if necessary, be configured and supplemented by display screens. A total of 46 screens and a sophisticated acoustic system make the hall a large, multi-use stage, which artists can design and adjust as they please. The large hall can be recognized from the outside by its mirrored wall separating it from the neighboring rooms. Moreover, thanks to its high technical standard, various spatial proportions, stage shows and sound and multimedia adventures are possible in the small hall. With 70 to 150 seats, this hall too has a flexible structure: the side walls can be slid across and the floor fixed at various heights, making it suitable for all kinds of performances, concerts and installations.

“For me, the entire building is a kind of body in which the artists can get themselves set up and communicate from anywhere,” comments Manuelle Gautrand. Her architecture considers itself a foil against with digital culture can be encountered; it enables experiences, provides a variable and, if necessary, modifiable context for them, and optimizes the possibilities and preconditions of perception.

In this way, encountering the historic theater building becomes an adventure in digital culture: tonight the Dutch duo Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans will be discussing with visitors folklore on the World Wide Web, later on two Jamaican reggae greats will be performing, The Congos and The Abyssinians, and tomorrow the band versus 2.0 will transform the large hall into a pulsating acoustic cavern with its version of electropop. The city of Paris was always open-minded as regards the arts. Thanks to the way it sees itself politically, it has retained that role to this day and is promoting digital culture in a big way. Giving space to digital culture at all is not a matter of course. As such, locating it in as traditional a building as the Gaîté Lyrique is a strong statement for the future. And that not only benefits its fans, but also curious visitors, who can be quickly converted.

Sandra Hofmeister

The “Chambre sonore” continues to offer a very special experience at the Gaîté Lyrique. As a windowless room bathed in alternating colors of light, the sensitive floor responds to visitors and translates movements into a programmed world of sounds and light effects. Reception, exhibitions, cafés and the foyer are grouped around the two halls and the auditorium like individual modules.

Various functions are sometimes integrated into open boxes, part of Manuelle Gautrand’s playful concept of space within space. Sometimes the colored elements are used as audio boxes and sometimes as video spaces. Yet they can also serve as office spaces and artists’ studios.

Moreover, for the artists in residence and for workshops, which are also offered at the Gaîté, there are sound, recording and multimedia studios, located in the attic.

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SPORT

Extreme sport for the ears – or: Why Formula 1 driver Jenson Button finds it cool to protect his hearing Someone who enters “golf and triathlon” under hobbies in questionnaires either has too much spare time or a very demanding job. The latter can be said of Jenson Alexander Lyons Button (Member of the British Empire). The man whom not just Formula 1 officials praise for his “smooth driving style” is among the world’s most successful active racing drivers. Most recently he stood next to current world champion Sebastian Vettel (Red Bull) and his own McLaren-Mercedes teammate Lewis Hamilton on the winner’s podium at the Spanish Grand Prix. Like his two colleagues, Button has also been world champion. This was two years ago. When this magazine went to press, he was in a very respectable fourth place in the driver standings, and even in tough times he has repeatedly shown that he is still in the running. Like triathlon, motor racing is also an extreme sport. Not only is it fast and dangerous, it is also extremely loud. Nevertheless, or precisely for this reason, “I rely strongly on my hearing”, says Button.

As the 50th ambassador for the Hear the World initiative, he wants to be a role model for hearing protection for as many people as possible.

As a welcome change to the humming of car engines, privately Button listens to a music mix that we can justifiably call “eclectic”. Alongside the Pigeon Detectives, a young indie rock band from Leeds and a favorite of BBC1 DJ Steve Lamacq, Jenson likes above all ambitious R&B sounds such as the music of Grammy Award winner Maxwell, who set new standards in “neo soul” in the mid and late 1990s with his Urban Hang Suite.

“Despite the extreme sounds associated with motorsports, I still heavily depend on my hearing to ensure I perform at my best,” says Jenson Button. “Whether it’s fine tuning the car before the race or communicating with the team on the track. Hearing protection is essential to maintaining a good sense of hearing.” This is why he is particularly keen to be involved in the Hear the World mission: “The ability to hear well and connect with the world around us can have a huge impact on our quality of life, yet many people don’t understand the risks they expose their ears to every day. It’s essential that people understand the importance of protecting their hearing today to prevent hearing loss in later life, something I am very aware of in my line of work.”

Christian Arndt

Photo: Bryan Adams

Jenson started kart racing at just nine years of age, supported by his father, who was himself a successful driver in the British Rallycross series. At 18 Button became British Formula Ford champion and advanced to second place in the European driver standings. One year later he took third place in Formula 3, before competing in his first Formula 1 season at 20, achieving a respectable 12 World Cup points.

Ever since his debut in the top class of motor racing, Button has been seen as a joker who, although possessing all the necessary ambition, rarely loses his sense of humor. His winning smile and boyish charm have made the Brit a role model and one of the most popular drivers in Formula 1 racing. Yet the 31-year-old has his racing skill and strategic ingenuity alone to thank for the fact that for more than ten years, he has repeatedly made it to the top of the most challenging automobile racing class in a number of different teams. Naturally, there are highs and lows that must be weathered. For instance in Monaco, where in 2009 he earned himself “a place in Formula One’s history books” (The Express) with a triumphant start-to-finish victory and the following year was written off shortly after the start as going “from hero to zero” (The Sun). Although the failure of his car shortly after the race started was “only” due to a mechanic’s error. What we don’t know is whether the mechanic in question is still working for Button’s team.

Of course, above all the sound of his McLaren Mercedes MP 4-26 is music to his ears, and these are also an essential part of the vehicle tool kit that Button needs for the “finetuning of the car before the race”: The crankshaft of the eight-cylinder, high-performance engine with 32 valves, which weighs no more than 100 kilograms, rotates at up to 18,000 revolutions per minute, and all this takes place just roughly an arm’s length from the back of the driver’s head.

It is inconceivable for a driver or mechanic to expose himself to such a noise level without ear protection.

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TRAVEL

Hear the calls!

Iceland has such beautiful, often seemingly unreal views that it is sometimes good to just trust our ears and listen to the island’s sounds.

In a pub in Reykjavik, a man is sitting and waving his arms about. He just barely missed the waitress. Then a whole tray of expensive imported beer would have been wasted, but luckily she managed to duck out the way. Maybe the noises the man was making gave her some idea of what might happen. Jón Þór Birgisson, known as Jónsi, is demonstrating to friends what the waves sound like up at Húsavík: “knnzsshwmmm!” He claims to be able to distinguish the sound of these waves from all others throughout the country, which, however, no-one believes. As if the waves at Djupívogur in the east sound any different! “They do,” calls Jónsi, “kshshshmmmbl!” Totally different beach, totally different pebbles.

Jónsi is a singer in the Icelandic band Sigur Rós and is traveling around his home country, collecting ideas, looking for inspiration, and finding special sounds. Critics have always heard a great deal of Iceland in the band’s highly original compositions. For them, superimposed voices sounded like the northern lights, and the electric guitar maltreated with a cello bow like a glacier from which a large wall of ice is threatening to break off, and they may have all been right. Indeed, perhaps Sigur Rós’ music really is a representation of all the sounds of Iceland. And maybe that is why Jónsi is now looking out the window.

Outside on Hverfisgata, a flock of seagulls is squabbling over a fish. Their squawking is so loud and shrill that it can be heard through the glass and above the tavern din. They sound like a string section out of control.

Talking of cars, driving in Iceland is also an acoustic experience. On a gravel track like the “52” into the Kaldidalur valley, for instance. The car clatters and rumbles and crunches so much over bumps and potholes that the music from the MP3 player is only just audible as background noise. There must be four million stones flying up and hitting the bottom of the car per minute, at least! After only a few miles, the clattering din is such a natural part of driving that when you stop the silence seems almost eerie.

Sometimes, however, there is another sound that can be heard during these stops, one that for rental car drivers is most unwelcome, namely, the quiet hissing of air escaping from a punctured tire. The only sound that drivers fear more is the Icelandic “slurpppppsh”, which comes from the floor of the rental car when, it turns out, there was in fact more water in the ford than they had thought.

Iceland’s rivers are the tumultuous brothers of its calm lakes and fjords. They bubble and gush, fed from the highland glaciers and driven by differences in elevation.

Especially in the late afternoon in summer, when the sun has had the whole day to melt the ice, they go wild: Then the innocuous brooks of early morning become foaming torrents. And wherever these rivers plunge into the deep over rocks and cliffs, it seems the whole world is a single roar. Whoever has stood in the thundering spray of Gullfoss, Dettifoss or Dynjandi will only wearily shrug their shoulders on beholding Continental European waterfalls.

Photos: Sabine Reitmaier

Can you hear a country? Yes, actually. And you can hear Iceland pretty well. Paradoxically, this is because of its fabulous views. For Iceland is an island of picture-book panoramas, which now and again we have to tell ourselves are real. It helps, for a change, to focus on another sense.

And of course it also has to do with the fact that outside its two or three larger cities, Iceland is more or less devoid of people: It has only 318,000 inhabitants on 103,000 square kilometers. In comparison, with this population density Manhattan would have 224 inhabitants. And we had always thought that, in a place where man leaves the world alone, the world is full of sound anyway.

In the early morning at Jökulsárlón, for example: there the silence is not silent. Not really. Only on the surface. A few hundred meters off the banks of the lagoon towards the glacier, and Iceland can be heard. Both the large and small icebergs scrape and grate against one another, and the water gurgles around their bases. Sound loves calm, still water; no other surface transports sounds better and further. In Iceland there is water like this everywhere: in volcanic lakes and glacial lagoons, bays, and narrow fjords.

Standing on their banks, you are a guest at nature’s concert hall. It can hear the rapid beating of wings of a family of geese taking flight. Salmon jumping out of the water.

Pebbles that have been loosened by sheep hooves and are rolling down a slope high up in the mountains. A solitary car driving on the other side of the fjord.

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An evening at Geysir is an unforgettable experience. The namesake of all other geysers worldwide is just 90 minutes by bus from Iceland’s capital, meaning that during the day, it is permanently busy. But as the afternoon wears on, the crowds start to thin and at some point you are totally alone between hissing holes in the ground and bubbling mud. Yet Geysir itself is rather unreliable; neighboring Strokkur is active every few minutes. Shortly before, the surrounding water starts bubbling and foaming, and then it hisses as though a moderately powerful hurricane were being held captive inside the earth. Then, a column of steam shoots up into the air so suddenly that you need to see it several times to get one decent photo.

Incidentally, the Icelanders have a very special relationship with their hot springs: Viking clan chiefs used to receive guests in thermal pools, and today debates and discussions are sure to take place in an open-air hot pot.

In this sense it is hardly surprising that the recent takeover of an Icelandic energy company by a Canadian corporation caused national outrage – the hot springs were part of the deal. A three-day “protest karaoke marathon” was swiftly organized, headed by singer Björk. Although the protesters could not reverse the sale of the energy company, they did achieve something important with their karaoke marathon in early January: Iceland’s nature reserves are to be declared public property. 48,000 Icelanders signed the petition. That is 15 percent of the population. And even more might have protested had the weather been better.

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When it isn’t pouring with rain or blowing a gale, the country’s most famous site is almost eerily silent: As though someone up above had pulled the plug from the socket and shut off all the world’s sounds. This is what it is like at the historical gathering place Þingvellir, protected in the lee of a rock face. Þingvellir has a very special place in the history and collective psyche of Iceland, for it is where the parliament met after Norwegian Vikings settled the island, probably for the simple reason that there was no hot spring big enough for the gathering. This is where the 1000th anniversary of the establishment of the state was celebrated and where the Republic was proclaimed. Þingvellir is virtually a sacred place for Icelanders, laden with history and legends. Sometimes, so they say, you can hear the murmurs of the past there – if you have an ear for them. Jónsi, the singer, was also there recently. Maybe we’ll get to hear them after all, when the new album by Sigur Rós comes out soon.

Stefan Nink www.visiticeland.com first published in: Süddeutsche Zeitung, Thursday, April 7, 2011

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Illustration: Malin Rosenqvist

THE WORLD OF THE SENSES

Trees that can sing Only one makes it – just one from 10,000 spruce trunks reaches the worktable in Martin Schleske’s studio, to be made into a master-class violin. A tree like this has to suffer – put up with 200 to 300 years on poor soil in a harsh climate, little water and the icy temperatures of the mountains just below the timberline. Only such a “crisis-stricken” tree, which has had to fight its way through life, growing slowly, can produce good tonewood. A lowland spruce growing in ideal conditions that shoots up and fills out quickly has no resistance. It has no resonant wood, no personality. “Our life is not a walk in the park either; humans, too, grow and develop through crises,” says master luthier Martin Schleske. The New York Times has described him as one of the “most important living violinmakers” and the German daily Die Welt has dubbed him the “Stradivari of the 21st century”.

From the forest to the studio

So what is the secret of world-famous violins? Finding the right tonewood? Skilled workmanship or precise sanding?

Or the almost therapeutic sensitivity of the violinmaker in recognizing what kind of violin precisely suits a musician?

And yet the man whose trademark is his dark leather cap and who, in his youth, played electric guitar as well as violin, is always a little nervous when a client orders an instrument from him: “It is always a kind of act of creation,” he says. Sensitivity and intuition are what he needs to recognize which violin perfectly suits this musician. “For a musician, the violin becomes part of their body, their inner voice.” The root of the word “person” – composed of per (= through) and sonum (= sound) – attests to the original connection between someone’s voice and their character.

When Martin Schleske talks about Stradivari or Guarneri violins, we could think he were talking about female personalities, and we get the slight impression that his role is also that of a matchmaker. “A Guarneri is like a hot-blooded, dark-haired gypsy woman; she is brash, passionate and pugnacious. You can work on her tones, ‘knead’ them.

There is a resistance – similar to a strong handshake.” The Stradivari is a completely different kettle of fish: “She is more like a holy Madonna, and can sometimes be a bit of a diva. She is capable of producing incredible sounds, but is not interested in meeting the expectations of a musician who wants to take center stage. Then she can get offended and shut down.” Such a demanding violin would find its way back to his studio worktable pronto, grins Schleske, but in a “Strad” – as they are known among musicians – this is considered part of a personality that has matured over 300 years, for which music lovers pay up to € 4 million.

They are only found in very specific regions of the Alps, these “mountain giants”, often some 50 meters tall, extremely firm and with no branches. It is these mountain spruces that Martin Schleske says are “destined for sound”. The 45-year-old used to scramble up and down trees himself in mountain forests, fighting his way through snow and ice in the Bavarian Alps with provisions and a chainsaw in his rucksack. Every violinmaker has his informants: a network of foresters and wood dealers.

When a storm fells some of the massive spruces on top of a mountain, the race begins: quick, up to the top and bag the best ones before others hear about it… “The wood has to have a greasy shine when you cut into it. It mustn’t look dusty,” says Schleske. The expert can already tell whether the tree is a “singer” when the sawed sections of trunk rumble down the mountain on a truck. For as they bounce off each other some sound “like a bell, with a free and light tone,” while others just sound “dull and wooden”. What a violinmaker wouldn’t do for that free sound!

Nowadays Schleske rarely has the time for such expeditions. He visits his wood dealer, who specializes in tonewood, two or three times a year. Yet there is still some detective work involved: “The most important thing is still to be the first in line when a new delivery comes in.” Then he goes to his wood dealer and appraises the often 3,000 so-called “canopy-scrapers” with an expert eye, but only five of them are real top-grade specimens.

Cut to size and marked with a precise combination of letters and numbers, the good trees are then sorted into the shelves of the studio in Stockdorf, south of Munich. Clients even come to the workshop from the USA and Asia and wait for months on waiting lists to have Schleske make a violin for them: “Since getting this violin I have stopped playing the Romantic concertos like Brahms or Sibelius on my Stradivari,” says London-based soloist Jeanne Christé v.

Bennigsen. Jehi Bahk, concertmaster in Seoul, highlights the “balanced sound on all the strings, which otherwise one can only expect to find in the best Italian master violins of the 18th century.” And star violinist Ingolf Turban praises the most beautiful E string he has ever heard: “I have the feeling I am no longer playing the violin, but singing.”

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In comparison to that, a Schleske violin almost seems a bargain: A violinist can purchase a soloist-class instrument for € 20,000 – 25,000. And that means one they can “break in” themselves – tailor, so to speak. The idea that a newly assembled violin is a finished instrument could not be more wrong. The violin only brings with it roughly half of its character; the other half it develops together with its player – teamwork, as it were.

Sensitivity and bespoke work Yet there is a long way to go before getting to the first “date”, and it demands a great deal of a master luthier.

Whereas some can barely tell the difference between an “E” and a “D”, the man with the cap is able to recognize up to 30 different variations of a single note on a violin.

Listen very carefully time and again – another secret of the luthier’s craft. First listen carefully to the client, what he or she wants and expects, and later, when working, listen to the sound of the wood. Immense concentration and a fine feel for the instrument are imperative in this profession.

And time to recharge the batteries is also very important: “When I get home from the studio in the evenings, often the first thing I do is turn off the music that my family has on. All I really want then is silence.”

Sitting opposite Martin Schleske, you feel the sensitivity to engage with both people and instruments. Sensibility coupled with a calm and considered charisma – presumably necessary for someone who works on an instrument for weeks with meticulous precision. When sanding a piece of mountain spruce for a top plate, just a few tenths of a millimeter can change the sound. “You have to pay great attention and do the wood justice,” is how he describes it.

You must never go against the grain. A statement that, for the religious Schleske, can also be applied to life. In his book Der Klang: Vom unerhörten Sinn des Lebens (Sound: the unheard meaning of life) he compares violinmaking with human personal development. Essentially, he claims, people are like mountain spruce trees: It is crises that mature one’s personality. The tension between gentleness and strength, permission and formation, and trust and surprise determines our life. It is the same pairs of opposites that complete the sound and beauty of a violin. Not confusing aspirations of completeness with perfection is important to the craftsman: “A perfect sound with no rough edges has no soul, no character.”

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Balancing act between craftwork and research Is it difficult letting go of a finished violin, having spent so much time with it? No, answers Schleske, “it has to leave the studio and motivates me to make tiny improvements on the next instrument.” For in actual fact, he considers himself more a violin developer than a violinmaker. In order to better understand acoustic phenomena and explore why certain tones give us goose bumps, after qualifying as a master luthier he studied physics. From his cozy workshop, we step through a sliding door into another world – the state-of-the-art acoustics lab. The atmosphere is definitely more sober here. We almost feel a little sorry for the little wooden violin, hung up in the center of the room, all alone and unprotected, to reveal its sounds. Schleske taps it with an impact hammer, as with a patient in a doctor’s surgery. Sound and modal analyses are conducted using methods from aeronautic technology to establish its “acoustic fingerprint”. The violin wood can be magnified 600-fold using a scanning electron microscope to see the tiniest details. The varnish, too, of which 15 layers are generally applied to seal the instrument, plays a key role.

It can dull the sound of the wood more than three-fold.

Schleske has studied around 300 different varnish compositions over the past few years. He has invested many years in research; it seems he leaves no stone unturned.

Having set out with the aim of copying the magic and charisma of a Stradivari, he has now found his own path of creating an instrument whose sound touches people and pulls at their heartstrings.

The best compliment for Martin Schleske is seeing that the “matchmaking” has worked. He recently made a violin for a talented young musician. When the school student played it for the first time, he did not seem merely proud, but downright in love. “His whole posture suddenly changed, he stood taller, he grew with his violin – it was simply right.”

Daniela Tewes www.schleske.de Martin Schleske, luthier.

Der Klang: Vom unerhörten Sinn des Lebens.

With photos by Donata Wenders. Kösel Verlag, 2010 (there are currently plans for an English and a French version)

© 2011 HARMAN International Industries, Incorporated. All rights reserved. Harman Kardon and CMMD are trademarks of HARMAN International Industries, Incorporated, registered in the United States and/or other countries. iPod is a trademark of Apple Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries. Features, specifications and appearance are subject to change without notice.

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Visit your Harman Kardon retailer or www.harmankardon.com, and discover technology that entertains beautifully.

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THE WORLD OF THE SENSES

When Tarzan yells – On the nature and culture of screaming We have little sympathy for a potato or an oyster. Samuel Butler once observed this and also proposed a reason for it: “Since, then,” he writes, “they do not annoy us by any expression of pain we call them emotionless; and so qua mankind they are; but mankind is not everybody.” Thus on hearing a scream, culture and civilization – or rather, their human representatives – reflect on precisely what is part of them and what is to be disregarded. And that is still interesting today. When regarding the economics of attention, for instance, or media, advertising and politics as realms of the “shout or die” principle. Even Sir Peter Ustinov once quipped, “When someone yells it no longer matters what he wants to say.”

But what is a scream? – They say that screaming is the opposite of culture. In a scream, life is condensed into a single utterance. Belted out with maximum force, it is the sum of all possible sentiments. We scream in rage and desire, in happiness and pain, in fear and exertion, in protest and warning. That said, raising our voice so that people can hear us who are further away or did not hear the first time is a communicative exception. For screams are “loud” and “shrill”, “desperate” or “piercing”, rarely “meaningful”, never “eloquent”.

Even though a baby’s first cries are not real speech, they can still signify something, for instance, that the baby feels too alone, is hungry or thirsty. Moreover, they can be used to measure how slowly or quickly a child learns to speak.

For speech development follows a pattern: single-peak, double-peak and more complex cries, vocal play, marginal and canonical babbling, first words.

Screams generally involve the body, and for some involve everything that is “animal” about humans, or, on a less judgmental note (and according to Friedrich Nietzsche) the “entire excess of nature”, which “sang out loudly in joy, suffering, and knowledge, even in the most piercing scream.”

For, “Be it gruesome or grandiose: It is not I who clamors, the earth drones,” wrote the Hungarian poet Attila József, born a little over 100 years ago.

Normally, screams are simple. And yet we always seem to want to interpret them. This has to do with what we know and what we expect. Or, in Gonzalo Torrente Ballester’s more eloquent words, “… well-read as you are you compare the cry with that of Peter Pan after killing a bunch of pirates”.

It is precisely where screams are not heard, namely in the visual arts, that this interpreting becomes obvious, for here it tells us entire stories. An ancient vase bears a scene from Homer: Priam entering Achilles’ hut. He has sought out his enemy to request the body of his son. The observer can already see it, the desecrated corpse. The father has not seen it yet, but we know from Homer that he is about to cry out. And although we can neither hear nor see it, this cry is burned into the vase, and once it could be heard by every learned individual who looked at it.

Illustration: Daniel Lachenmeier

Midday in the jungle: Water gurgles, birds chirp, and then Tarzan yells. He is asking nature for help; elephants and monkeys hurry past and even lions make an appearance.

Tarzan roars and intimidates his enemies. And at the end of the movie, too: Tarzan yells. For ever since 1912, when author Edgar Rice Burroughs dreamt him up, that is how he has been letting all know that, once again, he has triumphed. Consequently, American soldiers asked the most famous of all those who played Tarzan, namely Johnny Weissmuller, actor and top swimmer, for permission to sound his yell on the battlefields of World War II.

Renowned German author Arno Schmidt once noted that we can’t tell the nationality of someone who is screaming.

And perhaps he was talking about the cries of pain of the wounded in battle. That said, experts hold that even newborns scream in their native language. According to this theory, French babies scream with rising intonation and German babies with falling intonation. The journal Current Biology explains it as follows: Children hear language even in the womb, and as soon as they are born, copying it strengthens the bond to the mother.

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On January 14, 1506, a vintner in Rome came across a vault underneath Esquiline Hill. Inside, he found life-size sculptures. It was the so-called Laocoon Group, which Pliny the Elder preferred to all other artworks. It features marble figures showing a scene from Virgil’s Aeneid: The goddess Athena has sent sea serpents to kill Laocoon and his sons, and soon he “clamors in dread to the stars”.

Later, in the 18th century, the classical aesthetic of one Johann Joachim Winckelmann started painting a different picture of the Laocoon Group, precisely because the father, wrestling with the mighty serpents, seems rather to be sighing than screaming. But does this really make him, as Winckelmann claimed, the epitome of the ancient hero, full of “noble simplicity and silent grandeur”? Or is it, as Gotthold Ephraim Lessing countered, simply the best solution to an artistic problem, “because screaming … distorts the face in a most unsightly way”?

Edvard Munch started painting The Scream at the end of the 19th century, and painted over 50 versions. It is an extreme example of “a painting of the soul” and is considered the first Expressionist motif. This is interesting above all because Expressionism in art, as well as in literature and music, is seen as the “era of screams”. Be it themes such as fear, losing oneself, insanity, desire or intoxication, all of them are able to use the scream as an extreme expression. Particularly in Expressionist war lyric poetry, the scream marks the other side of language.

And that was a key step in cultural history. For it took a long time until a scream could really be inarticulate yelling and no longer had to be verbosely translated.

Indeed, Antonin Artaud produced Pour en finir avec le jugement de Dieu, To Have Done with the Judgment of God, a beastly “scream play” actually conceived for French radio, but which was then shelved. It is now one of the celebrated pieces of the “free screaming” evident today in anything from electronic music through comics to punk and heavy metal.

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Yet it is not only in relation to culture, but also to society that screaming offers fascinating insights. Even the French Revolution was associated with “screaming”. And in 1840, Karl Marx wrote the following on the “unrest” among workers: “Strange screams and noise from the populace during a sudden food shortage, or owing to a fear of one.”

Yet despite all the mass experiences in the 18th and 19th centuries, a sociology of the masses did not emerge until the 20th century. For it was only with growing cities and industries that a mass society took shape, leading Elias Canetti to examine Crowds and Power. Incidentally, it was the goal cheer, the screaming of the masses at a soccer match, that inspired him to study the “peculiar humming” produced by a crowd when it, wherever it may be, amasses.

Yells and screams continue to puzzle us. At the Wagah border crossing between India and Pakistan, hundreds, and sometimes even thousands of people yell slogans to one another at every changing of the guard. For 400 years, the Japanese have held a competition called “Nakisumo”, where the babies of Sumo wrestlers are made to scream.

The parents then ask the gods for good health. Moreover, screaming is said to drive away evil spirits. At several universities in Sweden, at night students scream for all they are worth. According to one interpretation of this mysterious custom, which, lovely as it is, is unfortunately somewhat inconclusive, the tradition goes back to the 12th century, when Uppsala was converted to Christianity. As the Swedes didn’t know how to pray, they screamed to God. Yet a more profane theory is that a student began the custom in the 1980s to relieve exam stress.

Screaming is a key element in the media, too. Including for technical reasons. The unpleasant feeling that someone is constantly shouting in our ear when we are on the phone probably comes from the absence of a spatial impression.

Yet those who are less technologically-minded can also become loud. For instance, when speakers inadvertently shout when they are addressing a large crowd, although, with sound amplification, they have absolutely no need to.

And then there are the movies that scream for a scream.

A door opens, a stair creaks, a shadow appears against the wall. And then Jamie Lee Curtis screams in Halloween, and later Neve Campbell and Naomi Watts – and with them the undisputed “scream queens” of the horror movie genre.

And what is a “Wilhelm scream”? Originally it was an injoke among sound designers. Now it is a scream that can be heard in over 200 movies, generally several times. In The Charge at Feather River, a western from 1953, the character of Private Wilhelm is shot in the thigh with an arrow.

Wilhelm screams. And this scream landed in Warner Brothers’ sound library. Years later, Ben Burtt took delight in repeatedly incorporating this scream into various movies he was working on, for instance, Star Wars and Indiana Jones. And many other sound people adopted the idea.

Incidentally, the Star Wars movies contain two Tarzan yells, and that in a highly technical environment. In the original story, Tarzan is the son of a British lord, but, having grown up in the jungle, he rejects English culture, society and technology and longs for the simplicity of nature. In the end, he returns to Africa with Jane … where he performs the “victory cry of the bull ape”.

Max Ackermann

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CLASSICS

A fairytale come true: Pet Shop Boys’ foray into ballet Pet Shop Boys have written the music for a ballet. The successful pop duo composed a musical back in 2001 and in 2004 composed a new soundtrack for Eisenstein’s seminal silent film Battleship Potemkin. This March saw the latest achievement of band members Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe, namely, music for a classical ballet based on a fairytale by Hans Christian Andersen.

The Most Incredible Thing is about a king who announces a contest. The man who can do the most incredible thing shall have the king’s daughter’s hand in marriage and half the kingdom. The first participants don’t get far at all: “Two ate themselves to death, and one drank until he died.” Needless to say, the royal judges are less than impressed. In the end it is a young man, “good-hearted and happy as a child”, who succeeds in winning over the judges and the people.

He invents a clock with various figures that appear on the stroke of every hour, for example, Adam and Eve, the Three Kings, the four seasons and Ten Commandments. Everyone agrees that this is the most incredible thing anyone has ever seen. Congrat … no! Suddenly “a long bony fellow” appears, destroys the clock with an axe and, with this incredible act of violence, wins the contest. How could that happen?

Like this: “My work has overcome his and overcome all of you. I have done the most incredible thing!” Aha. Somehow that doesn’t sound like the usual fairytale happy ending … and of course, the incredibly terrible act does not go unpunished. On the wedding day, 12 figures from the clock take their revenge. The groom is struck down with a halberd and the princess is allowed to marry the kindhearted young man. All’s well that ends well: “All were glad and all blessed him; there was not one who was jealous – and that was the most incredible thing of all.”

Photo: Hugo Glendinning

It is amazing that here Pet Shop Boys have written music that largely gets by without lyrics. Only in the more than seven-minute-long The Grind – the second song on the soundtrack after the Prologue – does Neil Tennant briefly sing. There it is: the Pet Shop Boys moment! Yet even though the soundtrack is for the most part instrumental, it still bears the unmistakable signature of the British duo.

The compositions are lavish as usual and form a blend of the familiar synthesizer sounds, the typical Pet Shop Boys electropop and large orchestral arrangements. The beginning of The Miracle Ceremony is even slightly reminiscent of Pet Shop Boys’ hit It’s a Sin.

However, without the accompanying dancers in their costumes and the elaborate set, the work, which runs for over 80 minutes, is in parts somewhat bland. Fortunately the CD booklet, similar to a libretto, contains descriptions of the individual songs in each scene of the ballet. So listeners can let their imagination run wild and dream up their own ballet, complete with set and dancers. Indeed, those who missed the performances in London will have to make do with their own imagined images for a while yet. Fans had only ten days to see The Most Incredible Thing at London’s Sadler’s Wells Theatre, and the next performances there are not planned until 2012. Yet there is some consolation in the fact that the BBC intends to show a live recording this year.

It was four years ago that Pet Shop Boys came up with the idea of staging Danish author Hans Christian Andersen’s fairytale as a ballet and composing the accompanying soundtrack. The foundation stone was laid when their friend, dancer Ivan Putrov, asked them at the same time to compose the music for one of his dance performances.

Putrov took on the role of the villain, Javier de Frutos the choreography and direction. As orchestra arranger, Pet Shop Boys once again sought the skills of German composer and music producer Sven Helbig, with whom they had previously worked on Battleship Potemkin. Playwright Matthew Dunster wrote the script, Katrina Lindsay designed the costumes, Tal Rosner was responsible for the digital effects and video projections, and Paul Arditti for the sound design.

Yet if you only have the CD, the visual element is simply lacking, although when you listen to it the album certainly rouses curiosity – How do the music and dancing fit together? Less open-minded Pet Shop Boys fans could have some difficulties with it, for compared to Tennant and Lowe’s previous work, here the pop aspect is definitely not at the forefront. Thus, like their soundtrack for the silent movie Battleship Potemkin, The Most Incredible Thing is dividing fans. For here the familiar Pet Shop Boys pop epics, which can be heard on their latest album Yes, released in 2009, have given way to opulent orchestral tones.

That said, the project offers those who enjoy and appreciate film scores the opportunity to experience pop music in combination with classic soundtrack flair. For those at least, The Most Incredible Thing will be something incredible indeed.

Matthias Westerweller A Sadler’s Wells Production, Pet Shop Boys & Javier De Frutos, The Most Incredible Thing www.sadlerswells.com

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MODERN

The Boys Are Back In Town – or: Why the music world waited on tenterhooks for the reunion of Take That and Robbie Williams It was in Manchester in 1990 that music manager Nigel Martin-Smith met the 19-year-old Gary Barlow, who had been touring northern England for years as a songwriter and pianist. Martin-Smith had the smart idea of forming a boy band based on the highly successful New Kids On The Block. One Mark Owen was working as a tea boy in the studio where Martin-Smith recorded some initial songs with Barlow, and was instantly recruited, as were breakdancers Howard Donald and Jason Orange. They advertised for and found a second lead singer: Robert Peter Williams. At 16, he was the fifth and youngest member to join the band.

Through their manager’s contacts, Take That initially performed mainly in gay clubs, where they first found success. They gained media attention primarily with their stage costumes and bold dance acts. Yet it soon became clear that musically too, they had much to offer. From 1992 there was no stopping them. They made number seven in the charts with the Tavares cover It Only Takes a Minute and even reached number three in the UK charts with the Barry Manilow classic Could It Be Magic. The following year they won the first of four Brit Awards, and in 1994 and 1995 they received two MTV European Music Awards in the coveted categories “Best Group” and “Best Live Act”.

The five were not bothered by the fact that the serious music press continued to ridicule and lampoon them, for indeed, millions of screaming fans do not lie. Especially in the UK, but also in mainland Europe, adoration of the band sometimes took on hysterical proportions and reminded more than a few observers of Beatlemania in the 1960s.

“In every beginning there is a magic”, wrote poet Hermann Hesse once, but it wasn’t until the end that the legend began. When Take That announced they were splitting up the day before Valentine’s Day in 1996, flags were flying at half-mast in millions of teenagers’ hearts across Europe.

The band that the thoroughly respectable Allmusic Guide had dubbed the “most popular British teen pop sensation since the 1960s” was no more. Crisis hotlines for suicidal fans were set up in London, Vienna, Berlin and other major cities.

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What had happened? Right at the peak of their fame, when the quintet had taken the number one spot in no fewer than 31 countries and cracked the “Billboard Hot Hundred” top ten in the US for the first time with Back For Good, the equally charismatic and erratic frontman Robbie Williams pulled the plug and left the band. The others soldiered on for nine months, before throwing in the towel too. Fan clubs, biographies and gossip columns have long since identified the problem, namely the rivalry between gifted singer and songwriter Barlow and talented entertainer Williams, who over time increasingly came to the forefront vocally, too. On the one hand, this duo of unequals had driven the band to ever greater success, but at the same time repeatedly pushed it to breaking point. Moreover, a new musical zeitgeist had swept in with Blur, Oasis, Suede, Pulp and the whole britpop wave, which, in the home country of pop at least, evolved into an almost absolute taste doctrine.

In July 1995, no-one could have predicted that 15 years later Robbie and Gary would put their differences aside in a highly publicized song, Shame, which they wrote together. But that is precisely what happened last fall. The song is a solid pop ballad whose intro is a little reminiscent of McCartney’s Blackbird. Yet even more than the song, a must for old and young fans alike is the video for Shame: In four and a half minutes in a bar, on the dance floor and in natural settings, the archrivals, at least in the video, become buddies again. The quartet of Barlow, Donald, Orange and Owen had already reformed in 2006 and released a highly successful comeback album, Beautiful World, which in the UK alone was certified eight times platinum and sold a total of around three million copies.

Yet insiders would have particularly noticed the cover photo: a group shot from a bird’s eye perspective, with a large gap in the middle, which would not be filled until fall 2010, when the mother of all (European) boy bands would once again embrace its lost son.

Now Robbie is on board again and is saying that with his four band members, he feels “at home”. With the epic single Flood (which, incidentally, all five members co-composed) the fun-loving breakdancers of old return as respectably dressed grown-up men to a radically changed music scene, which strangely enough seems to have been waiting with bated breath for the Take That reunion with Robbie Williams. Which does not mean, however, that they have nothing new to offer in terms of music. On the contrary, the title of their latest album Progress is meant absolutely seriously. Sentimental ballads and disco revival are peripheral here. Instead, there are moments of rock (SOS) and strongly electrified beats (Wait, Kidz) somewhere between the early Pet Shop Boys and currently allthe-rage duo Hurts. Incidentally, the latter also hail from Manchester and like to describe themselves as “sons of Joy Division and Take That”. The one-time boy band has not only “grown up” on the outside, but musically too has both feet in the 21st century. The latter is partly thanks to the brilliant producer Stuart Price. The triple Grammy Award winner found great success with his band Zoot Woman and before that (at 19 years of age) under the alias “Jacques Lu Cont” with the project Les Rhythmes Digitales, while at the same time also working as a remixer and making hits by Madonna, Coldplay, Depeche Mode and Lady Gaga ready for the clubs. He gave Take That a modern, edgy sound, which in part forms a stark contrast to the otherwise familiar disco beats and harmony vocals known and loved

by Take That fans the world over.

It becomes clear how well the combination of Gary, Robbie, Howard, Mark and Jason with Stuart Price works – albeit less in the first hit single Flood and far more in songs like the martial Kidz. Tribute is clearly paid for around 45 seconds to the Kinks classic Lazing On A Sunny Afternoon, and then Price lets off a volley of percussive electro sounds, which the voices of the brave Manchester five can only just topple. This is music to our ears! The album’s only weak point is that it is clear from most of the songs (sometimes excessively so) just how much the band wants to be taken seriously nowadays. Yet who can hold it against them? Especially in the YouTube era, when dozens of live videos from “ancient times” are watched and “shared” by millions today. The World Wide Web mercilessly preserves the highlights, but also the most embarrassing moments of their career. In answer to the question in the title of one of their first big hits, Could It Be Magic?, today they would probably not row in their boat, but answer confidently, “Yes, we can!” The “magic” is still there. Only Take That are no longer like cute rabbits in a magician’s hat. Now they do magic themselves.

Take That are back, and in the context of their new-found maturity, which they have certainly achieved with Progress, it is also fitting news that all the members of the band have volunteered to be ambassadors of the Hear The World Initiative: “We have to be able to rely on our hearing on a daily basis, especially, of course, as musicians,” says Robbie Williams and adds: “We are proud to be supporting this initiative and grateful that we can contribute to raising awareness of hearing loss.”

Christian Arndt

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Photo: Bryan Adams

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PORTRAIT

Modern dance in the truest sense of the word With Motion Bank, a notation system for the development of online digital choreographic scores, the Forsythe Company is treading new paths and offering a new, different way of perceiving dance and motion.

The four-year project aims to establish a benchmark for dance that has long since existed in music: it seeks to create digital versions of dance sequences and choreographies and make them accessible to artists and dance scholars for teaching and reference purposes. This information is intended to enable someone to completely reconstruct a choreography without ever having seen the performance live on stage.

William Forsythe developed a prototype of the system several years ago. Now it is set to be perfected by 2013 in collaboration with partners from various research fields: The Ohio State University is lending the project its Advanced Computing Center for Art and Design and a number of other universities for design, dance and performing arts are involved. The project also enjoys the scientific support of brain researchers from the Max-Planck-Institut in Frankfurt and Humboldt Universität in Berlin. Moreover, a federal ministry, cultural institutions and private sponsors are offering financial support.

The method combines techniques currently used in IT and animation technology. The dance sequences of a performance, the choreography, are filmed from different perspectives and entered into the notation system with the help of a software program. Pauses, transitions, impulses and stage directions from the choreographer are likewise integrated and complete the score.

It is intended to enable choreographers to store a digital version of their works that is easy to understand, userfriendly and low cost. The test phase has already begun with selected choreographers from different artistic approaches. Should the method prove a success, there is nothing standing in the way of the establishment of a library for digital dance scores. The idea is to in future make the software available to all choreographers who wish to record their performances and in return make them available to posterity in the Motion Bank database.

Public lectures, performances, workshops with academic scholars and experts, and master classes for students and up-and-coming artists will illustrate the development of the program over the four years. It is hoped it will spark in-depth discussion on the results of similar projects or existing studies – indeed, William Forsythe’s “creation of a new form of ‘dance literature’ for a wide and interactive audience” should have a sure step.

The first workshop week focusing on educational activities has already been held at the Frankfurt Lab. It featured international participants and renowned guest lecturers, who spoke on various aspects of the development of choreography. Moreover, the new work Solo by choreographer Deborah Hay has been the first of a planned three to be recorded, and is now set to be followed up and analyzed on computer using the newly developed methods. The work will be performed live this fall. Until then, the experts at Motion Bank will continue dancing and tinkering. What is clear in any case is that even motion can’t hold up technical progress now… let’s dance online!

Sandra Spannaus

© Synchronous Object, for One Flat Thing, reproduced.

The Ohio State University and The Forsythe Company

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MODERN

James Blake – The salvation of silence “There are sounds that only really come into their own when you suddenly can’t hear them anymore.” We would normally expect such lofty musical musings from mature musicians, who, as they get older and wiser, increasingly develop an understanding of the interaction of absolute silence and sound, and accord individual notes plenty of space. You can’t have the one without the other. But when this quotation comes from a 22-year-old, it is high time to devote him a page or two in this magazine. Ladies & Gentlemen, your undivided attention please, switch off anything disturbing you, lean back and listen to the wonderful music of James Blake from London Town, with his very own genre blues-dubstep-pop or, to put it simply, gospel music 2011.

The development that culminated in the freshest musical innovation this year so far, which essentially rests on centuries-old musical pillars, started when James Blake was just six years of age, when he sat at a piano for the first time and practiced of his own accord, until he received classical piano lessons. He didn’t enjoy it to begin with, but it made him realize something important: “I saw very, very early on that it must be something good if it meant I made progress. So I stuck with it, carried on. I could see how I was getting better and better on the piano.” What initially sounds like something a young geek might say is probably rooted in the family environment Blake was born into.

Both his parents were successful freelancers – his mother a graphic designer and his father a not so very unknown musician in the 1970s progressive rock scene. He was a member of the band Colosseum and later, to the present day, a solo artist now more at home in the folk-rock singer/songwriter field and with his own studio. His name: James Litherland.

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Yet it was not the rock elements of his father’s music that inspired the teenage Blake to start experimenting with his voice, but soul and especially gospel records. “It was classic harmonics, if you like. I learned early on how to play gospel songs on the organ – I liked gospel from a very young age, real old gospel, the sound of Reverend James Cleveland and all those amazing recordings that I found interesting in terms of piano playing alone. After that I was really into Art Tatum and Errol Garner, although I actually never did much jazz myself. I always had the impression that the jazz era was over, and I was looking for something different, something new.” Which is how Blake put it talking about his debut album James Blake (Atlas/Polydor).

Yet it is difficult to get an interview from the man who nonetheless so deeply inhaled and so profoundly understood soul and jazz. It seems this is also part of the apparent master plan increasingly taking shape for the musician’s life. It is thus fitting that one of his rare interviews took place in the pastor’s office of the Central Presbyterian Church in New York, the second venue of his first live performances in the USA in March 2011. But now back to the all-important, sound-defining moment, which ultimately led journalists to create a new genre for James Blake called post-dubstep, which can only come from his affinity to “Nautilus – Sub-basses from 20,000 Leagues under the Sea”. The original dubstep sound of the “FWD>>” club night on the underground London scene held at the club Plastic People, which has an extraordinarily good sound system, supplied the new element, the step to computer production to explore the depths and the pauses of these exciting tracks made only for the dance floor.

Here we might be inclined to say that the rest is history.

Following a few vinyl releases with a hint of dubstep, extraordinary DJ sets, in which he often inserted pauses between the records to lend them greater impact, and two brilliant EPs with slightly different styles on the renowned Belgian label R&S (previously known more for techno music), CMYK and Klavierwerke EP, in which his restrained voice can be heard, altered by way of special effects, it was the cover version of a song by Canadian Leslie Feist that catapulted him into the next world overnight. Limit To Your Love combines pauses and sound, piano and sub-basses are pitted against each other, and above it all floats this soulful voice, at once fragile and very strong. “When you start singing, it changes everything.

You build a bridge to the audience and directly express your feelings,” said Blake in the pastor’s office in New York. Almost even more impressive is his transformation of his father’s song It’s My Turn into one of the most touching and at the same time shocking moments in contemporary music: The Wilhelm Scream is like the soundtrack to an endless free fall with an open end. Or the polyphonic I Never Learnt To Share, which after the acappella intro spirals up with never-ending and almost threatening church organs oscillating in minor keys, until salvation comes in the form of the transition to major and rekindles our faith in goodness. He did, after all, learn to share.

James Blake manages both; we could just feel his songs or, as an added bonus, listen to his voice and the ever brief, but telling messages. A true wunderkind, with a gift that only very few people on the planet possess: Soul music rooted deeply in his soul that is here to stay. Like traditional gospel songs that never fail to move us. Including the long, echoing, wonderful silence. (Hallelujah and Amen.)

PS.: We should not neglect to mention that James Blake is a big fan of Joni Mitchell. Especially her brilliant, wonderfully quiet album Blue influenced the Londoner’s compositions; the track A Case Of You often crops up in his live sets. Piano, first-class singer/songwriter music and, if we look at the cover, we cannot but think that Joni Mitchell has influenced Blake in visual terms, too.

Michael Rütten Highly recommended: Music: James Blake (Atlas/Polydor) Interview in New York: www.noisevox.com Face Time: James Blake Live: Wherever you get the chance. He has also played numerous sets in churches.

An extended European tour is planned for fall 2011.

“I love intense feelings. You could almost say it’s a real quirk of mine. I want to produce dance tracks that touch my listeners in a way that only an ancient soul song would.

I want them to give my listeners goose bumps, like folk songs, sound really organic and above all human. The human element is really important in all my music.”

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Photo: Dan Wilton

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MODERN

Nick Knight – Resounding names and great faces on glossy paper Nick Knight is one of the greatest fashion photographers of our time. Both star designers and musicians are among his fans. His works are often unconventional and surprising, including garish, virtually screaming colors in his works with Björk and Lady Gaga as well as the more restrained, harmonious images in his Flora series.

Nick Knight sees real beauty, beyond symmetrical faces and perfectly draping fabrics. He shocks and flatters and redefines beauty. He has worked with renowned fashion houses and photographed most top models, shooting numerous cover photos for the world’s leading fashion magazines as well as major advertising campaigns for the likes of Dior, Louis Vuitton and Levi Strauss.

Knight uses aggressive color accents, which lend his photos a touch of the modern painting, and delivers equally impressive soft black-and-white shots with fabrics draped gently over delicate skin. Yet Knight believes the end is nigh for classic fashion photography, and he has already set the course for the future on the Net with his fashion blog SHOWstudio. One more reason for this book, which offers an insight into his work in recent years and visualizes in enduring images his magic moments. A must-have for lovers of fashion and photography alike.

Sandra Spannaus www.nickknight.com www.showstudio.com

Nick Knight Photographs 1994–2009 With an essay by Charlotte Cotton English edition with German articles Book design by Paul Hetherington 264 pages, 429 color and duotone plates ISBN 978-3-8296-0426-0 In stores € 68.00 / SFr 110.00

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ROSE, 2003

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Photos: Š Nick Knight , courtesy Schirmer / Mosel

MICKY HICKS, DOLLS, SHOWSTUDIO, 2000 76 HEAR THE WORLD

KATE MOSS, BRITISH VOGUE (COVER), SEPTEMBER, 2000 HEAR THE WORLD 77

DEVON AOKI, DEVON, ALEXANDER MCQUEEN, VISIONAIRE 20, 1997 78 HEAR THE WORLD

SHALOM HARLOW, LOUIS VUITTON, 1996 HEAR THE WORLD 79

MODERN

The voice of Adele There are those voices that seem to come from another universe, voices no-one has ever heard before, voices that now suddenly evoke something new, sometimes something painful, something agonizing, and succeed in rousing our emotions. Let’s call them authentic new voices. And then there are those that seem to make reference to something we are already familiar with, something slumbering or stored inside us, something borne over time as collective auditory experience. Voices that have a memory of their own, that echo pasts we can name and those we cannot, that we cannot imagine separated from their tradition.

They may well be novel and authentic, but not original, for they hold the voices of their forebears. Let’s call them ghost voices.

Ghost voices carry a history with them. When we hear them, we always hear something else in them: something familiar, a memory, scraps of authenticity. They are part of a river of voices sourced in a place far back in our memories and which, having reached the sea, mixes with many other currents, making it impossible to identify its origin.

Adele has such a voice. Although it is her own, recognizable voice, it is one with a large family tree, going back decades into jazz, blues and soul. It may be fitting to describe, as several music journalists have, Adele – and singers like Duffy and Rumer – as Amy Winehouse’s daughter and Dusty Springfield’s granddaughter. Yet Winehouse and Springfield also stood on the shoulders of great singers.

Ulrich Rüdenauer

Photo: Mari Sarii

Adele is very young – only just 23. Her voice, on the other hand, is not. It has that engaging, warm sound, which sometimes takes on a roughened, raspy, melancholic quality, as though she wanted to convey in her voice that pain is always also hidden in love. Adele knows how to modulate, to really perform her songs. She concentrates on the words and gives each one a significance that goes far beyond its meaning. For instance, she turned an agemellowed Bob Dylan love song into a hymn of worship; and she has what many other singers of her generation lack, namely moderation and balance. Female R&B and soul artists sometimes lose themselves in naïve coloratura just for the sake of it, which expresses nothing more than technical ability and can at times simply completely destroy the heart of a song, leaving just shreds. Adele is a cool blueeyed soul singer; she doesn’t have to prove anything, but rather grabs the songs by the scruff of the neck, feels for them, caresses them, without interpreting them to death.

We hear in them the sovereignty of jazz and soul singers that don’t have to trill hysterical ranges of octaves to express what is in their soul. Adele has a ghost voice, a historical voice.

Adele Adkins was born in London in 1988. She belongs to a generation that did not take the classic path to renown.

Whereas in the past, musicians of her kind first earned their spurs in dingy bars and small clubs, Adele graduated from the Brit School of Performing Arts. It speaks for her that today she claims to have been somewhat bored there.

Neither did she send 200 demo tapes to record companies until someone finally signed her. Instead, she posted recordings on her Myspace account, where she caught the attention of thousands of Internet users and record label scouts. At 19 she produced her first album, aptly called 19.

It was a surprise success. 21, the follow-up album released last year, decidedly topped this early triumph. A few of the songs on 21 were produced by the legendary Rick Rubin.

It is a superb mainstream album, somewhat more pleasurable than the debut; not all the songs have an engaging character, but the singer can still make something magical of even the simplest of pop songs. If we are to believe what she says in her interviews, it seems Adele has a great hand in determining her own career. This is probably due not least to the fact that she has something she can rely on and that makes her independent of the ephemeral pop trends, namely, her voice. This might also explain her success among a public that otherwise likes Lady Gaga or Rihanna.

Adele’s most loyal listeners, be they male or female, are young, self-confident, a little nostalgic, have had enough of polished, glossy musicians and carry with them a longing for emotion, the past and the present. Adele lends this longing a voice.

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HEAR THE WORLD IMPRINT

Publishing Company

Trademark Publishing, Westendstr. 87, 60325 Frankfurt am Main, Germany Publishing manager Armin J. Noll Publisher Alexander Zschokke Editorial team Maarten Barmentlo, Heiko Ernst, Markus Frenzl, Christian Gärtner, Antonia Henschel (V.i.S.d.P.G.), Karl W. Henschel, Christine Ringhoff, Elena Torresani Cover photo Bryan Adams Contributors Bryan Adams, Max Ackermann, Christian Arndt, Anno Bachem, Nico Beck, Markus Frenzl, Hennie Haworth, Shin-Shin Hobi, Sandra Hofmeister, Marcel Krenz, Stefan Kugel, Daniel Lachenmeier, Sylvia Meyer-Rothen, Céline Meyrat, Sabine Reitmaier, Samuel Roos, Malin Rosenqvist, Ulrich Rüdenauer, Michael Rütten, Sandra Spannaus, Daniela Tewes, Matthias Westerweller Art direction Antonia Henschel Production Remo Weiss Translations Jeremy Gaines Printed by pva, Druck und Medien-Dienstleistungen GmbH, Landau/Pfalz, Germany www.hear-the-world.com ISSN 1863-9755

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Ad selling Von Wedel Media Solutions, Amselstraße 1b, 22081 Hamburg, Germany, phone: +49 (0)40 677 85 29, Mobil: +49 (0)173 208 52 51, fax: +49 (0)40 401 68 102, email: vonwedel@vwedel-mediasolutions.de The magazine HEAR THE WORLD is published quarterly.

Single issue 6 EUR (Austria 6.90 EUR), 9 CHF, 8 USD. Distribution SI special-interest MD & M Pressevertrieb GmbH & Co. KG Nordendstr. 2, 64546 Mörfelden-Walldorf, Germany Phone: +49 (0)6105 975 060 Subscription Why not subscribe to HEAR THE WORLD – The Magazine for Hearing Culture at www.hear-the-world.com. Annual subscriptions cost 29 EUR, 47 CHF or 39 USD including postage and packaging. HEAR THE WORLD appears four times a year. Every subscription serves a good purpose.

The net proceeds are made available to the Hear the World Foundation, which supports products devoted to people with hearing difficulties. To find out more about the activities of the Hear the World Foundation please visit www.hear-the-world.com.

The articles published in HEAR THE WORLD are protected by copyright. Reprints, even in part, are only possible with the publishing company’s prior written permission. Neither the publisher nor the editors assume responsibility for unsolicited manuscripts and photos submitted. We presume the right to print letters sent to the editor, in full or in part. The editor is not responsible for the content of ads and ad supplements.

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Celebrating five years of Hear the World Istanbul Jamie Woon

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