The Barry Echo

'The Barry Echo' is a site-specific sound piece produced for the Pfänder Gondola in the Alpine-town of Bregenz, Austria. The piece consists of 104 stories from the current editions of the Barry Gem and South Wales Echo, read in the café of Tescos in Barry by one of the artists to his blind mother. It was played through the Tanoy system of the gondola, continually, as the gondola made its passage up and down the mountain in the summer of 2007.

The piece is loosely based on the book by the Austrian author Thomas Bernhard, entitled The Voice Imitator: 104 Short Stories. In this book the author writes 104 parable-type stories based on newspaper reports and hearsay. The Barry Echo both plays tribute to this work but at the same time sidesteps the weight of the original idea, allowing the stories to create their own parable-type status through their context of hearing; the gondola’s repetitive passage up and down the side of an Austrian mountain.

Salome Voegelin

Research Fields

Sound Art
Philosophy and Aesthetics of Sound
Listening
Sonic Memory
Ethics
Audio-Visual Relationship
Digital
Current Research

Salomé Voegelin is an artist and writer who is concerned with the practice and philosophy of sound. Her work has been shown in the UK and Mainland Europe. Most recently her voice work 'Barry Echo' has been included in 'Playing with Words, the Spoken Word in Artistic Practice', Cathy Lane ed., UK, CRiSAP and RGAP, Cornerhouse Publication, 2008. In 2007 she was commissioned to produce a site-specific sound piece for RADAR in Loughborough, UK, and produced a collaborative sound work for the Bregenz Kunstverein, Magazin 4, Austria. She is the curator of Clickanywhere, an online sound exhibition featuring sound work that focuses on the voice.
Salomé is regularly invited to speak at conferences and most recently presented Digital Listening some ideas on digital knowledge and sound at an ARLIS workshop on born-digital archives at UCL in London. She also chaired an international workshop on 'Audio Art on the Radio' at The Cabaret Voltaire in Zürich, Switzerland, in November 2009. In July 2008 she gave a talk on Noise at Architectones in Besançon, France and was involved in NOW II a research project into durational work on the radio staged by the University of the Arts Zürich which culminated in a publication entitled Nachtschichten, edition Fink 2008, for which she wrote a chapter.
Voegelin took part in a panel discussion on States of Flux, chaired by Cecilia Wee at Tate Modern. Her published writing includes 'Sonic Memory Material as "Pathetic Trigger"' in 'Organised Sound international peer-reviewed journal, Cambridge University Press April 2006, 'the Anxiety of the Lonely Listener' in '/Seconds', an international peer reviewed on-line journal, issue 05: March 2007, available at 'A Speech for Noise' in 'Earshot' 5, 2007, and most recently 'Völlig Losgelöst', a chapter in 'Autumn Leaves: Sound and the Environment', Angus Carlyle ed., published by Double Entendre in 2007. Her book 'Listening to Noise and Silence: towards a Philosophy of Sound Art' will be published by Continuum Press in May 2010.

• http://www.salomevoegelin.net