utrumque is an electroacoustic music duo in which Gerhard Eckel and Ludvig Elblaus have explored music making through room-scale acoustic feedback in several projects since 2018. Their work centers around incorporating the performance space as a resonating chamber in the very instrument that the music is played on. Inhabiting that space together with the audience during the performance opens up many interesting questions about space and place, sharing and co-creation.
In this text, we will describe our artistic practice and how we deal with themes of shared acoustics and specificity regarding the sites we work with in our projects. We are interested in how sound can take place when intentionally composed for a certain environment.
We will look at how we tune towards a site, how we tune in a site, and how we can tune beyond the physical constraints of the site. We will introduce the notion of a work-space, a term that we are experimenting with to point both towards what it is we are making and where we are making it. As our practice relies on listening, and listening together, we will also provide many audio examples that illustrate our points beyond what we can articulate in writing. In Nancy’s terms, we understand listening as co-resonance—music as sense without concept—so meaning emerges in shared vibration rather than representation (Nancy, 2007).
While this text is an artist’s statement, it is a statement about an ongoing development, and is not written from the vantage point of a set of final conclusions. We look ahead as much as we look back and we try to formulate our stance based on our curiosity, intuition and imagination about future possibilities, rather than on an analysis of our current results. Many such possible futures are available to us through our practice which makes this a fruitful moment of reflection and sharing the current understanding of our work. We consider these to be open and speculative approaches that offer as many experiential questions as definitive answers. In Rheinberger’s sense, our setup is an experimental system: it produces questions and figures of sense we cannot predefine (Rheinberger, 1997).
We build room-scale instruments that literally incorporate the built environment and its inhabitants in their becoming. By making the space we perform in a central part of our instrument, our audience also becomes part of shaping its character. There are no passive listeners there—by entering and therefore lending your corporeal presence to the instrument, you change it. It is at times as if playing with the hands of everyone present laying on, moving through, or sometimes even obstructing the instrument with which you "musick" (Small, 1998). Following Georgina Born’s account of musical mediation, we treat the instrument as a socio-technical–spatial assemblage, an expanded instrumentality, in which bodies, rooms, and infrastructures co-produce the music (Born, 2013).
We understand these situations to be shared acoustic ecologies. Everyone in it becomes responsible for everyone else's experience. Thus, agency cannot productively be thought of as individual, instead it is interwoven, systemic. Our actions affect the system. Our actions are the system. This aspect, and many of the others of our stance, is of course also true for many other situations without room-scale instruments, and furthermore for many situations that aren't musical at all. Therefore we posit that our approach points outward, from the situated specificity of the situations we set up, to larger societal, ethical and political considerations about shared resources and environments.
Some things that our practice brings to the forefront are:
A plurality of perspectives - as the room and its resonances are physically dispersed, i.e., there is no traditional "sweet spot" (ideal listening position) that is common in traditional symmetrical loudspeaker setups, the acoustic terrain lacks hierarchy. It is, however, full of variety, to the point where you can never be really sure what someone else is hearing from their listening position.
Entanglement of observer and actor - if you hear something else by moving to another position in the room, you can never be sure if you experience changes because you made the whole situation change by moving, or if you experience change because you moved to a position that was already sounding different.
A heightened sense of shared responsibility - the first time an audience member moves a chair or coughs, and that sound affects a dramatic change in the music, it charges the space for all its inhabitants. A present, but hitherto unseen, weave of agency and responsibility becomes apparent, and every decision made from then on is made in a different light. Willingly or unwillingly, everyone is now a part of the system.
Taken together, the common theme of these components is that of interpersonal responsibility through a diffuse collective systemic agency paired with a validation of all vantage points. All perspectives are valid, and plurality is encouraged. Following Barad and Haraway, this practice foregrounds care for an entangled field where actions are never only one's own (Barad, 2007; Haraway, 2016).
Spaces resonate, they offer spectral characteristics to excite, ways of going with the grain, where very little added energy produces great effects. As such, spaces offer a modus, a native vocabulary, that one can work with or against.
While the inhabitants and objects in a performance space also matter, the fundamental acoustic qualities of a space are to a large degree the result of the architecture and furnishing. Phenomena such as reflection, dispersion, and absorption, that together make up what we in general terms call the acoustics of an environment, are consequences of the surface qualities and the geometry of the space. Many of these aspects will remain constant, or at least change very rarely, e.g., the materials and positions of the walls, the height and materials of the ceiling. Here, "rarely" should be understood in comparison to the temporal perspective of a piece or perhaps even a composition process. For longer periods, what Roads calls the supra time scales (Roads, 2004, p.3), even the built environment can change, effectively destroying the site as its character changes, a situation we will address later in this text.
The spaces we incorporate in our music making are important and decisive components that offer both constraints and suggestions for our work. Spaces do so in different ways at different times in our processes. Our relationship with the spaces generally goes through three distinct stages:
Constructing - Our composition process takes orders of magnitude more time than we have access to the physical space we are composing for. Therefore, we need to assemble and use several models of the space to be able to compose with something that resembles the performance situation in some way. Models can take almost any form, as long as they provide an experientially meaningful link to the targeted space. They can be another space that is similar in some way, a digital model of a room geometry that likens the physical space, or a digital simulation made from acoustic measurements performed in the physical space. Together they form an iteratively refined experience that becomes increasingly rich.
This photo shows work in the construction phase at the Multi Studio at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology preparing for the St. Elisabeth Song Cycles by working on the two computers simulating the acoustics of each concert space in the eight-channel speaker system in Multi Studio.
Inhabiting - This is when we are present, when we set up, rehearse and perform on-site, in the physical space, be it for a single day or many performances over the course of weeks. It would be easy to consider this the end of the process, and for some time we did, but we now understand it as a mid-point, a fulcrum around which the constructing stage and the next stage balance.
This photo shows the inhabitation phase in the Villa at St. Elisabeth, where we discover the nuances of the physical space and tune our composition to the site.
Repurposing - We move on from the space with a wide variety of experiences and material, recordings, measurements, insights and new questions. All this is fed into a process of post-production of recorded materials, recombination and assemblages of new work that can be complete departures from the inhabitation stage work into new territories. An important shift is the use of the models made in the first stage - the construction stage. Freed from their original purpose to faithfully reproduce the specific experience of the inhabited setup, they can be picked apart, transformed, and repurposed as building blocks used to make new things. When verisimilitude is no longer meaningful as in the preparatory construction stage, we can use those building blocks to create physically impossible spaces, transposing rooms into wild geometries made out of imaginary materials or zoom in on a microscopic quality and construct new instruments around that. This resonates with how models are used in science. Morgan and Morrison argue that models function as partially autonomous mediating instruments between theory and the world, enabling representation, exploration, measurement, speculation, and intervention (Morgan & Morrison, 1999).
This montage shows a score used in the repurposing phase of producing the three audio examples used below.
The historical and contemporary use of the term site-specific art is complex. Common components are the interdependence between site and artist contribution, so that the piece is equally dependent on both where a change in either one means the destruction of the whole (Kwon, 2004).
Our work is site-specific in that it makes a particular site, in a specific configuration and state, a fundamental component of each piece. Furthermore, our site also includes its inhabitants and their systemic agency to varying degrees. If we would try to extract a piece from its site, the work needed to retune everything would be immense. Yet, through our three stages of being with place, there are clearly activities and components that can be said to go beyond the traditional understanding of site-specific art. Especially given how site-specificity historically was a reaction to the gallery art system, using immovability as a countermeasure against a speculating international art market (Kwon, 2004). Our repurposing stage clearly goes against that tradition. However it is labeled, it is clear to us that our relationship to sites certainly grants meaning and energy to the work. The site also functions as a set of constraints, a found material through which all other decisions need to be argued, a ground truth that serves as an externalized constant that facilitates collaboration. By ingesting these spaces after having inhabited them, dissolving them and fusing them into our ever growing collection of custom digital systems for synthesis and spatialization, they also form a history. They become layers of previous work that can inform and support new pieces.
One could argue that in the end it is the "specificity" as much as the "site" that matters, that the marking of a specific point in space-time and the subsequent relating to that point is as important as what that point is or signifies. The specificity is as important as what is specified. Perhaps this is the defining gesture of our practice.
Still, caring about space is radical in a contemporary music culture where space is too often abstracted in perfectly damped rooms with symmetrical loudspeaker setups engineered to render a composition or performance with perfect control and similarity between sites. A piece should in this tradition be space-agnostic, and sound the same wherever it is played. The need to take the room into account is almost seen as a technical deficiency, the sign of an imperfect machine for reproduction. Characterized in this admittedly pointed way, it is clear that a position with deference to the performance space is a strong stance that brings with it a very different set of attitudes and values. A different way of being in and relating to the world and the work we make in it.
We can think of our way of relating to a site, our specificity, as engaging with work-spaces. The sum of the set of models that enable us to compose for a specific site without physical access constitutes a work-space, an assemblage world where we live, collaborate, and spend our work day, sometimes for several months. We have described this notion of modeling as an artistic practice in and of itself in an earlier publication (Elblaus & Eckel, 2020). Our proposed concept of the work-space very much builds from those ideas .
Also the physical site becomes a space for work once we inhabit it. In fact, the space also becomes the work, meaning "work" as in piece. Our offer to our audience is to inhabit it together with us. The experience of the space is the work.
Afterwards, the site in all of its physical and digital variations, continues to be a place for work, a work-space where we can compose beyond the premise of creating materials that can be realized in the physical space. Instead, the collected material makes up a work-space untethered from both physical reality and the temporal cadence of preparation - production - performance.
These remains offer a work-space where something else can emerge from the digital ruins of the now abandoned concert space. New meaning and purpose can be found through re-purposing the work-space.
Framed in this way, there is an unfixed non-final quality that is brought forward. The work is about the work, and it is about continuous activity through shared agency, and the work is always about space. Perhaps this is a more fruitful way to articulate our site-specificity: the specificity is the precision with which we link work to space to create room for being with, being in, being together.
In this section, we will highlight three projects and their corresponding sites. We will provide sound examples for each site that illustrate moving from a more strict re-presentation of the site's acoustic particularities to a more deconstructed approach where the site is no longer directly re-presented. Rather than being reproduced, the resonant vocabulary of the space is re-formulated, re-purposed, into a physically improbable configuration that can be made audible and material through digital synthesis.
We will not delve into the technical systems that make this possible, rather we would like to share the experience of moving from a representational site-specific work-space to a reinterpretation of the site’s acoustic particularities for the purposes of imagining it beyond its physical limitations.
Interference - The CUBE
The CUBE, the main performance space of the Institute for Electronic Music and Acoustics in Graz, is a visually complex and busy place, filled with computers, instruments, rigging, cables, technical equipment and speakers. If one closes one’s eyes, it offers something very different: a smooth shimmering warm wooden acoustics provided by the particular curved shapes of its walls. When we first played there, it was equipped with speakers with a warm Hi-Fi sound and rich bass. The speaker system has since been replaced by more modern, more accurate speakers, but some of the charm has been lost. This highlights how sites change and evolve, and how the point in the space-time that we are specific towards is not there anymore and might very well be impossible to recreate. The particular spectral modus, the vocabulary of resonances, in the CUBE were very important for us when composing our first tools and algorithms that have shaped our collaborative work since.
St. Elisabeth Song Cycle - St. Elisabeth Church and Villa
The St. Elisabeth Church in Berlin, with its villa next door, is a cultural center hosting all sorts of public activities with many kinds of performing arts productions in their program. We were there performing a piece commissioned by the Labor Sonor Festival and our measurements captured not only the spaces themselves, but also the particular ways we excited them. Like the old speakers in the CUBE, the way we activate the space matters. Here we were using two ensembles, one for each room, consisting of a double bass and a snare drum, both equipped with transducers, providing particular resonances of their own. Linking the two rooms digitally created an eerie effect of sounds originating in one situation and emerging in another, with the symmetrical setups in both spaces providing a kind of coherency and kinship. As the two sites were offered as concert venues at the same time, no-one, not even we, could experience the full performance. Half of the performance was always out of reach yet present as one space was always haunted by the other.
The Season of Sound - Der Betrieb
A bright studio with big windows towards the street, used for durational dance performances with two seasons per year, engaging neighbors, passers by, local enthusiasts and the dance community alike. Der Betrieb in Vienna is a special and precious space with deep and nuanced social connections. A meeting place for many who would otherwise not meet, it was a tremendous place to explore systemic agency not only with such a diverse audience but with an ensemble of dancers. 24 performances that were 5 hours each gave us ample time to do so in a space that was filled with transducing surfaces of glass, wood, and metal (Elblaus, Pozzi, & Eckel, 2025).
It is true that our initial work on modeling and simulation was a search for fidelity in representation, as described earlier in this text, we have moved to an understanding of our models as having one purpose before the on-site work, and another one after. In other words, we have moved from accuracy in representing the site to material for imagining beyond the site. A consequence of this three-part structure of construction, inhabitation and repurposing, is that the temporal balance very quickly tilts towards the latter, i.e., the time spent preparing our pieces is always quickly outweighed by the time since the piece was performed, and as time goes by this ratio will continue to grow. One can therefore speculate that since our work-spaces spend most of their existence in the repurposing phase, the construction and inhabitation can be thought of as igniting sparks that bring the work-space into being. Such a perspective would radically rebalance our understanding of our work and open up for very different forms of activation and dissemination of our work-spaces in their final form.
Our desire to find new paths through the situations and spaces that are the origin of our work, even after they cease to exist physically, points to a temporally bidirectional practice where we must be as open to speculation about what could happen as we are about what has happened. This openness requires us to reject the impulse to collapse our understanding of the past into a fixed description. The true work-space must be fluid and adaptable also in its past form. Perhaps the linear model of construction - inhabitation - repurposing needs to be expanded to a plane or a volume, allowing us to find new materials by trying to revisit past experiences.
Our repurposing work is very much a speculative practice, in that it posits situations beyond what is possible and also engages with them experientially. It is the construction of futures that in some sense will never be realized beyond their simulation. However, the usefulness of speculated futures are not determined by the degree with which they come to pass. They are neither predictions nor goals. They are an attitude towards a terrain, a gait with which the landscape is explored. Ingold calls this wayfaring, a shift from pre-laid routes to lines made in the doing, that keeps our pasts and futures open (Ingold, 2007).
In the corpus of utrumque’s work, there are pieces that serve as stepping stones that have led to the understanding of the practice at the time of this writing. Before the final remarks, we want to mention a selection in this section.
Rotoscillombrage
The robotic loudspeaker arm Rotoscillombrage opens questions about non-standard spatializations and the use of movable loudspeakers as synthesis components in feedback systems. It was described in a recent publication at the Sound and Music Computing Conference in Graz (Elblaus, Eckel, & Färber, 2025).
Andacht
In 2020, the installative piece Andacht was presented in the Graz Mausoleum. It played with the superposition of several rooms modeled in different ways, using digital convolution models and filter-based simulations of room modes derived from architectural plans. It is both composed to be projected using the IKO speaker and also synthesized using the same speaker in a studio setting, creating a hybrid acoustic reality where many spaces merge.nullibidem
Finally, an earlier work that still incorporates so many of the questions that this text engages with is nullibidem. nullibidem, described in its accompanying booklet as “A site-specific performance that never happened in a place that doesn’t exist” (Elblaus & Eckel, 2021) was a portal piece in the sense that the process in which it came about helped spur many key techniques and attitudes towards space, place, recording and reproduction.
Our practice relates to sites through specificity, making different kinds of work-spaces in different stages of our composition processes: construction, inhabitation, and repurposing. We derive meaning from tuning into particular configurations of space, as a form of collaboration. Sharing them through cohabitation with others is our preferred method of offering experiences of our work. In this sharing, aspects like having pluralities of perspectives, an entanglement of observer and actor and a heightened sense of responsibility rise to the surface. This process forms what we think of as acoustic ecologies with systemic agency which we tend to approach with carefulness and invite others to do the same.
Our current concerns revolve around how we can extend the lives of our work-spaces. We want to refine our reuse of materials gathered from earlier parts of the process in our repurposing stage, and look at how different kinds of re-mediation, re-staging, re-composing can breathe life back into work-spaces in new ways. We aim for this to allow them to be shared further and experienced by new audiences. We consider this work to be speculative in the sense that it reconfigures a highly physically situated practice into a physically impossible mode, where we simulate objects and model situations that cannot be constructed outside of our digital systems. We argue that this insight highlights the speculative quality of the computational material.
In some ways, we are establishing a cultural history of experience that serves both to preserve and to progress. We carefully gather the traces of our past and make our future of what we assemble and how we view that collection in the light of our next destination. The frustrating impossibility of fully recreating a situated experience becomes the indisputable proof that nothing can replace the richness of inhabiting a work-space, thus further motivating our site-specific practice.
Some of the thoughts presented in this text are developed from a presentation at the 16th International Conference on Artistic Research, hosted by i2ADS at the University of Porto in 2025. We also thank the Artist in Residence program at the Institute for Electronic Music and Acoustics (IEM) in Graz, and the Artist in Residence program at the ICST and the Moving Loudspeakers group for their support of the work presented in this text.
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