COPULA E /Semiotic Chora
COPULA E /Semiotic Chora is a sound installation for four loudspeakers. The site-specific work commissioned for the façade of Cologne's Philharmonie combines sounds from abstract computer music with synthetic, computer-generated speech fragments, as used in language acquisition. This is the first of several parts of the work in which the general relationship between language and sound is addressed. Here Schmickler once again expresses his interest in making epistemological themes tangible as compositional questions by means of music. Among other things, the Cologne composer deals with questions about the development of musical grammar and, more generally, the sign levels of music. In terms of their acoustic properties, music and language are very similar. Their function, however, is apparently different. Different methods are used to generate sounds that resemble certain characteristics of language - human sounds, phonetics, on the one hand, and speech melodies, prosody, on the other.