Subproject 2: "Voluminous Modernity. On the Conception of Sound as a Spacious Entity, 1920-1945"
In Subproject II, sound is examined as a spatial conception — as a voluminous entity. The investigation is based on selected media technologies, in this case electronic sound amplification: tube amplifiers, microphones, and large loudspeakers. Public address systems incorporating these components had been developed from the late 1910s onwards and became more widespread in the mid 1920s. With these systems, sound achieved a volume that could be controlled and regulated by an electronic amplifier, which coincided with the volume of new sound spaces that sometimes held hundreds of thousands of people at the same time.
The project looks at several decades, yet always returns to a narrow period of time: the Summer Olympics, which took place in August 1936 in Berlin. This period is used as a kind of magnifying glass for analyzing central aspects of voluminous modernity. The starting point for this analysis is a sound and music history of the various loudspeaker systems at the 1936 Olympics and the voluminous spaces they opened up: in addition to the huge "Reichssportfeld", these were places of nightlife and entertainment (ballrooms, dance clubs, and bars) and places of work (factories, offices, and stock exchanges).
The hypothesis about the conception of sound as a voluminous entity is that, between 1920 and 1945, practices of sound production and perception were increasingly articulated together with new principles of spatiality and spatial experience, which were coupled with decisive socio-cultural upheavals in the fields of science, music, politics, and labour. In the extended sound, modernity manifested and transformed itself as voluminous modernity in a core tension concerning a dynamic spatial concept of expansion and massiness, which could be designed to be overwhelming as well as to exert an enigmatic, atmospheric effect. The coincidence of space and sound volume created a dynamic sound space that relied on physical co-presence. This voluminous modernity is politically highly ambivalent. On the one hand, it resonates with totalitarianisms, and on the other, it includes the problematization of them.
Sonische Moderne 
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