Venue: Right side Atrium, Ljubljana City Hall
Date: Wednesday, 3 September 2025
Composed and performed by Ida Hiršenfelder and Urška Savič
Duration: 42 minutes
Year of production: 2025
About
Oscillating Spaces is a microtonal composition made for a deep psychoacoustic experience of the oscillation of sound waves in space. With persistent, slow bowing of cymbals placed around the hall, the two performers create subtle microtonal sequences. These tones expand into overtones, cross-resonances, interference patterns, and phase cancellations, surrounding the listeners in slowly drifting sound fields. The music moves beyond harmony, into a realm where listening becomes a physical sensation, where one feels the pulse of air and the weight of frequencies on one’s skin. Their gestures produce friction, density of sound masses, oscillations, and a flux. At times, percussive rebounds, resonant pulses, and rotations emerge, transforming the space into a living organism. As both performers and audience move through the space, the sound waves are stirred and reshaped, deepening the intimacy between sound sources and listeners. Attentive listening gradually sharpens the perception of tiny differences in intervals that elude harmonic frameworks. Through the unfamiliar sonic world of microtonal oscillations, we open new emotional and mental responses and encourage different ways of being with sound.
For the performers, the long, lamenting passages come from the place of quiet meditations on pain, hunger, confinement, and violence, yet also on the small, resilient sparks of hope and beauty that endure in a world burdened by human cruelty.
Review: Marina B. Žlender, Prostorski svet zvočnih frekvenc [Spacial World of Sonic Frequencies], in Sigic, 11 September 2025
Photo by Nina Pernat
Credits
Concept by Ida Hiršenfelder
Composited and performed by Ida Hiršenfelder and Urška Savič
Production by ON Rizom / Sonotopija (Nataša Serec), KUD Mreža, and ŠŠŠŠŠŠ | Institute for Spatial Music
Mentor in bowing techniques: Jaka Berger
Video documentation: Oskar Kandare, Nina Pernat
Photo documentation: Nina Pernat
Year of production: 2025
Special thanks: Mojca Zupančič, Luka Seliškar, Društvo Robida (Topolovo), Bojan Krhlanko, Sašo Kotnik, David Drolc, St. Joseph Church (Damjan Ristić), MOL Gallery (Mateja Veble), Peter Fettich (Kela)
Supported by the City of Ljubljana, Department for Culture
Bios
Ida Hiršenfelder (beepblip) is a sound artist and archivist making psychogeographical, spatial and ambisonic compositions, sound installations and sound walks. Her work primarily explores sound ecology and spatialisation, addressing themes such as the agency of non-organic others, non-human languages, and listening to the inaudible. She is a member of the Jata C group for bioacoustics and sound ecologies, the Clockwork Voltage community for modular synthesis, and the CENSE Central European Network for Sonic Ecologies. Her solo albums were published by the Kamizdat label. She frequently composes for contemporary dance, for which she received the Golden Lightning Award for soundscape from the Bunker Institute in the 2023/24 season.
Urška Savič (Sava Šumi) is a photographer, publicist and radio artist, whose work focuses on archival practices, questions of memory, and the relationships between visual and sonic media. From 2019 to 2025, she worked as the artistic director of the open radio-based (artistic-theoretical) research platform R A D A R at Radio Študent, where she developed projects at the intersection of art, theory, and the radio medium. She teaches at the Department of Photography at ALUO, is a member of the editorial boards of Fotografija / Membrana and the Journal for the Critique of Science (ČKZ), and is part of the photography collective Kela. As an author and collaborator, she also contributes to the third programme of Radio Slovenia – Ars.
Score
Score instructions [PDF], Ljubljana City Hall, 3 September 2025
Poster design by Urša Rahne
Research
In preparing the composition, we explored 26 contemporary experimental works for cymbals. If you know of other related artists, we’d love your suggestions so we can listen and expand our list.