TopoSonic Spheres is a spatial sound composition by the artist couple Sabine Schäfer and Joachim Krebs, built from animal voices and sounds of nature examined under an "audio microscope". The set comes as two discs: a stereo version on the first, and a four-channel version on the second, encoded in DTS so that it can be heard in surround on a DVD player.
Schäfer, born in 1957, is a media artist and composer based in Karlsruhe whose work centres on the micro- and macrocosm of nature. Her cycle TopoPhonien won the Siemens Media Art Prize in 1993. Krebs began using the sampler as an audio microscope in the mid-1990s and developed an electroacoustic analysis and processing method for it, which the two call EndoSonoSkopie. Since 1995 they have worked together as an artist couple, producing spatial sound compositions and installations, several of them connected with the ZKM in Karlsruhe.
The method is the subject of the music. With computer-assisted samplers, Schäfer and Krebs slow down, magnify and dissect natural sounds until their inner structures, which the ear normally cannot catch, become material in their own right. The label text speaks of "acoustic-molecular" structures, and of sounds that lie beyond human imagination because they were made not by people but by animals and nature. The first disc opens with the stereo version of TopoSonic Spheres, about 51 minutes long, followed by ten shorter studies from the series RaumklangMilieu (spatial sound milieu), Nos. 2 to 12. The second disc holds the four-channel version and seven further RaumklangMilieus, Nos. 13 to 22.
The release reflects the duo's concern with listening space. Their pieces are normally installations for many loudspeakers, and the DTS disc was a way to bring a multichannel version into a private room, as a "3D" listening experience at home. Their later joint work, such as the four-channel sound and light installation MicroSonical Shining Biospheres No. 1 (2009), is held in the ZKM collection.
2CD (audio CD stereo plus DTS audio CD, four channels, playable on DVD players with DTS), total running time 146'43", released in 2004 by artist.cd / Wergo as ARTS 8107 2.
