Terry Fox
«Berlin Wall Scored for Sound»

Terry Fox was DAAD scholarship holder in Berlin in 1980/81. His studio in ‘Künstlerhaus Bethanien' in the city's Kreuzberg district offered him a view over a large section of the Berlin Wall: ‘I saw the way it divided streets, squares and even houses. I decided to draw up a soundscape, a score, a type of audible geography of this structure. I labelled with dots the geographic cornerstones of West Berlin, and joined these four dots with straight lines around which the Wall then zig-zagged to form a pattern. By adding four equidistant lines running parallel to the centrifugal line between the East and West sectors of Berlin, I produced a kind of staff line. The Wall's overall length in centimetres was converted into seconds, meaning that distance was measured in units of time. The topographical and geometrical peculiarities specific to the Wall were divided into the categories 'curved or bent' (E), 'straight' (C), 'chaotic' (H), 'canal' (D), 'lake' (F), and also a category corresponding to the stars of the interstella nebula in the Orion constellation (X). The entire score for six different acoustic tones is an endless loop – just like the wall it is describing.'

Rudolf Frieling