Ludwig Berger - photosynthetic beats - utricularia vulgaris, marais des pontins

With photosynthetic beats — utricularia vulgaris, marais des pontins, landscape sound artist and educator, Ludwig Berger shares the minute polyrhythms of aquatic plants’ photosynthesis.

On a too-hot summer day in the Swiss Jura, Ludwig Berger was listening to bog ponds with an underwater microphone. Below the surface, lay a swarming tapestry of submerged greenery bathing in sunlight. These were the aqueous cradle of oscillations essential to our world.

As aquatic plants photosynthesize, they release oxygen bubbles from their stems and leaves. The moment of release creates myriads of extremely short sound pulses, resulting in ever-changing polyrhythms stemming from different parts of the plant. At a particularly high frequency, the pulses become continuous tones. From these sounds, one can deduce if and how strongly the plant is converting CO2 to oxygen. This depends on light and temperature, but is also affected by contaminants, fertilizers or pesticides.

The two recordings were made in two different ponds, and in both cases the hydrophone was in close proximity to a common bladderwort (Utricularia vulgaris), a carnivorous aquatic plant. While in the first recording the process is left to itself, Berger intervenes in the second by using shadows to regulate the pace of activity. At first accidentally, then intentionally, the interplay of light and shadow triggered the plants to respond with various temporal and tonal shifts.

To emphasize the microscopic processes and polyrhythms of the plants, these recordings were saturated, equalized and dynamically processed. Yet they remain unedited and unchanged in their temporality. Later on, twelve loops were extracted from the recordings to further highlight the percussive nature of these photosynthetic phenomena. These loops are featured as locked grooves on the release’s vinyl format.

The work was created at the residence of "La Dépendance" in St. Imier in July 2022. Thanks to Jan van Oordt and the Collectif du Pont.

Biography

Ludwig Berger is a landscape sound artist and educator. In his compositions, installations and performances, he enables intimate and playful sonic encounters with plants, animals, buildings and geological entities. In his musical work, Berger produces sonic eco-fictions with processed and synthetic sounds. He studied electroacoustic composition at the University of Music Weimar and Musicology, Art History and Literature at the University of Eichstätt. As a sound researcher and teacher at the Institute for Landscape Architecture at ETH Zurich from 2015-2022, Berger studied the sonic dimension of Japanese gardens, alpine glaciers and urban landscapes. He has composed sound and music for award-winning films and theatre pieces and curates the landscape sound festival "Sonic Topologies" in Zurich and the experimental music label Vertical Music.

forms of minutiae is a publishing platform for attuning listenings, electroacoustic music, sonic ecologies and visual art. f—o—m invites artists to produce sound topographies that point to specific (or imagined) territories while constructing a dialectic between the medium through which the works are shared and the sites from where the material was collected.