Daniel Maalman
Sound Art / Media Art / Performance
Please visit https://vimeo.com/showcase/9488690 to see the complete videos with sound. The fragments on this profile are merely references to the actual work. The fragments here don't contain sound, which is an important focus of the works.
Daniel Maalman is an artist, composer and electronic musician who creates site-specific installations that function as experimental setups to research the workings of sound in physical spaces, and to investigate the spatial circumstances that affect our experience of a space.
In the last years, Daniel developed a large instrumentarium of sound sculptures and mechanical objects that can be used to produce sound, using the direct surroundings of his sculptures as his most important canvas to create sound experiences with. His sound sculptures contain handmade porcelain sound objects, pneumatic and electro-magnetic robot drummers, ceramic drums, and vibrating drone motors.
By reshaping the conditions that define our surroundings, Maalman aims to change the context of these conditions and transform a regular space into an immersive experience. Daniel creates spatial compositions utilising uncommon methods and unconventionally designed instruments that use material surfaces, building materials and physical objects as a sound source. Alongside these setups in physical spaces the artist experiments with methods to save the temporary spatial compositions, into three-dimensional virtual spaces, so that the experience can be virtually repeated, revisited and researched.
Foundscape Orchestra
In 2015 Daniel started a sound-art project, with a small system of electro-magnetic percussive devices and some contact microphones. With this small setup he transformed an engine room in the magnificent monumental building ‘Building A’ in Radio Kootwijk in The Netherlands, into a musical composition. Through various experiments Daniel kept expanding his system, his toolkit and through the years he developed new methods to turn locations into musical experiences.
Fast forward to now, in 2024, Foundscape Orchestra has evolved into a big project where a site-specific sound-art installation is used to create a concert performance, in which the architecture plays the most important role. Design and traditional art forms such as ceramics are paired with state-of-the-art electronic circuit design, which together define the aesthetics of the project. Also a Virtual Reality and LiDAR method is developed to be able to save the temporary immersive experience.
The basic concept of Foundscape Orchestra is that any building can be the starting point for a unique musical composition. Since all buildings have a characteristic set of properties and circumstances, such as their acoustics and their dimensions, but also the materials of which they are constructed, all architecture has its own sonic signature.
Following this concept as a guideline, the goal of the project is to make the inaudible, audible. With an orchestra of machines and unconventional instruments, the material surfaces of a building are played as an instrument. With pneumatic and electromagnetic percussion instruments surfaces are tapped and knocked and amplified with microphones. Together with 60 self-playing handcrafted porcelain illuminated speaker objects, a sonic chandelier, two tables with ceramic drums and a prepared piano, the building is transformed into a sonic story about the cultural heritage of the architecture, its form and function.
Through different experiments the unique properties of a building and its surroundings come alive in a composition that can be performed live and afterwards presented as an exhibition. Foundscape Orchestra has evolved into a large-scale project with many interdisciplinary co-operations, which makes it possible to transform entire buildings.
