The »Architone« aim is not to create sound art in public space but with public space. To use public space as an musical instrument. For the first “Architone” in Kiel developed for the Siemens Arts Programme in collaboration with BMB Con presented at the Schleswig-Holstein Musik Festival we created unique instruments/machines to produce physically powerful sound waves so that the entire Kunsthalle became acoustically resonant, tangible, and alive. For the Tuned City Festival in Berlin we applied the Architone ideas to a public park under the name of  COMPOSEDCITY a co-production of Lola landscape architects and staalplaat soundsystem. A similar incarnation was presented with Mark Bain in Graz at the Steirischer Herbst and ORF Musikprotokol.
For Station To Station commissioned by the Today’s Art Festival in Den Haag, in collaboration with Mike Reinirse, Erik Hobijn and Mark Bain, again we applied Architone principles to the Den Haag Central train-station. To explore the train station’s sound as a source and then control and transform it into a new instrument, we used the back and forth movement of the trains as faders for the mixing of 10 train horns and station sounds.

Staalplaat Soundsystem is now working on the new Architone project Yokomono-pro, developed for the Indian Khoj – International Artists Association in New Delhi. The incredible volume and size of Indian traffic and the sounds it produced is our inspiration for this project.Their communication language is by car horn. Signaling with it much the way we use car indicator lights here in Europe. Applying the Architone practice we seek to intercept this phenomenon of car signaling and overlay it within a meaningful structure. Our idea is to hire 30 of the Auto Rickshaws taxis and to remotely trigger their horns as they drive along a pre-determined route. Using the taxis and their horns as a choir it will be a combination of voice patterns and dynamic spatial movements creating a sound choreography. This taxi horn experiment hopes to engage on a large scale with the relationship between discrete signals and generalised noise. The première was presented in August 2008 at the India Art Summit.

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