ISTANBUL, TURKEY.- Oliver Beer’s series entitled The Resonance Project works with acoustic resonance, and the relationship between sound, music and architecture. Every architectural space resounds at its own precise musical notes – its ‘resonant frequencies’ – which are determined by the dimensions and the geometry of the space. In Call To Sound the viewer is invited to move through the hamam during the composition as singers stimulate the resonant frequencies of the architecture, just as a wine glass can resonate at the tip of a finger.

Indeed, in exactly the same way that an organ pipe resounds at its own particular notes, Beer will be using human voices to stimulate the innate harmonies of the building to resonate. The harmonic response is determined by unchanging acoustic physical and mathematical laws, and the new composition will weave these notes into a form of architectural polyphony which is unique to this specific architecture.

The artist describes how he has ‘tuned’ the Kiliç Ali Paşa Hamam, discovering that tonally the building has a strong Eb as its most important resonant frequency, whilst incorporating the diatonic harmonies of Ab major.

Beer says: “The Kiliç Ali Paşa Hamam was completed in 1580. The notes at which the Ottoman building resonates, and which it amplifies in response to the human voice, have remained unchanged since the day the architect Mimar Sinan conceived its form. The building’s geometry is so perfectly regular, and its surfaces so dense and smooth, it could almost have been designed as a massive and subtle musical instrument.

The harmonic response of the building will remain the same – throughout the centuries – no matter what language and what melodies are sung within its walls. The tonality of architecture, something which is largely unrecognized in modern construction, is an instinctive part of our response to our surroundings: in the prehistoric caves of France for example, recent studies have suggested that concentrations of cave paintings and specific red marks indicate points of particularly strong harmonic resonance.”

Beer has long been interested in the story and music of Dmitri Shostakovich, a composer who was able to integrate political and social significance into the seemingly abstract symphonic form – a subject Beer deals with in his 2012 film Out of Shot, a Korean Western. He recognises the potential of abstract harmony to carry social and political messages – and the capacity of the audience to perceive them – as an extraordinary phenomenon. In the composition, alongside a thematic clin d’oeil to Shostakovich, each of the singers has been invited to bring to the performance melodies which they have inherited through their musical upbringing and education and which have personal significance for them. These melodies are integrated into the new score and filtered through the resonance of the building; which sends back its unwaveringly indifferent harmonic response.

Oliver Beer was born in 1985 in the United Kingdom. He studied composition before reading Fine Art at the Ruskin School of Fine Art, University of Oxford and Theory of Cinema at the Sorbonne, Paris. His personality and his background in both music and fine art led to an early interest in the relationship between sound and space. He realises sculptures, photographs and films which embody this relationship, such as his recent piece The Devil in Music, 2015, a sculpture of two tuning forks sliced in half and immersed into the wall to become what he calls ‘2-dimensional objects’.

Within and alongside his work with sound, Oliver Beer creates subtle and diverse sculptural, installation and film projects whose provenance sometimes seems biographical; but in which his play with universal-often intimate-concerns draws on shared emotions and perceptions.

Beer's work has been the subject of many screenings as well as solo and group exhibitions, notably in 2014 at the Centre Pompidou, the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, and the Musem of Modern Art MoMA PS1, New York. Oliver Beer has also held residencies at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, and recently was awarded with the Daiwa Foundation Art Prize 2015.