The Brooklyn Rail

In a highly technologically mediated present where questions concerned with dis/embodiment become more urgent, the continued work and practice of sound-art pioneer Bernhard Leitner (b. 1938) is increasingly relevant. Decades of research-based acoustic investigations have allowed the artist-architect to develop works that use sound technologies to shift perceptions of space, shaping micro-environments that actively engage the listener’s entire body.

From the scale of a single body to that of the urban, Leitner presents social, aesthetic, and technological possibilities for corporeal hearing, listening with the full, moving body. Forming sonic structures, Leitner uses tone as a building material through a high-level understanding of speed, dimension, intensity, and color of sounds. Movement defines the audio-physical experience of these sonic architectures. Leitner states: “Moving one’s body is critical to experiencing my large space-filling installations and works, because movement allows our auditory sensory organs to register the three-dimensionality of space in a much more precise way.” In movement, the sound-space emerges: in his Sound Space Manifesto, Leitner suggests that these can include lifting, dropping, guiding, opening, stretching, narrowing, relieving, soothing, rising, or embracing qualities, to produce an expanded sensory experience that transcends transmittance to just the ear or brain.

Developing new spatial vocabularies and design techniques, language is a crucial component of this practice. Leitner’s first investigations with sound emerged through essays, including “Sound Architecture” (1974), focused on theory and analytical research, before moving into multi-channel space design, with early works using stereo and quadrophony for electronically generated sounds. Later, when existing technologies could not realize his complex works, Leitner invented devices with engineers, typically using acoustic instruments to produce tones.

In 1982, Leitner won an invite-only international competition for Kunst am Bau, “art in architecture,” by the Technical University Berlin to realize his first built sound structure. Sound Space TU Berlin transforms an existing architecture at the intersection of three corridors into a time-oriented sonic chamber. When the forty-two hidden loudspeakers are at rest, silence defines the space: the sound-absorbing perforated coverings, encasing the room’s walls, absorb and collect bouncing sounds within the constructed sound-space.

Much of Leitner’s work relies on visual components—metal sheets, marble slabs, or even water—that allow the eyes to hear. Almost diagrammatically, the listener can anticipate embodied interaction with sound in relation to these materials. Tuba Architecture (1999) incorporates such geometric objects in space. Suspended from the ceiling are sixty 3 mm–thick heat-rolled industrial steel sheets. Magnet-mounted loudspeakers project tones of a bass tuba, generating a dense “heaviness” as the listener walks through these forms below.

Using a similar material sensibility for an inverse embodied experience of a composed sound-space, Pulsating Silence (2008) suspends two metal panels superimposed with an amplifier and two loudspeakers to generate tones that are completely inaudible to the human ear but are still materially sensed through the body. The tones generate at 74 and 85 Hertz, creating a pulsation that can only be felt as well as seen through the oscillation of the large metal sheets. The work not only reframes silence but also reiterates an understanding of sound-space beyond ear-based audibility.

Bernhard Leitner began his career in the 1960s, at the peak of the Minimalist and Conceptual art movements, and his practice has since been continuously evolving. Viennese philosopher Elisabeth von Samsonow suggests that our present moment is still only “slowly arriving” at his artworks, which continue to remain far ahead of their time. Socio-technologically aware, Leitner’s works use the invisible building material of sound to assemble spaces to listen more closely with the entire body: a call toward a reorientation to the corporeal and the present.

Leitner’s permanent works are located at sites including Parc de la Villette, Paris (Le Cylindre Sonore [1987]); Technical University of Berlin (Sound Space TU Berlin [1984]); Lassallestrasse, Vienna (Sound Field 1020 Vienna [1992–2000]); and the Hotel Embarcadero in San Francisco (Aerial Spaces [Birds] [1973–85]). Bernhard Leitner will present a forthcoming major solo exhibition at Vienna Secession from September 11 through November 22, 2026.