Following on from a recent post I made about Justin Beiber’s song ‘U Smile’ that had been slowed down 800%, I’ve come across another dramatically slowed down soundscape. This time it’s not some Canadian teeny bopper, but one of the most famous and influential composers of all time: German classical composer and pianist Ludwig van Beethoven.
Norwegian conceptual artist Leif Inge took Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and digitally stretched it to a staggering duration of 24 hours with no distortion or pitch shifting. The result is a deeply ambient soundscape that that wouldn’t be out of place in a film like Baraka.
The 24 hour soundscape is called ‘9 Beet Stretch’ and was originally created as an art instillation at Oslo’s NOTAM (Norwegian network for Technology, Acoustics and Music) in 2002, and has since been featured as a 24 hour audio artwork around the world.
According to the New York Times, ‘9 Beet Stretch’ was inspired by the Scottish visual artist Douglas Gordon, whose “24 Hour Psycho” (1993) slowed a Hitchcock film to uncover its “unconscious.”
Personally, the thought of watching the film Psycho stretched over 24 hours sounds like torture to me, but Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony similarly stretched creates an interesting and sometimes epic soundscape.
While ‘9 Beet Stretch’ hasn’t appeared in any art galleries recently it can still be heard online. The soundscape has been playing continuously every single day online since may 7th, 2005 when it was started at sunset in Vienna, Austria, where Beethoven’s ninth symphony was first performed, on may 7th, 1824. There is now even a free ‘9 Beet Stretch’ iPhone app!
You can listen to the live 24/7 stream of ‘9 Beet Stretch’ or sample five minutes of it in the clip below.
[audio:https://www.beforeiforget.uk/audio/9-beet-stretch.mp3]—
Live continuous broadcast of ‘9 Beet Stretch’
As heard on RadioLab’s show about ‘Time.’
Slow down Justin
Tree roots and other things
Four decades of naked ladies
Wrote the following comment on Oct 9, 2010 at 9:12 pm
Amazing, I’m going to try it out at work. It’s probably pretty hard to listen to the whole thing. I would have to wait for a weekend to do it. It would be interesting to listen to it in parts though.
Wrote the following comment on Oct 9, 2010 at 11:26 pm
Where do you find this stuff? The clip you include is quite beautiful, but I don’t think I would listen to it for very long.
I also clicked the link to ‘Four decades of naked ladies.’ I look at stuff like this and think what it must be like to have a mind that comes up with these ideas.
Wrote the following comment on Oct 10, 2010 at 1:36 am
Wow, this is awesome! It’s very immerse, great for meditation.
Wrote the following comment on Oct 10, 2010 at 6:49 am
That’s really really good. I just listened to it – twice, and can honestly say that I no longer have a care in the world. Other than how to rip the audio out of this page and stick it on my ipod.
Wrote the following comment on Oct 11, 2010 at 12:20 am
@ JP – Where do I find this stuff? I actually heard it featured on a podcast I’m subscribed to called RadioLab. It’s a very cool science podcast, but science for the rest of us not science for nerds.
@ PJ – I will email you a direct link to that clip, but in fairness all I did was pull out 5 minutes completely randomly from the live stream.
Wrote the following comment on Oct 12, 2010 at 5:28 pm
What a fascinating piece of music. I had a lot of polishing to do this weekend (a work related chore) and so I hid away in my workshop and just had this music on quietly. I found it to be very soothing.
Wrote the following comment on Oct 16, 2010 at 2:37 am
U crazeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Wrote the following comment on Oct 23, 2010 at 5:38 pm
So, does everything that’s slowed down become ambient and just basically cool? I mean, consider the range: Beiber to Beethoven. At this speed they both sound similar as if they were both composed by someone like Vangelis, as a soundtrack for a movie like Blade Runner. Whatever the case maybe, I like it. Paula, however, wasn’t diggin it.
On a theological note, it made me think about how God might experience the universe. Not being limited by time and space, I imagine that he (kinda like Doc Manhattan in the Watchmen) can perceive things far beyond human perception, and can stretch a nanosecond to infinity and enter into it and experience it like nothing else. In this way the universe would be like an immense, multi-layered symphony that can be experienced and enjoyed at so many levels.