Wolfgang Müller (1957-) is an artist and musician based Berlin, Germany and Reykjavík, Iceland. Since 1988, much of Müller’s recent work incorporates his interest in Icelandic natural history, culture, and mythology. Müller is particularly interested in Iceland myths of elves, creatures who communicate not through speech, but through singing, a music inaudible to the human ear. Inspired by this notion, several of Müller’s works bring the sounds of Iceland to life through audification and sonification techniques. Müller’s Bat (1989), for example, consists of Ultrasound recordings of indigenous bats (from Iceland) processed to be audible to human ears. Available as CD, the work was originally shown alongside painted oscillograms at an art gallery. With musician colleagues in 2008, Müller produced Séance Vocibus Avium, a project that recreated the calls of eleven extinct bird species. Each collaborating musician was assigned to a particular species, and reconstructed the sounds the bird would have many by studying historical documents. Müller includes in CD/vinyl a booklet with Müller’s sketches of each bird. Interestingly, in this sonification the calls (all from birds once found in Iceland) are recreated using only the human voice rather than electroacoustic technology – a bittersweet and haunting underscoring of the fact that it was humans, too, that directly or indirectly caused the extinction of these birds.

You can learn more about Wolfgang Müller at his website, http://www.wolfgangmueller.net/. 

Works Cited

1. Sudyka, Diana. “Wolfgang Müller – Séance Vocibus Avium,” Tiny Aviary. November 27, 2009, Web. http://thetinyaviary.blogspot.com/2009/11/wolfgang-muller-seance-vocibus-avium.html. (Accessed 11 July 2016).
2. Wolfgang Müller website, Web. http://www.wolfgangmueller.net/. (Accessed 11 July 2009).
3. Schoon, Andi, and Florian Dombois. “Sonification in music.” (2009).