On October 28, 2021 Sinestesia Eco by Roberto Pugliese, winner of the Matteo Olivero Prize 2021 was unvealed on the façade of the former civic library in Saluzzo, a candidate for the next capital of culture.
Sinestesia Eco is a sound installation that, at certain times, transforms the building into a musical palace. Artificial intelligence software uses machine learning to study scores by composers such as Frescobaldi, Domenico Scarlatti, Bach, Cherubini, Mozart, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Händel and Rossini. Never-before-heard variations of these scores alternate at particular times of the day with sounds produced by an electronic ‘sound carpet’ – a long sound with a series of internal micro-variations. In the evening hours this builds a wave that oscillates between tradition and modernity.
The sound is transmitted through seventeen external loudspeakers suspended on the façade and mounted on a tensile structure consisting of harmonic steel, the same wire used for musical instruments, making up the internal structure of a pentagram.
The sound will be diffused through 17 external loudspeakers, suspended on the façade of the Study Centre and mounted on a tensile structure made of harmonic steel cables: the same metal used to make the strings of musical instruments, such as pianos and violins. The cables on the façade form a grid simultaneously evoking the internal structure of a piano and pentagram.
The work aims to “amplify and share the musical activities taking place in the new Saluzzo Centre for Historical Keyboard Studies and to represent a sounding board for activities centred on composition which are based in the building“.
This is one of a number of recognitions of a work that has developed steadily and consistently over time, even when experiments of this kind were not so easily supported or recognised.
Roberto Pugliese, Sinestesia Eco, 2021
Premio Matteo Olivero, curated by Stefano Raimondi, Ex Biblioteca, Via Volta, Saluzzo, Cuneo, Italy
