Petri Kuljuntausta
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Petri Kuljuntausta is a composer, performer and sound artist. His latest soundscape compositions are based on the first recorded sounds of Aurora Borealis along with soundscape compositions based on urban environments like the cities of London, Milan and Helsinki. He is famous for music composed of sounds both natural and extraordinary. In close collaboration with natural scientists, he has composed underwater installations from underwater materials and made music out of whale calls and the sounds of the Northern Lights.
Environmental sounds, live electronic music, improvisation and collaborations with media artists has influenced him as a composer. One of his many challenging composition projects is Northern Lights Live, which is based on soundscapes of the Northern Lights and audio feedback. The work was commissioned by the ISEA2004 (Inter-Society for the Electronic Arts) festival, 12th Symposium on Electronic Arts. Northern Lights Live is a vivid collaboration in the field between art and science, recycling original nature recordings of the phenomena as well as processed aurora borealis sounds. A forty-five-minute-long continuous audio-visual dialogue between nature's own soundscapes and their digitally altered, urban noise-art substitutes were created on stage. In collaboration with zoomusicologist Dario Martinelli, he released a CD entitled Zoosphere. A Musical Encryptation of Animal Sounds, which is entirely based on animal sounds, like the sounds of birds, whales, wolves, shrimps.
Kuljuntausta has collaborated with the experimental film director Sami van Ingen, urban architecture group Ocean-North, Morton Subotnick, Atau Tanaka, Richard Lerman and musician/philosopher David Rothenberg, and he has made recordings for various labels in England, Finland, France, Germany and the USA. Kuljuntausta is famous for music composed of sounds both natural and extraordinary. In close collaboration with natural scientists, he has composed underwater installations from underwater materials and made music out of whale calls and the sounds of the Northern Lights.
Kuljuntausta is the founder of Charm of Sound association (Äänen Lumo), established in 1995 to support electronic music, experimental music and sound art, and the Finnish Society for Acoustic Ecology which was founded in 1999. Kuljuntausta was the founder and main editor of "..." ezine (electronic magazine, 1997–2001) and he also founded Charmlist emailing-list in 2001, both focused on distributing information on the activities on electronic music and sound art.
CChanges (“see changes”) is a four-part art production dealing with sound art and climate change that started in Helsinki in 2019 with concerts by seven sound artists and electronic composers. In January 2020, the artists staged a collective sound art exhibition at Vuotalo Gallery. At the end of 2020, a CD recording was produced containing audio works and electronic compositions commenting on the state of the environment and climate change.
"The book Sound, Art and Climate Change is the fourth production of the CChanges project, towards which are also invited a few visiting artists to write on the subject. The book brings together personal texts, while the authors had the freedom to produce a text reflecting on their own position. The only request given to them was to follow a theme on which it was hoped they would write: thoughts on environmental sound and climate change, and the relationship of these topics to their own work. Each text opens up the subject in its own way. Collectively, they provide an overall picture that worries artists globally. In the writings, artistic activity at an individual level is linked to the surrounding world and the change that takes place in it. Each artist sees events in their own way, but what they have in common is that they have all noticed the change. Climate change affects the environment we live in, it affects the food we eat and the air we breathe, it affects the wood we use in musical instruments."
The work of sound artists and composers is ecologically sustainable, but it’s not just a question of us. Information about the world around us can also be disseminated through art. However, the purpose of the CChanges project is not to preach, but to unite art and writings under a particular theme and to share the ideas that emerge through the work of an artist.