If an evening walk in Prague were ever to take you from Spálená Street to Opatovická Street through the passageway around what used to be Vilímkovo nakladatelství Publishing, you might notice a loud and rising drone, apparently coming from an unhappy fluorescent tube on the ceiling. In this case it’s quite easy to link the unfamiliar noise to its possible source. At other times, mysterious emitters and replicators of sound generated, for example, by electrical wiring, water mains, the drainage system, air conditioning, the wind or restless neighbours are hidden somewhere, and thus harder to identify. The origins of the universe of microscopic, unidentifiable sounds in architecture is not always necessarily physical; under certain circumstances they even appear metaphysical or paranormal.
   The largest organ in the world is said to be found in Sydney, in the concert hall of what is probably the most famous piece of architecture dedicated to music in the 20th century. A tender in the late 1950s was won by Danish architect Jørn Oberg Utzon. In the course of preparing the construction, the relationship between Utzon and the investor became quite strained, and the architect eventually left Australia to return home to Europe. The local councillors and the ministry involved found a replacement in Peter Hall, who successfully brought the construction to its conclusion 15 years later, in 1973. The building was formally opened by Queen Elizabeth II. The Sydney Opera House is famous for its extravagant, seashell-like roof, but the mysterious sounds heard in the interiors of the giant structure when no musical ensemble is performing are less well-known. The reason might well be that they are mostly heard at night when the building is empty. One might recall the romantic plot of Le Fantôme de l'Opéra, but there is no lovelorn musical genius to grace the case of Sydney .
   The Belgian sound artist Peter Lenaerts travelled from Brussels to Sydney to record a documentary involving audio research into the opera house for the “Soundproof” programme on ABC Radio . He discovered that every room, from the rehearsing room, the staircase and shower to the main concert hall had an unmistakable acoustic manifestation. Listening through the headphones connected to a recorder, he disclosed that some rooms resonated at a single frequency, and others even in harmonious chords. Apparently, the main concert hall sounds a note in pure A; musicians could base the tuning of their instruments on it.
   Lenaerts’s research resulted in the finding that the iconic ferro-concrete building was not as mute and audio-neutral as one might expect. When there is nobody inside at night, the opera house starts to live its own life, like some organism giving off an array of cracking, humming, buzzing, rustling, whistling, whirring, ringing, knocking, spluttering, screeching and trembling noises. As part of his radio documentary, Lenaerts interviewed several people working in the opera house, and arrived at a psycho-acoustic model, an “auditory portrait” of the building. He found a tension, almost a contradiction between the visual and acoustic aspects of the Sydney Opera House. The monumental, tectonically and constructionally sophisticated architecture speaks a diverse, multi-faceted, whispering dialect. For that matter, every construction, every building has a similar hidden audio manifestation – not only the historical ones or those with timber frames but also straightforward stone or concrete houses, and not necessarily in areas of high volcanic activity.
   Peter Lenaerts works to reveal everything that hides beneath silence and the seeming absence of sound, or beyond emptiness. His recordings from the interiors of abandoned buildings were issued by Very Quiet Records (field recordings of quiet places; the owner of the Devon-based label is Tony Whitehead, who shares Lenaerts’s interest in micro-sounds). Among his remarkable pieces is a static portrait of the Serbian Orthodox church of Prophet Elijah. Lenaerts recorded this in 2011 during an expedition to track silence and emptiness in the deserts of southern Australia and its Northern Territory. The location, Coober Pedy, lies 847 kilometres from Adelaide and 2088 kilometres from Sydney. Since the place is extremely hot, it is hardly a popular tourist destination. The small town, situated around 10 kilometres from the church, has a few hundred inhabitants, probably of a non-orthodox persuasion.
   Lenaerts originally intended to capture the sound of silence in the church interior, but his headphones were largely occupied by the low frequencies generated by gusts of wind hitting the walls outside. He thus decided to improvise with detailed micro-sounds; he lit two candles and placed a Rode NT4 stereo-microphone between them. The recording lasts almost four hours and has not been modified in post-production. If you have time and patience, you can picture yourself in an abandoned church in the New South Wales, listen to the candles burning, and also experience a number of surprises during the session. Some might remember Jacob Kierkegaard’s recordings from the interiors of houses in Pripjať, near Chernobyl, or a Bruce Nauman video capturing his empty studio in the night.
   The Quies video-documentary charts a quest for emptiness, not silence. While watching it, you witness the sound artist’s constant struggle with the wind and technology.
   In recent years Lenaerts has also travelled to China. He stayed for a while in a newly-established city in Nancha Province. The city was planned for a million people, but hardly a quarter of that number have lived there to date, so the metropolis is strangely empty. As human acoustics there are, logically enough, somewhat subdued, the sounds of the non-human urban structure prevail, even during the day,
   Apart from travelling, Lenaerts has been performing, in the last couple of years for sleeping listeners, which is a popular trend that has also taken root in Prague recently. He refers to his concept as MicroSleepDub, and the musician, acting as a human soporific agent, uses specific acoustic nuances intended to put the listeners to sleep as quickly as possible.

- MILOŠ VOJTĚCHOVSKÝ
- https://www.hisvoice.cz/sydney-microsleepdub-a-dalsi/

Dear Miyuki, 

I'm sending you this postcard from 非場所. 

15 years ago it was rural farmland, now it’s a rapidly developing new city with high rise apartments, office buildings, shopping malls, hotels, and a dilapidated entertainment park. Most of these are still empty though. It's a city built for 1 million but the current population is around 300,000. It's not a ghost town—no one has left—but not enough people have arrived yet either, which makes it feel rather eerie. 
This place is not exactly a tourist destination. 
I don't speak the language. Kids stare at me. 
I'm gonna start recording now.
I'll send another report soon. 

Peter

Field Reports From 非場所 was commissioned by ABC RN's Soundproof.

There's a ghost (or two) at the Sydney Opera House. It lurks in the halls and ceilings, and calls out ever so quietly that you don’t hear it unless you’re all alone in the building, late at night or in the small hours of the morning. In the Concert Hall it hums an A perfect enough to tune an orchestra to. In the Joan Sutherland Theatre, it shrieks in discord.

Where do these sounds come from? What produces them? And do they in their turn produce the stories and myths?

We are a visual species, often unaware of the impact of small, invisible sounds on our moods and behaviour.

The Sydney Opera House is famous for its looks and infamous for its sound(s). 
Architecture is still a mostly visual medium, even though no building is ever quiet. From their structure and infrastructure to their surroundings, buildings hum, drone, whistle, shriek and hiss.

Phantom Opera is an exploration of the sounds of the Sydney Opera House—with a particular focus on the quiet and the acousmatic - and a search for the reasons, origins and stories behind these sounds.

Phantom Opera was commissioned by ABC RN's Soundproof.
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/soundproof/phantom-opera/7526220

An experimental festival implies an experimental audience, and a test of this also came on the second night with Belgian artist Peter Lenaerts’ MicroSleepDub – a sleep performance between 12am and 8am in the Østre venue.

Upstairs, we were invited to occupy one of the 17 beds on the floor. Attractive red and white blankets and pillows were made up on slim, comfortable mattresses. The mattresses themselves were spread out in no particular design, within arms-length of each other. Some came in twos and threes, wore pyjamas and carried toiletry kits. I selected a spot in the corner of the room and lay down in the clothes I had been wearing all day.

Just past midnight, Lenaerts dimmed the lights and began describing the dimensions of the room, counting, number by number, its length, width and depth. Before he finished I was asleep. Throughout the night, I woke up regularly to hear a variety of sounds, from scratching noises to the sounds of empty buildings, all provided by Lenaerts, collected from his travels everywhere from Nansha in China to Sydney Opera House, where he recorded empty concert spaces. The mood was peaceful and comforting, not only because of the sounds, but perhaps because of the intimate, communal nature of the event. It somehow suggested acceptance, openness. It had not been my intention to stay the whole night, but the black-out curtains on the windows were pulled down at 8.45am and I was still there. As I left, I noticed two women had, during the night, pulled their mattresses together and now lay in an embrace.

I sat with various participants outside, on a thin, cobbled street on garden chairs, and drank coffee and ate cartons of porridge. Someone asked me about my dreams, but I didn’t think that was the most significant thing about the work, and couldn’t remember them in any case. Yet I felt strangely refreshed, elated even. Lenaerts’ concern is sound, but his amalgam of sounds, sleep and community created something much more. We know listening as a group is powerful, but are we even more receptive to sound and music when we are asleep?

That afternoon, as I listened to Tomoko Sauvage’s flow, an installation involving blocks of ice dripping from the ceiling into amplified bowls, creating a magnificent counterpoint, I knew my senses were particularly alert to the experience because of MicroSleepDub.

- Toner Quinn
- http://journalofmusic.com/focus/end-and-beginning-experimental-music-festival

My only two days at the festival had to be spent efficiently and luckily I got to use the nightime as well with a sleep performance by the Belgian sound artist Peter Lenaerts. The instructions were to meet up at midnight and bring a pyjama and toothbrush. The place was again ‘Østre’, now transformed into a dormitory with 27 beds located at a safe distance from each other. The program consisted of Lenaerts’ field recordings from two places: a newly established city in southern China, which was intended for a million people, but only inhabited by a minority, and night recordings from the Sydney Opera House. These recordings were re-recorded onto dub plates: LPs without a protective layer. Because of this, according to Lenaerts, they will wear out with each play and become noisy, so that every performance gets embedded in the next one.

The performance was introduced by Lenaerts himself, and in the first hour he read us some kind of bedtimes stories while playing field recordings. He described a room which I thought at first was the one we were in, but then became a mixture of descriptions of the places where the footage was from. Some of these were very surreal. After that, the lights were dimmed and the night really began. The concert experience happened through a combination of slumber and light sleep, between drowsiness and extremely clear listening.

At one point I was awoken by the silence, because there was a small pause in the soundscape, another time by an airplane that flew close-by over my head and a third time because one of the other guests was snoring. When I was awoken by the silence, it hit me how much I missed the soundscape I had fallen asleep to. I only fell asleep again when I heard the LPs crackling and some Chinese men discussing something or other off in the distance. Time and space were dissolved and I belonged to a world created by Lenaerts’ sounds.

- Sanne Krogh Groth
- http://seismograf.org/artikel/borealis

MicroSleepDub
a durational sleep performance by Peter Lenaerts
2015, 480min

The sleep performance MicroSleepDub is about micro sound, architecture and urbanism. It’s a durational performance built around a sound composition for dub plates.

In MicroSleepDub, Belgian artist Peter Lenaerts listens and looks for sounds that are too quiet, too vague, or too low. By using the microphone as a microscope, he zooms in and amplifies these neglected, underexposed and discarded sounds. MicroSleepDub is an all night performance, where listening and sleeping are both encouraged.

Peter Lenaerts spent a week recording in Nansha, a so-called StateLevel New Area in China. 15 years ago it was rural farmland, now it’s a rapidly developing city with high-rise apartments, office buildings, shopping malls, hotels, and a dilapidated entertainment park. It’s a city built for 1 million, but the current population is around 300,000. Nansha is not a ghost town, because no one left, but not many people have arrived yet, giving the city an eerie and empty feeling. Nansha is caught between a rural past and high-tech future, the present that lies in between is out of sync with reality, and already slowly but surely falling apart.

Lenaerts also collected sounds during two nights alone at the iconic Sydney Opera House where he recorded its empty theater spaces, rehearsal and dressing rooms, and concert hall.

With these recordings, Lenaerts will create a live soundtrack for 4 dub plates – LPs without a protective layer causing the groove to wear itself out and making the sound disintegrate over time.

MicroSleepDub starts at midnight and ends at 8am, and you are invited to come, listen, and fall asleep. Mattresses and sheets will be provided. Lenaerts will read you bedtime stories about new cities and empty buildings and lull you to sleep with the sound of empty rooms.
Please bring anything to make your sleepover comfortable (clothes, cushion, toiletries, etc.).

At the end of the performance, a small breakfast will be provided.

Credits
Concept, sounds, words & images by Peter Lenaerts Light design by Salva Sanchis
Supported by Workspace Brussels, Buda Kortrijk, Kunst/Werk VZW and the Flemish Authorities.
Many thanks to Els Silvrants-Barclay, The Institute for Provocation (Beijing), Guangzhou Nansha Pearl River World Trade Center, Eddie Yi, Rocky Luo, Doreen Liu, Katrina Lui, Sydney Opera House, Beursschouwburg, Vincent Tetaert, Zsenne Artlab, David Helbich, Manon Santkin, Elly Gabriels, Amber Ma.

MicroSleepDub premiered at the Radio Festival in Buda, Kortrijk, February 27, 2015.