Elektronengehirn : Hardware

Østre · 22 November, 9:00 pm–2:00 am

Malte Steiner is an Aalborg (DK) based German visual artist and musician. He began exhibiting and creating electronic music in the early 1980s. In 1996 he initiated the project Elektronengehirn as an experiment to create music exclusively using software-based sound synthesis. The name is an old German term from the 1960s for computers, which were then referred to as electronic brains. What sounds trivial today was, at the time, a rather radical idea – especially for those without access to the computational resources of institutions such as universities. Computer sound synthesis for the masses was in its infancy, and not much was possible in real-time. Initially, Steiner used Csound in non-real-time mode to create complex electroacoustic soundscapes out of processed field recordings and synthetic sounds.

The album Hardware from 2024 breaks with that concept and features tracks which are also done with Eurorack modular synthesizer and custom electronic instruments that Steiner has been developing since 2022. During the concert pieces from the album are performed live on computer and DIY modular synthesizer. The Linux computer runs Pure Data for the audio and a custom software created with the game engine Godot for visuals.

https://www.elektronengehirn.de


Malte Steiner is an Aalborg (DK) based German visual artist and musician. He began exhibiting and creating electronic music in the early 1980s. In 1996 he initiated the project Elektronengehirn as an experiment to create music exclusively using software-based sound synthesis. The name is an old German term from the 1960s for computers, which were then referred to as electronic brains. What sounds trivial today was, at the time, a rather radical idea - especially for those without access to the computational resources of institutions such as universities. Computer sound synthesis for the masses was in its infancy, and not much was possible in real-time. Initially, Steiner used Csound in non-real-time mode to create complex electroacoustic soundscapes out of processed field recordings and synthetic sounds.

Malte Steiner