The Audium thrums with Pamela Z's factory-sampling 'Arbeitsklang' - 48 hills

"I walked onto the floor of the Bayer pharmaceutical plant and it was so loud, just constant noise, that I was worried I wouldn't be able to use any of my recording. My thoughts obviously turned to the workers. Even with safety equipment, how do they put up with this? Do they like the sound of their work?"

"For Arbeitsklang, Z visited six specific German worksites, including a kitchen and futon maker, to capture the rhythmic strike of knives on cutting boards and the mechanical whir of sewing machines, the industrial thrum of factory floors and Gutenberg printing presses, stitching her samples together and interweaving her own voice and live-MIDI sonic manipulations."

"I actually found there was a lot of that recording I could use. It became a bed of noise I could play with as another layer of the composition."

Composer Pamela Z, after winning the 2025 Berlin Prize, created Arbeitsklang (WorkSound), an immersive audio installation premiering at the Audium theater through March 28. Z visited six German worksites including a Bayer pharmaceutical plant, kitchen, futon maker, and printing facility to capture industrial sounds such as knife strikes, sewing machines, factory machinery, and Gutenberg presses. She layered these field recordings with her own voice and live-MIDI sonic manipulations across the theater's 176 speakers to create an industrial soundscape. Z, known for her five decades of experimental composition and gestural sonic controllers, transformed overwhelming workplace noise into compositional material, exploring the relationship between workers and their sonic environments.

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