KYOKA
SOFIE BIRCH
Tetra Sonus Selected Artists
Kyoka
Kyoka is a Japanese-born, Berlin-based sound artist whose compositions blend irregular rhythms, fragmented melodies, and tonal contrasts that shift between intensity and restraint. As the first solo female artist on the Raster-Noton label, she has developed a singular approach to electronic music that resists genre specificity while remaining emotionally direct. Her work often draws from research into auditory perception and the psychological effects of sound, creating listening experiences that are both disorienting and deeply focused. Her research into the field of sound and its connection to human understanding will be ever present in her commissioned piece for Tetra Sonus.
Sofie Birch
Sofie Birch is a Copenhagen-based composer, multi-instrumentalist, and vocalist whose ambient works combine electronic hardware, acoustic instrumentation, and field recordings to create rich, layered soundscapes. Her practice is rooted in a deep interest in the therapeutic potential of sound, often drawing from principles of sound healing and somatic awareness. Birch’s compositions unfold slowly and sensitively, inviting the listener into states of introspection and calm. Her live performances often incorporate scenographic elements, creating immersive environments where sound, space, and subtle movement form a cohesive sensory experience.
RESONANT DRIFT
In Resonant Drift, Japanese electronic composer Kyoka explores the space between sound and the unconscious. Inspired by neuroscience, experimental music, and architectural acoustics, the work investigates how sound and human perception shape and respond to each other.
Presented as part of the Tetra Sonus Listening Sessions, the installation unfolds within the quiet and textured space of The Feuerle Collection. Kyoka’s four-channel composition engages in a subtle dialogue with the sculptural and architectural elements of the space, inviting an inward drift.
LOLUPUPI KUTIKU (VEILED VERSION)
A deep listening installation by Sofie Birch
Originally composed for a 32-channel spatial audio system with support from Strøm Festival (2022) and mixed in collaboration with Alfred Bundgaard, Lolupupi Kutiku is a sensorial landscape—at once tender, mysterious, and immersive. Reinterpreted here in a quadraphonic sound by Sofie Birch, the work is part of the evolving Tetra Sonus Deep Listening Session program.
Birch invites the listener into a surreal acoustic terrain—a land of invisible forests, cooing flowers, and humid melodies—crafted from field recordings, synthesizers, and sound therapy instruments. The composition unfolds as a soft resistance to urgency: a public sonic ritual that gently disrupts the tempo of daily life.
Tetra Sonus
Tetra Sonus is a series of quadraphonic listening sessions conceived in dialogue with sonically and architecturally distinct spaces around the world. Each session presents newly commissioned compositions or adapted works of historical significance, designed to resonate with the acoustic and spatial character of its setting.
The series explores spatial sound as a practice of peace, public ritual and material artefact. Using a custom quadraphonic system designed by the VVSSL engineering team, Tetra Sonus offers a focused listening experience defined through the integration of medium, environment, and sonic thought.
Advanced Quadrophonic Sound
Designed for a limited audience, the Tetra Sonus system creates an exquisite and deeply immersive sound field using an advanced minimal quadraphonic setup. The format pays tribute to the legacy of quadraphonic sound developed between the 1950s and 1970s—an early attempt to move beyond stereo and immerse listeners in multidimensional audio environments. Though short-lived in the consumer market, the format laid essential groundwork for today’s spatial audio innovations, especially in the realm of experimental music and sound art.
Tetra Sonus reactivates this lineage through advanced contemporary tools and artistic collaboration, reviving quadraphonic listening as a field for focused attention, shared experience, and sensory depth. With its emphasis on clarity, adaptability, and fidelity, the system is designed to move across spaces—allowing sound to inhabit architecture, and listeners to inhabit sound.
Sonic Identity of The Feuerle Collection
The premiere of Tetra Sonus takes place within the singular environment of The Feuerle Collection in Berlin, an institution internationally recognized for its meditative and synaesthetic approach to exhibition-making. Founded by acclaimed curator and art connoisseur Désiré Feuerle and Sara Puig—art historian and the President of Fundació Joan Miró, the collection is housed in a former World War II telecommunications bunker, a space marked by architectural austerity and acoustic intimacy. Its reverent stillness, carefully preserved and minimally intervened upon, offers a setting where perception slows and sensory attention is heightened.
In this context, Tetra Sonus aligns seamlessly with Feuerle’s intention to break down traditional categories and lead audiences into altered perceptual states. The quadraphonic listening sessions become part of the collection’s larger mission to abolish hierarchies—between disciplines, between time periods, and between the inner and outer worlds of the spectator. Transposed within a space designed to evoke stillness and wonder, the works in Tetra Sonus are not merely heard, but absorbed—activating the architecture as an extension of the listening body.
Here, the act of listening becomes both a private ritual and a public offering. And in resonance with Feuerle’s vision, the contemporary dissolves into the ancient, the audible merges with the unseen, and the experience becomes total.
