TEMPI
57 heartbeats & electronics

C_Music NOW

Among the many conjectures proposed about the origins of music, one retains a particular resonance, precisely because it touches us all: the first sound to which every embryo is exposed is the beating of the maternal heart. This muffled, rhythmic pulse becomes the primal sonic imprint upon the human psyche, perhaps explaining our enduring bond with music and its manifold phenomena.

In the language of music, the term tempo denotes the pace or speed at which a piece is performed. Its plural, however – tempi – unfolds a cluster of associations that leads us, inescapably, to a painful chapter in recent Greek history: the Tempi train crash on 28 February 2023.

In the work of composer Orestis Karamanlis, fifty-seven individuals – mirroring the actual number of lives lost in the Tempi valley – are connected on stage by a network of cables, generating a soundscape composed of their heartbeats. Each participant is equipped with a contact microphone that captures the signals of their pulse, feeding them into a computer where they are processed through a programming language. The sonic textures and musical structures that emerge in real time are continuously reshaped by the emotional states of those on stage, forming a shifting acoustic mass born of overlapping rhythms.

TEMPI is a work that cannot exist without the presence – and participation – of its audience, and it makes this condition explicit. At the same time, it illuminates a deeper truth we often overlook: that we are inextricably bound to one another, whether we recognise it or not. The fifty-seven who offer their living pulse as raw material for this collective, irregular heartbeat remind us that we are a thread of empathy running through history, a bond woven from the invisible fabric of sound.