Menneskelig Metronom (eng.: Human Metronome)
Four voice based human metronomes at 24 beats per minute.

@ SPOR - Festival for contemporary music and sound art
Venue: KH7 artspace, Aarhus, Denmark
May 10th, 2019

"THE WIRE - Adventures in sound and music" writes about "Human Metronome" in a review of SPOR Festival 2019 by Emily Bick:
"...The following day’s events take a more cerebral turn with the minimalist vocal piece for four singers, Louise Vind Nielsen’s "Human Metronome". Each singer repeats one syllable, sometimes changing the volume. It feels like listening to radar swoops of celestial objects looping out of phase with each other, and predicting each singer’s changes becomes increasingly interesting as the piece progresses..."
THE WIRE, Issue 427, September 2019


»It appears that time as a universal human measure has been obliterated. Clocks and watches have been confiscated. A shield conceals the changing colour of the sky. Everyone is forced to become their own clock, teasing out a vague memory of what those mechanical measures used to feel like.«

- Jack Chuter about the tape release Louise Vind Nielsen - “Human Tape Metronome” (2018, MAGIA)

A human being breaths on average at a frequency 12 breaths per minute while resting. When a human upon exhalation generates a note with a frequency of 24 beats per minute it is therefore twice the speed of an average relaxed human being.

Four people performs as voice-based metronomes. They follow their own feeling of 24 bpm and are not synchronized or calibrated. They can’t help it. They keep going and continue even though it hurts.

Essential to the piece is the human being’s sense of time and “self-time” in a world in which the pace seems to be constantly accelerating and huge parts of society moves on the verge of exhaustion.

“Human Metronome” is sonically relatively minimalistic and because of the asynchronous beats that emerge the listening audience will probably feel it resembles electronic avantgarde music such as Steve Reich tape-loops, Caterina Barbieri’s modular synthesizer-patterns that continue infinitely, or polyphonic voice-based music based on repetitive patterns as in the traditional music of the Pygmy tribes.

“Human Metronome” is part of Louise Vind Nielsen’s sound-based performative works in which she lets humans take over the roles of machines and thereby embody musical instruments. Most recently in the performance “Human Amplifier” where her live music are exclusively amplified by human speakers.