Smetak’s Inventions

Walter Smetak, a musician and inventor who emigrated from Switzerland to Brazil in 1937, is one of the most important protagonists of sound art and experimental improvisation in the Brazilian avant-garde of the 1960s to 1980s, whose work continues to have an impact today. At the heart of his work are over 100 instruments and sound sculptures, known as "Plásticas Sonoras," which he invented and built himself. His work also includes numerous compositions, sound recordings, books, poems, writings, and plays, which are testimonies to his integrative, associative mind. While Walter Smetak is known to only a few in Europe and North America, and his music and instruments have only been heard sporadically, in Brazil he was one of the important figures of a counterculture and a strongly interdisciplinary-minded and working artist community in Salvador de Bahia.

The publication Smetak’s Inventions, edited by Julia Gerlach, compiles the research and exhibition material from the project Re-inventing Smetak (a project by the DAAD Artists-in-Residence Program in Berlin, Ensemble Modern in cooperation with the Goethe-Institut) and aims to make this extraordinary artist, his networked thinking, and his creative personality interested in transformation accessible to a broader German- and English-speaking readership.

In addition to the Plásticas Sonoras, the publication focuses on three central themes in Walter Smetak's work: firstly, the symbolism of these sound sculptures and instruments, which is particularly evident in Smetak's Simbologia dos Instrumentos and his composition M 2005; secondly, the Projeto do Estudio Ovo, an egg-shaped sound and listening studio that combines many of his tonal and acoustic visions and his interest in resonance, microphoning, amplification, microtonality, and space. And thirdly, the term "Caossonância," which describes a meta-acoustic, cosmic state that transcends consonance and chaos, in which light is transformed into sound.

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