A Symphony of Bureaucracy
A few years back, at Loud Numbers, we made an episode of the Loud Numbers podcast called A Symphony of Bureaucracy. It’s a data-driven fugue, where eight interlinked melodic lines weave in and out of each other, covering a timeline from the 1950s to the present day. The more melodies you hear at once, the more laws being made by the EU at that point in the timeline. You can listen to it here.
Then, in mid-2025, we were invited to contribute an installation to an event titled “Sonic Citizens” in Malmö’s famous cultural sound zone - and it seemed like a great fit. So we retooled the original piece to be played on eight different Eurorack synthesizers, each sitting on its own table, with a lamp that lights up when it’s active.
Each synthesizer was contributed by a different citizen of Malmö’s cultural sound zone, and each of those synthesizers was made up of multiple modules, each created in turn by a different person in a different place.
To access the installation, visitors were required to fill in two forms to apply for “sonic citizenship”, detailing their experiences of sound and listening being used to include and exclude people in different situations.
The piece speaks to the diverse, pluralistic nature of the EU, and how it can come together into something much greater than the sum of its parts, while also recognising the technical complexity of operating such a vast political and bureaucratic machine.
On the back-end, it was powered by an Ableton project sending MIDI to each synthesizer through a 10-port USB hub, and a Touchdesigner project sending data to a pair of DMX controllers which controlled the lamps.
It was hosted at Lararium during the Sonic Citizens event in Malmö in October 2025. Huge thanks to Luisa Carbonelli at Lararium for hosting the installation and contributing substantially to the staging. Thanks to Simon David Rydén for helping out tonnes on the lighting side of things. Additional thanks to Simon, as well as Konstantine Fioretos, Silfa Hüttner, Sebastian Hastrup, Magnus Borgkvist Johansson, and Kotte Aistre for designing the synthesizer voices that were included and in some cases lending hardware.