Soundscapes in the Garden: Immersive Listening in a Modernist Landmark.
Neue Nationalgalerie, CTM, and d&b transform the Sculpture Garden into a spatial instrument using the power of d&b Soundscape to expand and enrich an icon of modern architecture.
Summary
In August 2025, the Neue Nationalgalerie, CTM Festival, and d&b audiotechnik transformed the sculpture garden of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s world-famous Neue Nationalgalerie into a site for immersive listening and site-specific creation. Building on the museum’s legacy of showing avant-garde music, the series invited artists to compose directly in dialogue with an iconic architectural space, modern works of art, and a site-specific fog sculpture.
The power of d&b Soundscape empowered curators to respect the original vision of the architecture instead of having to insert a generic fixed stage. In addition to three sold-out live concerts, the series also included a full day of newly commissioned sound installations presented alongside Lange Nacht der Museen. Over a few short days, more than 8,500 people experienced the unique creativity made possible by d&b Soundscape – a new benchmark for spatial sound in iconic architectural landmarks.
Setting the Scene
The Neue Nationalgalerie has been one of the defining cultural landmarks of postwar Berlin. Designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the radical glass-and-steel building is widely considered to be one of the defining works of Modernist architecture and one of the most important buildings of the 20th century. Following a recent renovation closure, the museum has managed to live up to its building’s outsized reputation and has become the most-visited art museum in the nation’s capital.
Since its opening in 1968, the building’s architecture has frequently inspired ambitious and fruitful dialogues between art forms. In the 1970s, legendary artists like Alice Coltrane, Keith Jarrett, Cecil Taylor, and Don Cherry were all featured as part of the Jazz in the Garden series. When the museum reopened in 2022, director Klaus Biesenbach revived this tradition and expanded this tradition with Sound in the Garden, which has continued to evolve and grow as a format ever since.
Following this heritage, Soundscapes in the Garden carried the idea into new territory. Rather than simply reviving a tradition, it looked to perfect it. Although the architecture lacked the usual features of a concert hall, there was no stage, no walls, no acoustic enclosure — this was taken as a productive challenge rather than an obstacle to disguise and work around.
For curator Gregor Quack, the idea began to take shape after he experienced d&b Soundscape at CTM Festival. He began to learn that object-based audio technology had the power to turn a wide variety of spaces into environments for spatial composition. This system, he learned, made it possible to achieve sound finesse in unusual spaces without having to sacrifice their spatial and architectural integrity.
Objectives / Curatorial Vision
With Soundscapes in the Garden, the aim was to activate the full width of the Sculpture Garden, inviting audiences to move among sculptures, plants, and pathways rather than gather at a fixed stage. As Quack explained: “Most sound systems freeze audiences in place. What we wanted was the opposite — a setting where people could wander, encounter the music from different angles, and experience how it changed with the space itself.”
The Neue Nationalgalerie needed a solution that respected its architectural heritage and its city-center location. The system had to integrate discreetly into Mies van der Rohe’s protected landmark because the series might have been shut down by Berlin’s strict Heritage Authority. It had to deliver immersive clarity at lower volume to avoid clashes with nearby residential housing, and it had to make efficient use of a public museum’s resources by supporting both live concerts and sound installations with equal precision.
The vision was therefore twofold: to honor the museum’s tradition of fearless experimentation and to push it forward with site-specific works that treated sound as a spatial medium in dialogue with architecture and sculpture.
The Solution: d&b Soundscape
Having identified d&b Soundscape as the framework, the program demanded a system that could let artists compose for the Sculpture Garden itself, give audiences a spatial experience as they moved, within a protected architectural landmark and one of the city’s most beloved spaces.
With d&b Soundscape, sound objects could be placed and moved in relation to Alexander Calder’s Têtes et queue (1965), Eduardo Chillida’s Gudari (1974), or Daphne (1917) by Renée Sintenis, weaving the sculptures into the composition and the natural movement of the audience. Because the technology reinforces objects with multiple loudspeakers in time and level, clarity and localization are achieved at lower SPL than a conventional stereo system. This minimized spill into the surrounding city while preserving depth and presence inside the garden. The same configuration supported spoken word, piano, dense electronics, and fog activations without reconfiguration, combining technical efficiency with artistic versatility.
System Application
The configuration used 22 T10 point sources, four Y-SUBs, and M4 monitors, all driven by seven D80 amplifiers and processed through a DS100 Signal Engine. Together, these provided 28 discrete channels, enabling object-based audio to unfold precisely across the site.
Instead of a massive truss structure, the team used 3.9 m heavy-duty lighting stands — normally used for film fixtures — so loudspeakers remained visually unobtrusive within the protected environment. Once in place, and especially after dusk, the system was effectively invisible, preserving the garden’s aesthetic while still achieving the required coverage.
The lightweight T10s were decisive: their compact form allowed safe mounting at maximum stand height while maintaining stability. Despite the garden’s breadth, ArrayCalc planning and precise positioning ensured consistent imaging across the listening area.
Event & Program Highlights
The opening night set the tone with Blackhaine, whose physically charged performance combined spoken word and movement. “You were in the middle of the performance, because he was standing right next to you,” noted d&b’s Philipp Kercher.
The second evening featured Hania Rani, who appeared with a complex setup of pianos and vintage synthesizers under her new guise as Chilling Bambino. With Soundscape, each element retained localization as it moved.
The third evening featured Pantha du Prince, who began his performance on the museum’s terrace before descending gradually into the garden. The system extended this trajectory into sound: bell tones positioned at the rear of the garden were rotated electronically to follow his path, aligning spatial orientation with performer movement
The final day honored Fujiko Nakaya, the 92-year-old Japanese pioneer of fog as an artistic medium. Her sculpture transformed the garden into mutable architecture, activated hourly during Berlin’s Lange Nacht der Museen. At points, the fog thickened until it erased visual reference entirely. In those moments, when nothing could be seen but vapor, the sound field became the primary orientation, circulating through the garden as an architecture in motion.
Works by Carsten Nicolai / Alva Noto, Stephen O’Malley, and the estate of Ryuichi Sakamoto were staged in this shifting environment, conceived not only in relation to sculptures and architecture but also to the variable density of the fog itself. Behind the scenes, d&b’s Ralf Zuleeg and serge Gräfe translated these artistic intentions into a spatial mix, merging diverse sources and performances within the same architectural field.
During Blackhaine’s performance, serge condensed nearly 90 mono outputs into about 50 sound objects, placing them “to make it spatially sensible.” Because the performer moved among the audience, he relied on visual and colleague cues to follow motion, anchoring the voice in one position and reinforcing it with En-Space effects. “He was in the same area as the audience and could hear exactly what they heard — it made him very comfortable.”
The first performer on Friday was Limpe Fuchs, who brought a wide array of percussive and experimental instruments: metal plates, stones, and self-built tube drums. The highlight of her performance was a four-meter-wide lithophone assembled from rocks collected in the Bavarian forests near her home. Combined with the circling sounds of a Moog synthesizer, whose sound objects were automated using d&b Create.Control, Fuchs’ performance became an extraordinary experience.
All spatial trajectories were based on detailed written instructions from the artists and Sakamoto’s estate, merging pre-rendered and spatially programmed material into a spatial field. Reflecting on the process, serge noted, “Each piece had its own logic, and Soundscape allowed us to present the compositions in the best possible way.”
Conclusion
Soundscapes in the Garden showed how object-based audio can act not only as a system of reproduction but as a spatial instrument. In the Sculpture Garden, sound was not simply added to the environment but positioned within it, shaping how audiences moved, listened, and perceived. What emerged was neither stage nor auditorium but an impressive spatial field, where architecture, sculpture, and sound entered new relations.
