Senta Hirscheider

HUMBLE LISTENING TO THE FREQUENCIES OF EMPIRE

In the context of the 140th anniversary of the Berlin Conference, I visited the Lautarchive and its extensive collection of shellac Recordings at the Humboldt Forum in Berlin.
These historical recordings, initiated by linguist Wilhelm Doegen, were made with prisoners of war during WWI, including individuals from colonised regions, and continued into the 1940s.

One element caught my attention: At the end of each recording, a reference tone – a tuning tone – is heard. This tone was used to calibrate Playback speed, necessary due to the variability of recording equipment.
Crucially, this tone (produced with a pitch pipe) was not added later but had to be recorded live at the end of each session, meaning that every speaker was subjected to this final sound.

This tone forms an acoustic link between all the recorded subjects. It speaks to the scientific logic behind the archive – standardisation, objectivity – but also exposes the fragility of that logic through its small variances in pitch, duration, and environmental noise. For me, this tone holds potential: It is both a marker of violence and a possible path toward listening differently.
I am currently building a collection of these reference tones, preserving their connection to the individuals involved and exploring their acoustic differences. My presentation will take the form of a listening session with performative elements. It will propose a way of witnessing – through shared
hearing – that acknowledges these histories without re-extracting the voices. The tone becomes both a connective trace and a site of reflection, allowing us to hear into the layers of power, loss, and presence embedded in these archival remains.

Senta Hirscheider (*1988) is an artist, scenographer, radio producer, and legal scholar. The three central pillars of Hirscheider’s work are visual poetry and spoken word, a distinct approach to site-specific practice, and a working method in which form and aesthetics emerge from an intensive conceptual process based on in-depth research. Her recent work focuses on themes of sound, memory, and the interplay between archival research and contemporary artistic practice. For her contribution to ‘Antennae: Frequencies from the Archive’ (ZKM, 2024), she explored the collaboration between Suzanne Ciani and Harald Bode. Hirscheider has been part of the curatorial team for ‘man liest wieder rot’ (ZKM, 2024).Currently, she is working on a project based on extensive research in the Lautarchiv at the Humboldt Forum in Berlin, which will be exhibited in November 2025 at savvy contemporary, Berlin.