How does music sound to other people’s ears?

It’s the same thing with our sensory perceptions. I have no idea what the blue I see has in common with the color another viewer sees in it – except that we both call it blue. And what about music? How do Bach or Taylor Swift sound to other people’s ears, or even new music?

Let’s talk about it, maybe over a board game. The Berlin Zafraan Ensemble, whose ten members want to reflect today’s life through music, has come up with a card game together with the composer François Sarhan. They take the mystery of the musical experience by the horns, so to speak.

The idea: A group of musicians find a rusty music box with strange things in it – music, pictures and anecdotes – and try to make sense of it. The translation in the form of a card game: You listen to a miniature composition together, each player assigns a card picture to the music and has to convince the others of their own choice. Tell me, what did you hear? With all due respect, it sounds completely different to my ears!

Let’s try it out on the game evening, which some ensemble members have invited to a Berlin hotel lobby. We first admire the motif cards in tarot format, 80 of them, plus one card each for the first musician and the assessor.

What fantastic motifs: the picture collages are teeming with mythical creatures, nautical equipment, flying ships, late Gothic cityscapes, rampant plant ornamentation, imaginary celestial bodies and surreal hellish scenes à la Hieronymus Bosch. A little boy appears in changing guise, and a foxman is also part of the staff. And knights with pointed shoes and strange instruments.

The motifs, explains Zafraan pianist Clemens Hund-Göschel, come from the composer, who created them based on public domain images. François Sarhan edited historical engravings, paintings and encyclopedic illustrations using artificial intelligence. Sometimes more, sometimes less: Some cards are completely self-made, some are completely AI-generated.

Now let’s go. Hund-Göschel gives everyone five cards with QR codes for Sahan’s music on the back. The first musician places a card from his hand face down in front of him and scans the QR code. Sometimes it’s a 40-second piece, sometimes it’s up to eight minutes. You can hear musically enriched field recordings, a babbling baby (Sarhan’s son), word salad, shopping mall cacophonies, loudspeaker announcements – a lot of it comes from everyday Corona life, from the walk to the supermarket to the farmers’ association’s tractor demo.

François Sarhan sees his sound diary as a “re-reading of the recent past”, a mixture of individual and collective memories, comparable to a sailor’s logbook. Hence the name of the game, “Log Book”. The micro-music pieces based on this were then created on the sidelines of Zafraan concerts: the musicians experimented and improvised, with Sarhan’s audio notes in the headphones and his graphic score on the music stand.

The pianist shows us an example: lines of music on which insects are placed. How do you play something like that?

In this way, all the soundtracks of the card game were created in teamwork, whether the result is time-lapse preludes, distorted coffee house music, spherical sounds with sea weather reports, percussion clapboard or clarinet and accordion to electronic disruptive maneuvers. The international ensemble (the members come from Spain, France, New Zealand, Australia and Germany) also likes to try out seemingly impossible things. Since its founding in 2009, Zafraan has been known not only in Berlin for its immersive concerts and crazy experiments. Also for crossing borders in the direction of fine art, theater or performance.

It’s only logical that they have now developed a game from their concerted enthusiasm for playing. Clemens Hund-Göschel, who came up with the game concept, also reveals that he comes from a large family and is still passionate about strategy games with his siblings.

“Log Book” also works best in larger groups, because two players have to complete special tasks as the assessor and the first musician. There is also a version for two people in the instructions.

Now let’s move on: To the selected face-down card, everyone adds the one of their five cards, face down, that they think best suits the music they just heard. It’s reshuffled, dealt, and no matter which card I get, I have to convince the judge that my picture is the one that best suits the music. The more creative and daring I associate to match the music with my card, the higher my chances of winning the final distribution of points.

There is also some luck involved. Of course, if you happen to get the card with the QR code you listened to, it’s easier. But be careful, the motives are by no means clear! The foxman may be in the picture, but he may be rare in the sound collage. And not everything that looks like a dream sounds dreamy.

By the way, many micro-compositions contain snippets of text in English (it can be translated, for example for children): sometimes the words point the way, but sometimes they lead astray. That means it’s about music after all.

On to the next round, with new cards, new assessor, new mic music. Tell me what you hear and I’ll tell you who you are. Also a way to get to know each other better.