Matter and Memory

Strömgatan | Free admission

Matter and Memory invites visitors to take a moment of stillness and reflection. Along Strömgatan, visitors can take a seat on an illuminated bench and listen to a selection of sound pieces created by students in the electroacoustic composition programme at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm.

Inspired by the ideas, discoveries and stories of different Nobel Prize laureates, the soundscapes offer interpretations of everything from the cosmic microwave to literary testimonies and a meeting of past and present.

More about the soundscapes

Literature laureate Annie Ernaux often writes from the perspective of lived bodily experience. Inspired by this, Hillevi Duus explores how physical experience can be expressed through sound and intonation.

Inspired by literature laureate Svetlana Alexievich, whose work is built on hundreds of voices and testimonies, Linnéa Talp has created a composition for the church organ and its rich expression.

In his work, Ola Bergman takes his starting point in the long search for the Higgs particle that ultimately led to the Nobel Prize in Physics being awarded to Peter Higgs and François Englert.

Nobel Prize laureates Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson discovered the cosmic microwave background radiation through radio waves. Inspired by their research, Felicia Sjögren explores electromagnetic radiation that lies beyond human perception.

In his composition, David Linnros interprets Vinterviken and its Nobel-related history. Drawing on literature laureate Henri Bergson’s ideas about memory and time, he examines how the past and the present meet to create something new.

Nobel Prize Facts

Annie Ernaux was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2022 “for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory”.

Svetlana Aleksijevitj was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2015 “for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time”.

Peter Higgs and François Englert were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2013 “for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles, and which recently was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle, by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider”

Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1978 “for their discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation”.

Henri Bergson was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1927 “in recognition of his rich and vitalizing ideas and the brilliant skill with which they have been presented”.