Josef Reiter understands norm in the sense of an order in terms of size. His sound sculpture "ÖNORM A- 1650" can be described as an acoustic "confrontation or friction of pupils and school furniture". It is based on the most extensive survey of Austrian school youth, carried out in 1972, jointly by the Austrian Institute for School and Sports Facility Construction and the Institute for Industrial Design. The intention of this elaborate undertaking was to develop an Austrian standard for the ideal "standardized, physically suitable school furniture", which is still valid today. Reiter takes this standard as a starting point with regard to size and body proportions and transposes the individual deviations into the medium of music. With the help of a computer program based on an analysis by Kurt Tischlinger entitled "Harmonical Proportions of the Human Physique. Computer analysis of the body measurements of 8850 persons", Reiter calculated certain frequencies for the range of 1- 200 cm. He selected 16 students from the extensive sample and of these again only 4 body measurements: namely body height, half span, lower leg length (reference measurement for the appropriate chair) and foot length. These calculations resulted in the pitches of the sounds. Already in ancient times, musical structures had been derived from human body proportions. Four loudspeakers mounted in the corners of the room make the individual body dimensions acoustically audible. The fifth, centrally mounted loudspeaker reproduces an average value in pure intervals in sine tones. In contrast to the harmonic sounding sine tone, the sound reproduction of the individual body measurements is perceived as a slightly detuned and impure interval - analogous to the actual disproportion between ideal measurements and actual body measurements. The individual "student sounds", which form a lively sound surface, meet the sine tones, which in turn form a melodious standardized sound carpet. In this way, the discrepancy between idealized norm and actual, individually different reality becomes acoustically perceptible. Reiter's second project deals with the temporally standardized course of the school day - lessons alternating with breaks. The programmatic title "Große Pause" ("Big Break") already anticipates the theme: during the big break, the class has to be left and the corridor has to be visited, which causes the noise level to swell considerably. Depending on the structural characteristics of such an elongated break corridor, sound attenuation or amplification of everyday noises occurs. Reiter is interested in precisely these building-acoustic phenomena of this architecture, which is symptomatic of all schools. His sound installation consists of concrete material, namely the recess noises of two middle school classes. Two additional microphones at the end of the corridor record the individual sounds of the exhibition visitors. This amalgam of actual live sounds taking place in reality with the prefabricated sound material is filtered through the standardized architecture of the former school corridor. In the stairwell this sound mixture is played back simultaneously and thus serves as a sound track to the upper floor.