Browsing the Synapse Database — which is searchable by “Individuals”, “Interests”, “Projects / Events / Publications,” “Organizations” and “Gallery” — I came across Nigel Helyer’s Sonic Landscapes R + D project:

From June 1999 until September 2001, Helyer worked as an Artist in Residence at Lake Technology in Sydney, developing the Sonic Landscapes Virtual Audio Reality system … The salient feature of the Sonic Landscapes project is the juxtaposition of a fictive (but very convincing) 3D immersive sound-scape, accurately positioned by cartographic software, upon a physical terrain. The effect is somewhat akin to Murray Schafer’s concept of ‘Schitzophonia’, where, by the simple act of recording, sound is split from its original physical context and projected into another context.

However within a Sonic Landscapes experience we are not simply dealing with the disembodied voices of popular music reproduced and re-contextualised via a stereo-sytem! Here we are engaging with a seemingly live sonic organism that is responsive to our presence, our orientation and the traces of our wanderings, and which appears un-cannily embedded in the site itself.

The prototype Sonic Landscapes Unit is capable of operating with a 2cm positional accuracy when employing differential GPS (Global Satellite Positioning) and with a one degree accuracy for rotational head orientation, which, when combined with Lake’’s headphones delivered virtual speaker array, provides a highly realistic immersive audio environment. Tracking technology for the Sonic Landscapes project has been provided throughout by the SNAP Lab of the University of New South Wales under the guidance of Professor Chris Rizos. Future collaborative projects are currently underway between the Artist and UNSW c.f. “Audio Nomad”.The choice of a prototype test site for the project was St Stephens graveyard in Newtown; one of Sydney’s oldest burial grounds, which provided an ideal pedestrian environment, rich in historical material and interesting physical structures.

Dan Paluska and Jeff Lieberman have created the ABSOLUT QUARTET, a large-scale electromechanical sculpture consisting of three instruments and thousands of parts, working together to create one piece of music.

The main timbre is a marimba played by balls shot from a robotic cannon. Other components include a series of wineglasses played by little robotic fingers and an array of robotic percussive instruments. Online users first provide a melody theme, which is heard over a speaker near the machine. The machine interprets the melody and then comes up with its own version, which it starts playing. It also matches the user-generated melody with a composition from its algorithmic music library. As the machine plays, the user can interact and inspire the machine to play in different ways. The result is a complex robotically generated song, co-produced by man and machine - and performed live by the “Quartet”.

Teenage Engineering has constructed the ABSOLUT CHOIR, an architectural installation with an advanced framework of speech synthesizers and artificial intelligence software at the back end. A multi-channel robotic choir made up by 10 singing characters of various shapes and sizes, each of the men, women, tenors and sopranos has a unique and synthetically produced voice. The mother character holds a master clock - and each character contains a small, embedded Linux device, a DA converter and a speaker, making it possible to distribute sounds and to virtually conduct the members of the choir.

As the Choir starts singing, the user may input words to the machine. As the machine receives the words, it immediately uses them to generate a musical composition and lyrics. The robotic choir follows the lead of its human partner, and with the help of generative algorithms, the machine engenders a melody, tempo, dynamics, timbre and lyrics inspired by the user-generated input. The composition is also infused with the machine’s current mood and from the most recently analyzed words input by previous users. A lot of short words with many consonants may result in a fast arpeggio-like song, while softer words may result in a slower composition. As a result of co-production between man and machine, ABSOLUT CHOIR creates a harmonic, yet surrealistic sound palette.

As there are only a limited number of time slots available, you will need to sign up for a pass to ensure you get a chance to interact with the machines.

The hybrid forms of the artistic proposals submitted to VIDA and the transformation of the discipline of A-Life itself have prompted the jury to consider new issues, such as the rising importance of simulation in both social life (for example, in the concept of virtual personality) and organic life (evident in the concept of “neo-organisms”).

The scope of sound creation traditionally covers two large conceptual categories: tools (instruments, software, sound materials, methods) and sound pieces (composed, improvised, random, etc.). Sonic Alter Ego is a system-concept between the said categories or, more specifically, a virtual creative entity that includes both. It will produce original, variable sound creations as a result of the interaction between the author’s criteria and the software’s working architecture. The fundamental concept of Sonic Alter Ego is not the development of a software tool for a potential user, but rather the transfer of crucial aspects of Francisco Lopez’s creative spirit to a virtual machine. Using evolutionary computation techniques, the system will gradually learn the artist’s creative criteria, such as the selection of sound material, editing choices, compositional decisions, etc. This virtual alter ego will reveal hidden or unconscious aspects of the author’s own creative spirit.

About Francisco López

Over the last twenty years Francisco López has developed an astonishing sonic universe, absolutely personal and iconoclastic, based on a profound listening of the world. Destroying boundaries between industrial sounds and wilderness sound environments, shifting with passion from the limits of perception to the most dreadful abyss of sonic power, proposing a blind, profound and transcendental listening, freed from the imperatives of knowledge and open to sensory and spiritual expansion. One of the leading figures of the international experimental underground, he has realized concerts and sound installations all over Europe and the Americas, and his work has been released by more than fifty record companies throughout the world.

Absolute Concrete Music

Over the last twenty years Francisco López has been developing a powerful and consistent world of minimal electroacoustic soundscapes, ‘trying to reach an ideal of absolute concrete music’. To date, his prolific catalog comprises more than 90 sound works, which have been released by 50 record labels from Spain, Germany, The Netherlands, France, UK, Italy, Poland, Austria, Canada and USA. He has toured extensively through Europe and America doing acousmatic performances, and he has received commissions from a number of renowned institutions and organizations, such as the Dutch and Spanish National Radios, the Goethe Institut, V2 Organization, Yale University Theater and the Ralph Lemon Company.

Through what he once called the ‘exploration of the universe of broad-band noise from the real world’, his music arises from the processing of environmental recordings. In deep contrast to the classical soundscape movement (and even despite his paradoxical past involvement with related organizations as the Environmental Tape Exchange, the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology and the Nature Sounds Society), his vast activity doing field recordings all over the world (nearly 30 countries in four continents) never pursued a documentary or representational goal, but a dramatically opposite object sonore perspective.

And in this sense, the evolution of his aesthetics and conceptual background is a profound process of refinement towards an extreme musical purism, with a voluntary and forceful refusal of any visual, procedural, relational, semantic, functional or virtuoso elements. What is left is an astonishingly powerful musical essence capable of reaching both the deepest and most dreadful abyss of crude strength and the most subtle and diffuse aural edges; a complex territory of anti fast-listening where perceptual awareness and the power of naked music are strikingly rediscovered; a world where things are uneasy, unclear, unsolved and where one is forced to immerse and search. He calls it “belle confusion”. (Pedro Higueras, Sonom Studios)

Sun Suckers have one large compound eye (photoresistor) situated on the top of the body. This large eye can read how bright the sun is during the day and detect when night falls. Beside the eye is a thick whisker. This sensor (thermistor) measures the ambient temperature in close proximity of the Sun Sucker.

Sun Sucker’s sound and communicate with each other. They are notorious singers. Their song is a call produced by sensing the current light conditions and temperature. Each species has its own distinctive call and if you listen closely and get to know the calls you can find out what the weather conditions are. To learn more about Ken Gregory’s Sun Suckers–the only Real Artificial Life species to have developed such an effective and specialized means of producing sound–and where you can find one, click here.