Expect unexpected sounds, exciting evenings where listening and hearing are the keywords. Even before we are born, we are affected by noise invading our safe and quiet space. We are surrounded by sounds that define the rhythm of our world. Artists and researchers will guide you through the labyrinth of sounds that constitute our daily lives.

French visual artist Guillaume Leblon creates a new performance where invisible sounds and words meet. A dialogue within the imagination of the audience. Jeph Jerman (US) will be searching the surroundings of Leuven for materials that can be used as instruments. Wood and rocks become part of an improvised work in which natural and daily noises transform into new and subtle music. Marc Van De Sijpe (BE) has studied the sonar navigation system of bats and made their mysterious world of sounds accessible for us to hear. The video Lost Sound by John Smith & Graeme Miller (UK) shows discarded audiotapes around London - strands clinging to a fence, trapped in the crevices of a tree trunk, intertwined with weeds. The sound track combines the voices and songs on the found audiotapes with ambient sounds recorded on location. Finally, David Watson (US) will be exploring the acoustic qualities and possibilities of the venue at STUK with his bagpipes.

Soundcities is an online open source database of city sounds from around the world, that can be listened to, used in performances on laptops, or played on mobiles via wireless networks. Initially all of the sounds were by Stanza, but you can now contribute your own found sounds. This is was the first online open source found sound database. First version 2003.

Air Detritus is a 2007 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc., for Networked Music Review. It was made possible with the funding from the New York State Music Fund, established by the New York State Attorney General at Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors.

Miya Masaoka is a classically trained musician, composer and sound/ installation artist. She has created works for solo koto, laser interfaces, laptop and video. She has also made works for sculpture installations and written scores for ensembles, chamber orchestra and mixed choirs. In her pieces, she often works with the sonification of data, and maps the behavior of brain activity, plants and insect movement to sound. Read an interview with Miya on Networked Music Review.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNWLCvYgW_w
Objects on the Ground - stereo microphones - with Patrick McGinley, Hitoshi Kojo, Fantomas (18:21)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PCVsZXG2_s
Phone Tower Cables + 250% - contact mics on wires ( 12:28)

Try playing them all together!

Location Sound Films project has to do with a territory that falls somewhere between “performance”, “field recording” and “documentation”. It takes the usual idea of recording sound while adding the component of video. The following sounds and images were recorded simultaneously on a HD video camera. Little or no post-processing was involved other than the adjustment of equalization and sound levels. Various techniques were used to make recordings, some more clearly visible than others, depending on the type of sound captured. The main difference here being the use of a pair of stereo condenser microphones or piezo contact microphones. Location filming has to do with observation and reflection on events in a recored space and time, looking at what induces and affects spontaneous interventions using sound and image as the evidence.

John Grzinich is a mixed-media artist who has worked primarily with sound composition, performance and installation since the early 1990s. He has performed and worked on projects extensively throughout Europe and the US and have published a number of CDs on such labels as SIRR (PT), Staalplaat (NL), Edition Sonoro (UK), CUT (CH), CMR (NZ), erewhon (BE), Intransitive Recordings (US), Orogenetics (US), Elevator Bath (US), Pale-Disc (JP), Digital Narcis (JP), and Cloud of Statics(CH). Currently, he is a project coordinator for MoKS - Center for Art and Social Practice, an artist-run international residency center and project space in southeast Estonia.

John’s interests include acoustic sounds, phonography, found object sounds, sound and performance, film sound, processing and composing acoustic sounds, location sound, site-specific sound installations, collaborative sound actions, environmental sounds, extended tonal and atonal drones.

Since the early 1990s he has explored various approaches to sound generation, recording and production. His techniques range from the construction of original instrument devices and the capture of acoustic phenomenon through environmental field recordings to digital multi-tracking and manipulation. The resulting compositions are often studies in extended evolutionary permutations of a selected set of sound sources. These sources can concentrate on different properties of sound instigation and emination that can range from the textural animation of inanimate objects or an open-air mechanical noise field to overtone resonations from a set of wires stretched across a room.

silt (excerpt) 10 mb

yolk (excerpt) 5.6 mb

More audio >>

As a workshop leader she is part of the Sonic Postcards Project, recently awarded the New Statesman New Media Award for Education and run by the Sonic Arts Network. The project brings environmental listening, sound recording and the creative use of audio editing software to young people across the country.

Some thoughts about why & how…

Working with very limited material,
maybe only two or three sounds for each new piece.
Taking everything possible from the tiniest element,
making the smallest things significant,
creating something from nearly nothing.

Using the real world as a source.
Exploring the qualities of a sound.
A process of uncovering, of revealing hidden details
and turning perspective on its head.
Searching for beauty in situations
that might be considered ugly or irrelevant.
A commitment to the potentials and possibilities
of all things in the shadows.

A fascination with states of stasis,
by matter that appears to be still
yet is always in motion.
Searching for sounding movements
that change our perception of time
and textures that slowly evolve, rotate and turn in on themselves.

More >>

The performance took place at The Openhouse in SoHo and was born out of a burgeoning DIY music movement where artists take the debris of everyday life, for example an amp made from a Ritz cracker box and instruments made from Gameboys, irons and electronic toys, and turn them into musical instruments to play at events such as Handmade Music Night and Music for People and Thingamajigs. It was cosponsored by Create Digital Music, a webzine and community site for musicians using technology, Etsy, a website selling D-I-Y products and Make Magazine, a magazine devoted entirely to DIY technology projects.

“The course teaches students how to use technology to make art. With simple electronic tricks, students are able to tap into their creative potential and make instruments and music out of their own imagination” said Ranjit Bhatnagar, a faculty member at Parsons who taught the course and who is also an artist creating music out of found objects, such as a wind-up noisemaker and a Theremin-playing robot.

In the course, which has 13 students and is in its third year, students were taught basic electronic manipulation such as circuit bending and encouraged to creatively explore this technology to create instruments. The instruments range from an electric hurdy gurdy (a stringed instrument) made of an old synthesizer and operated by a wooden crank, to an electric cello made from two-by-fours a student found in the hallway of the school. Please visit the course blog for descriptions, images and video of the instruments.

Recent travels have brought me into contact with some difficult and potentially dangerous places … Some are areas where extreme and hostile conditions have been created, in others the danger has been hidden or absorbed into the local economy… [More here and here. You can listen to an interview about the project on BBC Radio here.]

[Photography: Anne-Berit Schultz, Autumn Leaves] Peter Cusack initiated the Your Favourite London Sound project that aims to discover what Londoners find positive in their city’s soundscape. His performances are central to Haunted Weather: Music, Silence, and Memory (2004), written by former collaborator and respected music critic, David Toop. More recently, Cusack was interviewed for Autumn Leaves, a book that seeks to draw together a number of different perspectives on how the environment is made audible through sound.

Cusack curated Interpreting the Soundscape for Leonardo Music Journal Volume 16 (2006). It includes contributions by Tonya Wimmer, Andrea Polli and Joe Gilmore, Jacob Kirkegaard, Chris Watson, Rafal Flejter, Chris DeLaurenti, Christina Kubisch, Charles Stankievech, Sonic Postcards, Yannick Dauby and Pascal Battus.

Cusack is a member of CRiSAP (Creative Research in Sound Art & Performance), and a research staff member and founding member of the London College of Communication in the University of the Arts London. He was recently appointed research fellow on the Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council’s multidisciplinary The Positive Soundscape Project: A re-evaluation of environmental sound with Mags Adams, Angus Carlyle, Bill Davies, Ken Hume, Paul Jennings, and Chris Plack. Cusack was a founding member and director of the London Musicians’ Collective. He is perhaps best-known as a member of the avant guard musical quartet, “Alterations” (1978-1986; with Steve Beresford, David Toop, and Terry Day).

Mark Vernon and Zoë Irvine work between art, music, radio and sound. The artists have been working prolifically at the forefront of their field since shifting from predominantly visual practices. They will talk about their individual practices and touch on their numerous collaborations together. Including their recent project, Hairwaves: which produced an irreverent blend of music, interviews, haircuts, dog groomers and the paranormal.

Radio, tape and found audio material creates intimate links between their practice. The dislocation of the recorded voice and the ability to manipulate, or cut up, tape creates a precursor to the limitless possibilities of digital manipulation which both artists employ with great sensitivity. Irvine ’s project MagneticMigrationMusic recomposed discarded fragments of audio cassettes collaged with location interviews. Recent works from Vernon have developed from experiments of amateur tape enthusiasts after he discovered The Derby Tape Club’s archive at a boot-sale.

ItSpace is a 2007 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. for Networked_Music_Review. It was made possible with funding from the New York State Music Fund, established by the New York State Attorney General at Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors.

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution - Noncommercial - Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

BIOGRAPHY

Peter Traub is a 4th year Ph.D. student in Composition and Computer Technologies at the University of Virginia. He received his Master’s in Electro-Acoustic Music Composition from Dartmouth College in 1999. After that, Peter moved to the San Francisco Bay Area where he worked as a software engineer for five years. While gambling his daytime employment on internet startups, he spent nights composing at Stanford’s CCRMA (Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics). His music and internet-based sound art works have been played and exhibited internationally. His interests at UVa include music that utilizes computer networks, virtual and real spaces, multi-channel composition, and the exploration of alternative and open-source software systems for composition.