From November 2005 - April 2006, the work was installed at a bus transit stop in Tempe, AZ located on the NW corner of the intersection of two major streets, Priest and Broadway.

MOTIVATING IDEAS: In conceiving this public work we have built upon the idea of the transit network as a metaphorical and practical sonic force. Topographically, the visual arrangement of speaker placement simulates a transit map that moves from a dense urban arrangement on the left, toward a widely spaced arrangement on the right. As sound moves across the wall, we have modeled the notion that transit paths will evolve and perhaps grow more sluggish with use. Thus, sound travels differently through each node of the network over time. This use of the network as a musical and visual presence, is intended to more broadly reference to role of networks in our lives. Transit networks physically link our communities, but networks of social, intellectual, and cultural connection span our world as well.

As this work is situated in the desert southwest, we also considered environmental issues in its conception. The propagation of sound across the surface of the wall simulates the way that the surface of water will ripple and expand when disturbed. In addition, all the electronics in this work are powered by a solar panel mounted above the work. The use of reusable energy is an important aspect of the work.

REALIZATION: At the heart of the piece is a 6′H x 10′W interactive wall that houses a network of sensors and sound producing elements. This wall is comprised of twenty-six modules that have the same basic design and function. There are two types of modules that, like in a real world transit network, serve as hubs or straight paths. Each module contains two proximity sensors, one light sensor, ten piezo speakers, and one microcontroller computer with supporting circuitry. Adjacent modules are connected to one another such that they form a fully connected network across the entire wall that allows sounds to wash across its surface.

This internal wall of sensor/speakers is enclosed on the back by a solid panel that keeps the elements out of sight and reach of the public. The wall is enclosed on the front side by a porous sheet of metal that provides protection and security, while allowing sound to easily emanate from the speakers, and providing visibility to the sensors and resonators embedded on the inner panels. The total depth of the structure is approximately 8 inches.

A large solar panel is mounted above the wall to generate electricity for the installation and provide protection from the elements. A battery is safely housed within the structure and is recharged by the solar panel to provide power to the electronics during the day and night. The structure is rooted in the ground behind the transit stop, facing, and in close proximity to the bench where transit users converge while waiting.

The London art space, E:vent, is among the first to chime-in with an exhibition addressing these issues. Their show, “Sound Proof” (open April 19-May 11), features six artists “using sound materials, drawings, and annotations [to create] audio and visual maps that preserve observations of transformation.” These site-specific works focus on the Lower Lea Valley, below London, which will be virtually reinvented for London 2012. In a way, they will function as aural time capsules–records or “proof” of a space and culture if not doomed for demolition, then certainly slated for overhaul. The valuable question raised by the show is that of preservation–what is deemed worthy of saving (memories, relics, cultural practices) and what is the responsible, effective way to do so. This form of ethnographic programming takes “game art” to another level. - Marisa Olson, Rhizome.

During these travels, she has often been struck by the similarities between Cleveland, a city of the Rust Belt, and New Orleans, a city of the bayou. Both cities dwell on the shores of bodies of water with global reach: Cleveland on Lake Erie, New Orleans on the Mississippi River. Both cities have seen the boom and bust of industry and population throughout their histories – past and present. Cleveland and New Orleans look remarkably different, but Christensen has often noticed that they have sounds in common: industry, birds, water, tourists. Rust Belt / Bayou offers an interactive document of aural snapshots from recent trips to both New Orleans and Cleveland.

Rust Belt / Bayou 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.

BIOGRAPHY

Julia Christensen is an artist whose work treads on the thin line between art and research. She also likes to tread on most of the thin lines between various media, between the electronic and the non-electronic, and between audience and performer. Julia is the author of Big Box Reuse (MIT Press, Fall 2008), a book about how communities are renovating abandoned Wal-Mart and K-Mart structures for creative new uses. Her photography, sound work, and electronic installations have shown recently at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Lincoln Center in New York City, and the DUMBO Art Center in Brooklyn, among other venues. Julia lectures widely about land use, art, music, and interdisciplinary research. She likes hearing stories, playing with her rock band in Troy, traveling in the depths of the United States, and thinking about the future.

Soundwok Artiject - Call for Participants: Take part immediately in a cutting-edge “artiject” in which the aesthetic consciousness of upstream sonifiers is mapped utilizing GIS technology. If you are a Southern California based or linked sound artist, experimental musician and / or composer, you are invited to participate in the first part of a unique sound art and music research artiject and study, conducted by Dr. Chung Shih Hoh and Marco Schindelmann that will involve the mapping of the dynamic social networks and aesthetic consciousness of Southern California artists involved in sound art and/or experimental music. The results of this study will also serve as material for a sound installation for SoundWalk2008. Your participation in this project is not contingent on your submitting to or taking part in SoundWalk2008.

“The project development over the last four months has been intense and varied, and the months of March and April hold the exhibitions and performances of five related works on the theme of navigation technologies, environment and sound. The central work is the Satellite Sounders, small portable instruments for hearing the live data from the GPS satellite network. These can be tried out by walking along the canals around NIMk and are part of the upcoming Territorial Phantom exhibition there. The two installation pieces, Dead Reckoning and Navigating by Circles present spaces of intuitive navigation in sound and video, in Amsterdam and Den Haag.”

March 20, 2008 7 -10 pm :: lecture at symposium on Eco-Visualisation organised by at Mediamatic in Amsterdam.

March 22 - April 28, 2008 :: Opening: March 22, 5 pm - Navigating by Circles: video and sound installation in the Eco-Visualisation exhibition curated by Tiffany Holmes and Hicham Khalidi at Gallery in Den Haag

March 29 - May 12, 2008 :: Opening March 28, 5 pm - Satelllite Sounders and Dead Reckoning: sonic walk and sound installation in the Territorial Phantom exhibition at the Netherlands Media Art Institute in Amsterdam.

April 2, 2008; 8:30 - Sun Running: performance at STEIM in Amsterdam
April 2, 2008 - Sun Run Sun: presentation at Test_Lab Topologies, V2_Insitute for the Unstable Media in Rotterdam.

April 15, 2008 - Navigating the Space of the Future: symposium around the project Sun Run Sun, including presentation by David Dunn, at Netherlands Media Art Institute (montevideo) in Amsterdam.

Close your eyes and listen. It is the Age of Noise: hums, buzzes, whines, traffic, ventilation systems, disc drives, cell phones, sirens, aircraft, muzak, televisions, radios, car alarms, leaf blowers, jack hammers, compressors — biproducts of an overheated visual culture bombard us endlessly. It’s no surprise that many people withdraw from our public hearing space and retreat into iPods or buildings with windows that don’t open. Harmony in the Age of Noise intends to empower the sense of hearing and deconstruct this sea of noise. In transforming this barrage of sounds into information about the way we live, the piece attempts to restore harmony and balance to the senses.

Anthropologist and poet David Guss invited sound artist, Bruce Odland — sonic thinker, composer, and sound artist known for his large scale, public space sound installations — to create Harmony in the Age of Noise. Along with sculptor Mark McNamara and media artist Michael Luck Schneider, they will collaborate with over 80 undergraduates and grad students as well as professors and staff at Tufts University. Together they are designing and building a sonic observation post that will allow visitors to navigate through sound maps of the campus and surrounding community. Harmony in the Age of Noise will be a parabolic gazebo where the hub of students and traffic are harmonized through a mix of a real time feed, a collection of stored psychoacoustic maps, and visitors’ sounds programmed to play like hourly chimes.

All students and the public are invited to participate and attend.

Read more here.

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.

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.

“I would like to pay my respects to all living creatures who inhabit dark places and who, over the years, have developed the art of echolocation (sounds sent out into an environment returning as messengers with information as to shape, size and substance of the environment and the objects in it). I am envious of the astonishing acuity of such creatures — dolphins, certain species of nocturnal birds, and bats, particularly those of the family Vespertilionidae, the common bat of Europe and North America.

Vespers was composed in 1968 and is performed in darkness. Each performer is supplied with a Sondol (sonar-dolphin), a hand-held echolocation device which emits a fast, sharp, narrow-beamed click whose repetition rate can be varied manually, and is given the task of orienting himself in the dark by means of scanning the environment and monitoring the relationship between the outgoing and returning pulses. When the pulse repetition rate is adjusted so that the returning echo is half-way between the outgoing pulses, an object appears to emit sound, the quality of which depends upon the material of the object itself.

Moving from place to place the performer discovers clear pathways, avoids obstacles and takes slow sound photographs of his surroundings.

This recording was made with the Environ-Ears Recording System, an integrated acoustical labyrinth and microphone assembly which duplicates the localization and noise-reducing functions of the human ear. The system consists of a pair of ears mounted on a tube containing two miniature high quality microphones which record the actual physical positions of sounds in three dimensions.

Both the Sondols and the Environ-Ears System were designed by Listening, Incorporated, Arlington, Massachusetts.”

Alvin Lucier was born in 1931 in Nashua, New Hampshire . He studied music at Yale and Brandeis and spent two years in Rome on a Fulbright scholarship. He was formerly conductor of the Brandeis University Chamber Chorus and now teaches electronic music at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. His recent works include Music for Solo Performer (live brainwaves) 1965, Whistlers (ionospheric disturbances) 1966, Shelter (sounds filtering through walls and floors) 1967, North American Time Capsule (humans talking to aliens) 1967, and Chambers (moving small and large resonant environments) 1968.

The Sonic Arts Union formed in 1966 when Robert Ashley, David Behrman, Alvin Lucier, and Gordon Mumma decided to pool their resources and help one another with the performance and staging of their music. Since that time the group has performed extensively in the United States and has completed three tours of Europe. Thanks to UbuWeb.

SOINU MAPA started thanks to a collection of recordings made by Luz Maria Sanchez in 2001. During a residence at Arteleku, this mexican sound artist did dozens of field recordings on different geographical locations of the basque country, from south to north, east to west.

This collection was archived on Arteleku mediateque, ready to be used by any artist, as Luz Maria wrote on the documentation.
Three years later, Audiolab created SOINU MAPA, in order to present in public all this collection and create a even bigger archive based on the same philosophy.

Paralelly, this collection give birth to a new project. In late 2005 the “brother” project RE:MAPA invited some basque sound artists and musicians to use this recordings and create new sound pieces, reinterpretations of the original archives (check re:mapa section).

SOINU MAPA is a project of Audiolab, the sound department of Arteleku contemporary art center from Donostia-San Sebastien. SOINU MAPA has been possible thanks to the help and support of Luz Maria Sanchez and Enrike Hurtado. [via]