Alex McLean is a programmer and live coding musician. He is co-founder of the dorkbotlondon meetings on electronic art, the TOPLAP organisation for the proliferation of live algorithm programming and the runme software art repository. He is also a PhD student at Goldsmiths College, within the Intelligent Sound and Music Systems group.

From the website:

Sound poetry is poetry free from the usual constraints of syntax and semantics, where only the sounds of words are used to form the structure and feel of the poem. The Ursonate by Kurt Schwitters is one fine example.

Vocable words are used by musicians to describe the sounds their instruments make, while teaching, swapping tunes and during performance. In many cultures formal systems of vocable words have developed, including the bol syllables of the Indian tabla drums, and the canntaireachd of the Highland bagpipes.

Comparative research into the perception of sound and speech has found both differences and correspondences. That there are two conflicting modes of perception is made clear by the phenomenon of sine wave speech. On the other hand scientific research such as that carried out by Aniruddh Patel shows correlations between the rhythm of music and speech in different cultures, as well as between neurological activations of the listeners of music and speech.

Babble sits on the boundary between speech and music, allowing play with the structure and form of simplified phonetics without having our perception hijacked by speech processing.

Under the hood is a physical model of a guitar string (Karplus-Strong synthesis), and a formant filter to produce vowel-like sounds. The different consonants control the excitation and noisiness of the string, and the vowels control the tuning and the formant filter. The result is something like a speech synthesiser, but with the vocal apparatus largely replaced with a single guitar string.

Although Babble’s phonetic system is quite unlike that of English or any natural language, when faced with the text that generates the sound, as well as the vowel-like queues, the listener has the sensation of ‘hearing’ speech as the brain searches for meaning.

Babble is written in the open source HaXe language, which compiles to javascript and flash. The source code is available under the GNU Public License version 3 or later.

Babble a project.arnolfini commission (produced for the exhibition ‘Supertoys‘).

They are accepting all (unprocessed) audio recordings (past and present) of Montreal’s sound environments. As they gather submissions, they will be placing them into a browsable tagging system based on criteria including: Sound Source (characteristics); Location (borough, neighbourhood, municipality); Date (time of day, month, day of week, year, season); Environment Type (park, metro, indoors, outdoors, etc…); Equipment (recording device, microphone, etc…). Files can be uploaded through the form on the ‘Uploads’ section of the website.

The Concordia Electroacoustic Studies Student Association (CESSA) was established Fall of 2007. Our focus is primarily in spreading awareness of electroacoustic matters throughout Concordia and Montréal via projects and events, expressing particular interests in health, environmental, and social issues pertaining to sound.

In Rigoletto, “La donna è mobile” is sung by the Duke of Mantua, a coldhearted playboy. In the last act when the Duke is singing its reprise, Rigoletto realizes his attempt to have the Duke assassinated had been foiled, and that his daughter, instead, was the one killed. In the context of violence and betrayal in the opera, the song’s lyrics of distrust and deceit stand in contrast to its comical melody. Added to this disconnect is the inherent irony that it is the Duke singing of females being flighty, when he is the one most guilty of this accusation. Woman may be fickle, man even more so, but Porter’s fluffy yellow chicks, a gender-neutral metaphor of innocence, sing as if to comfort and calm.

Long interested in issues of representation, Porter’s practice frequently addresses conventions related to portraiture and the gaze. Her figures, typically shot against white backdrops or placed on a painted white canvas or shelf, are presented with a simple, direct quality, inviting the viewer to ponder their existential plight. Whether it is a line-drawn rabbit looking at us from a piece of paper with a rock glued on, its path leading straight to the rabbit’s head, or a man pulling a strand from a rope, coiled beyond his vision to the size of a mountain, relative to his size, we can feel momentarily omniscient and amused, but also unsettled when we recognize ourselves, similarly unaware of our fate. Though they are kitsch objects, the artist portrays the chicks in Rehearsal in a way that imbues them with humanity, legitimizing our desire to anthropomorphize them.

Liliana Porter was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, attended the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes and later took up residence in New York. She has exhibited widely in South America, Europe and the United States. A monograph was published by the Centro Cultural Recoleta in Buenos Aires in conjunction with her solo show Fotografía y Ficción in 2003. A solo show of her work at Hosfelt Gallery in New York runs October 30, 2008 through January 10, 2009.

Funding for this project has been provided the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency.

The Cubes à sons / bruits / babils (Sonic Cubes) are pleasant-to-touch wooden objects containing a multitude of sounds and composing together an acoustic vocabulary. By holding them in your hand and turning them in all directions, you discover their contents and, in the course of manipulating them, unexpected and unpredictable associations and entanglements occur that you can model as you wish. Sighing, coughing, sneezing, leaves rustling, thunder, car humming, water gurgling in metal pipes, door banging — brief and fleeting stories thus unfold and fold, each time reinvented, starting from a tactile, visual and sound object. Each cube contains an electronic device having six independent channels — on per side — of digitally amplified sound memory and an accelerometer that reads its position. Wireless and energetically self-sufficient, the cubes are multifaceted and multichannel objects that allow for omnidirectional, unidirectional or pluridirectional spatializations.

Visitors are invited to explore and engage with this environment by manipulating the cubes distributed in the space. The order or disorder in which the visitor experiments with these sound objects create individual / collective, linear / non-linear sound paths that constantly enrich one another.

The Sonic Cubes are an exploration in miniature of the world’s immensity and address notions such as inside / outside, open / close. They speak of a memory that forgets, remembers and imagines, and of being here now.

Catherine Béchard and Sabin Hudon form a duo of multidisciplinary artists who live and work in Montreal. Working in the fields of sculpture, audio art and new media, the duo is particularly interested in phenomena linked to acoustically generated sounds/noises, their propagations, the impressions they give as well as the “things” and “empty spaces between things” that compose our perceptual fields. In piling up fleeting tensions between sight, touch and hearing, they endeavour to make audible trivial elements of our everyday microcosm and turn them into a genuine environmental experiment. They seek to occupy space by creating a form of synesthesia—seeing with one’s ears, listening with one’s hands and projecting oneself in a space-time between silence and noise, motion and stillness.

The duo’s installations put into perspective the impermanence and mobility of things as well as our direct presence in the world. They propose a lasting moment where internal time and external time are brought together.

Their work has been shown nationally and internationally.

With this, new sound landscapes are created, not only from the interaction among the fish, but also from unveiling the intimate music archives, which are “submersed” underneath the MP3 player devices.

The visitor can connect his audio device to the interface, and chose a song of his preference. It is also possible for the user to record the track in the system in order to let the song be modified during the next visitor’s interactions. The visitor can listen to the previous visitors’ songs as well, as the system juxtaposes the previous visitors’ tracks with the current visitor’s song. Accordingly, the piece is always meshing up two different songs.

Submersed Songs | Canções Submersas from ∆LEX on Vimeo.

Submersed Songs is the winner of the Rumos Arte Cibernetica Prize (Itau Cultural Institute - São Paulo).

Vivian Caccuri is an artist born in 1986 in São Paulo, Brazil; currently working with performance, sound-art and beyond. Her work establishes reactive systems between sound and the physical realm, within themes that comprehend everyday-life issues, gender and social group behaviors. From 2006 to 2007, Vivian was granted a scholarship at FAPESP (Foundation for the Research of São Paulo State), to develop software tools for sound-art installations and performances, under the advisory of Prof. Dr. Milton Terumitsu Sogabe. In 2007 she developed the first project of FILE Labo (the medialab managed by FILE International Festival of Electronic Language); the sound-performance “Memorabilia”. In the same year, Vivian Caccuri won the Rumos Arte Cibernetica prize (Instituto Itau Cultural) for the sound-installation “Submersed Songs”, with which has collaborated with artists and musicians like Scanner (UK), Vitor Joaquim (PT), Kassin (BR), Hal Rammel (USA), and others. She also works as a content coordinator and technical consultant of FILE (International Festival of Electronic Language), having already taken part in eight editions of the event.

Even if one disregards his naturalistic approach to the idea of a landscape, there remains in Schafer’s work an obstinacy to make art out of what is perceived as sonic nuisance — an important step which laid the foundation of an attitude that is still alive among scholars and composers today.

More than 30 years on, the programme Soundscape Forever revisits the concept with an original series of sixteen pieces by international artists (Michael Batalla, Yannick Dauby, eRikm, Xavier Fassion, Zoe Irvine & Mark Vernon, Damien Magnette, Patrick McGinley aka Murmer, NG, Etienne Noiseau, Jean-Philippe Renoult, Kassian & Ulrich Troyer, Els Viaene, Chris Watson). The artists were invited to work on the concept of soundscape from multiple approaches in order to go beyond notions such as frame, panorama, perspective, cartography, in its rural and/or urban dimensions.

These aspects function as creative starting points capable of opening up new territories: the works propose new approaches to this genre central to sound art: experiencing tangible space-time, integrating acoustic and architectural contexts, exploring the social and human dimensions of the landscape. Because in the end, landscape always brings us back to those who dwell in it.

Founded by atelier de création sonore radiophonique in Brussels, SilenceRadio.org is a listening space dedicated to the diversity of contemporary creative radio. SilenceRadio.org offers audio pieces, from composed works to “rough” recorded material in many genres (radio art, documentary, sound poetry, drama, phonography, field-recording, soundscape etc.). Furthermore, SilenceRadio.org collaborates with a number of cultural radio programs, forming a network of artists and radio diffusers who exchange artistic contents to be broadcasted.

Listen to Chris Watson’s new piece, commissioned by SilenceRadio and KunstRadio. — Sonia Dermience (join the SilenceRadio.org group on Facebook]

Mass communication and Babilonia. Fragmented communication and freedom of expression. Secrecy and disclosure. Locked and open. Black and white. Morse Code and Light. Hallucinatory flashes of light from the top of the Petrin Tower in Prague illuminate and disorient the nocturnal cityscape of this historical and fascinating place. Sound sequences play intermittently night and day, concurrently accompanying light signals that simultaneously spell out cryptic messages in Morse Code.

In “Music for Prague 1968,” the famous Czech composer Karel Husa played his oboe while following the Morse Code rhythm as trombones wailed like sirens. Likewise, Stefano Cagol exploits the secretive Morse Code communication system to remember the Spring of Prague anniversary, evoking miscommunication, classified secrecy, displacement and disturbance.

Sound signals will pervade the city during the day, while at night they will be re-invigorated by the inclusion of pulsating light that renders them more evident and visible but nonetheless incomprehensible and mysterious. Stefano Cagol’s work nurtures and questions the ambiguity inherent in and the limitations of contemporary communication. He challenges the use of language in mass media and places his interventions between freedom of expression and mass manipulation. This consideration of control issues and mass communication is all the more pertinent for the city of Prague during its 40th anniversary of the Spring of Prague, an event that has become a strong symbol of liberty and free thought, as well as of the ill-fated imposition of political and military might. It has taken on a profound new meaning in light of the recent events currently taking place in Georgia.

Stefano Cagol (Italy) has exhibited internationally in many solo and group shows. Most recently his work was included in Eurasia, MART Museum, Rovereto and Manifesta 7, parallel event, Trento. He also participated to The Peekskill Project 2008 at HVCCA Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, New York (2008). Upcoming projects include: Abschiedsfest at MARTa Herford (Germany) and artist residency with solo show at the Hoet Bekaert Gallery, Ghent (Belgium), in April 2009.

At the end of this trip, a floating listening lounge is unfolding as an Archipelago of creations: embarked on a specially fitted sightseeing boat (a 3000 Watts 4.1 embedded sound system), one will discover there the 27 sound pieces created on board by the residents but also the 10 imaginary audio landscapes from some ten guest composers. These 7 cruises along the Strasbourg canals will each be punctuated by a live performance taking place in a different background each time. At the same time, on the Nuits Electroniques de l’Ososphère site, the Mirror Ball installation will display visual documentation of the two parallel journeys…

ESD is therefore ending after 3 months on the water, a long vibratory cruise is echoing this finale along the sonic and aquatic waves of Strasbourg.

Conception and coordination : Collectif MU (Paris-France)
Associated curators : Valérie Vivancos et Joachim Montessuis

PROGRAM

All departures: Strasbourg Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art embankment

September 26, 2008

Opening cruise
2.30 pm to 4.30 pm
with a concert of Aki Onda

Concerts in the MAMCS Auditorium
6.30 pm to 09.00 pm
with
Rainier Lericolais (France)
Christian Zanesi (France)
Phill Niblock (USA)
Katherine Liberovsakaya (Canada)

Mirror Ball at Osophère main site
10.00 pm to 04.00 am
video installation of Vincent Voillat

September 27, 2008

Cruise 1
10.30 am to 12.30 pm
with a concert of Michel Guillet (France)

Cruise 2
01.00 pm to 03.00 pm
with a concert of Rainier Lericolais (France)

Cruise 3
07.00 pm to 09.00 pm
with a concert of Aki Onda (Japon-USA)

September 28, 2008

Cruise 1
07.00 am to 09.00 am
with a concert of Michel Guillet (France)

Cruise 2
02.00 pm to 03.30 pm
with a concert of Michel Guillet (France)

Cruise 3
04.00 pm to 05.30 pm
with a concert of Philip Griffiths (Brazil-France)

FREE ACCESS on reservation (booking: rendezvous [at] ososphere.org). Tickets out at the reception desk (MACMS embankment) 15 minutes before departure

In 2007, Adam Hyde from r a d i o q u a l i a voyaged to Antarctica to help establish the first phase of Polar Radio - a research project which tests the feasibility of establishing community radio stations in the two Polar Regions - Antarctica and the Arctic Circle. He was part of the first Interpolar Transnational Art Science Consortium (I-TASC) reconnaissance expedition to Antarctica, and was a guest of the South African Antarctic Programme, based in the Dronning Maud Land sector of Antarctica, at the base, SANAE IV.

Adam and the I-TASC crew created a mid-range FM radio station. This involved installing and configuring FM transmitters and receivers, designing and erecting antennae in the Antarctic ice. The first prototype radio station began FM broadcasts on 29 December 2006. The broadcasts consisted of radio art developed by r a d i o q u a l i a and hundreds of hours of music, radio art, sound art, DJ-sets, documentaries and podcasts produced by musicians, documentary makers, podcasters and DJs from around the world, collected via a public call for content.

Researchers and scientists at SANAE IV were trained in the skills necessary to make radio shows for their station, and now run the station themselves, using audio provided by people from around the world. They call their Polar Radio station, Radio SANAE.

THE EVENT: This informal event will consist of a presentation about Polar Radio and a discussion about working in Antarctica, followed by a sound performance by r a d i o q u a l i a. The talk will give an overview of the establishment of Radio SANAE, the first node of Polar Radio, in Antarctica, and will cover such salient points as:

* the role of radio in Antarctica
* how to build your own antenna from found objects
* what the net looks like over a 1k connection shared between 70 scientists
* can artists really teach scientists anything?
* common symptoms of contextual hyper neurosis

The sound performance will be comprised of elemental field recordings made on the ice, and VLF radio recordings made of the Antarctic ionosphere. Drinks will be provided. The event and the research phase of Polar Radio is supported by Arts Council England.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS: r a d i o q u a l i a is an artist collective formed by Adam Hyde and Honor Harger, which creates radio and sound art. Their work has been exhibited at the ICC in Tokyo, New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York; Gallery 9, Walker Art Center in USA; Sonar in Barcelona; Ars Electronica in Austria; Artspace in New Zealand, among other places. r a d i o q u a l i a projects include Radio Astronomy (2004 - now), The Frequency Clock (1998 - 2003) and Free Radio Linux (2002 - 2004).

In addition to r a d i o q u a l i a, Adam Hyde manages FLOSS Manuals. He has been involved in free technology and art for 10 years, mainly within the broadcast realm but lately Adam’s work is centered in community building and publishing. Recent artistic projects include the Geekosystem - recycling technojunk into art, Kumara - free media email blogging, and the Paper Cup Telephone Network. Recent non-art projects include managing the production of the OLPC and Sugar manuals.

Honor Harger also works as a curator and organiser. From November 2004 - July 2008, she was director of the AV Festival in Newcastle, Gateshead, Sunderland and Middlesbrough in the UK. In 2008, she curated the third edition of the festival on the topic of broadcasting. She is also a PhD researcher at Z-Node a facility ran by the Faculty of Technology, University of Plymouth, and the Zurich University of the Arts, (ZHDK) in Switzerland. Her research aims to combine traditional and practice based research methods to create a sonic understanding of astronomical space, placing emphasis on the way that radio can be used to make space audible.

CONTEXT: I-TASC (Interpolar Transnational Art Science: Constellation) is an official project of the International Polar Year 2007-2008. I-TASC is a decentralized network of individuals and organisations working collaboratively in the fields of art, engineering, science and technology on interdisciplinary development and tactical deployment of renewable energy, waste recycling systems, sustainable architecture and open-format, open-source media. I-TASC is a lichen-like structure sharing and integrating local knowledge, resources and skills across six continents in order to symbiotically engage with common issues concerning the air, ocean, earth and space.

Map showing Antarctic bases, including SANAE where the I-TASC crew visited in 2007.

FURTHER INFORMATION

The People Speak HQ - Directions: Cremer St is just under the bridge half way between Hackney Road and Kingsland Road, Public transport options: Shoreditch Tube station is sometimes open, and is close, alternatively, Old St, or Liverpool St are quite near. The TFL website should give you some useful directions. Map.

r a d i o q u a l i a would like to thank Arts Council England, SANAP, I-TASC, The People Speak and MediaShed.

Francisco López’s sound performances are something beyond a “normal” music concert. An intense and rich sonic immersive experience in the dark, with a surround multi-channel sound system and blindfolds provided for the audience. Virtual worlds of sound created out of a myriad of original sources collected all over the world - from rainforests and deserts to factories and buildings from multiple locations in the five continents - and mutated and evolved during years of studio work through the master compositional skills of López’s universe. The space is reconfigured with a multi-channel surround system around the audience, which is placed in seats arranged in concentric circles facing the outside array of speakers. The performer operates from the center of the space (not on stage), in order to be able to control live the sound as is heard by the audience.

Francisco López is internationally recognized as one of the main figures on the stage of sound art and experimental music. His experience in the field of sound creation and work with environmental recordings covers a period of more than 25 years, during which he has developed an impressive sound universe that is completely personal and iconoclastic and based on profound listening to the world. He has performed hundreds of concerts, projects with field recordings and sound installations in 50 countries all over the world, including the main international museums, galleries and festivals, such as: PS1 Contemporary Art Center (New York), Museum of Modern Art (Paris), International Film Festival (Rotterdam), Festival des Arts (Brussels), Darwin Fringe (Darwin, Australia), Institute of Contemporary Art (London), Museum of Modern Art of Buenos Aires, Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona, Center of Contemporary Art (Kita-Kyushu, Japan), etc. His extensive catalogue of sound pieces (with live and studio collaborations with more than 100 international artists) has been published by more than 170 recording companies all over the world and he has received the honorific mention of the Ars Electronica Festival (Linz) on three occasions.