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.

Jérôme Noetinger :: Un Temps 1 :: 4′55″

Since 1987 different concepts have been carried out and performed in festivals, galleries, cinemas and contemporary art spaces, in France, Europe, Canada, USA. Since 1995 they have developed collaborations with other groups or artists like Nachtluft (Switzerland), Kinobits (France), Loophole Cinema (England), Le Cube (France), la Flibuste (France), Voice Crack (Switzerland). Read more >>

Metamkine will perform at Liquid Architecture, Australia’s premier sound-arts festival. “Liquid Architecture is a sense specific festival, as opposed to art form specific. Occurring annually since 2000, Liquid Architecture celebrates the diverse methods of sound making and sound theory. It is our belief that listening is a vital activity, and one that is often overlooked within the dominance of visual media in our environment.” The fesitival takes place in 3 cities, Sydney (June 28-30), Brisbane (July 6-7), and Melbourne (July 11-14).

The result of this fusion - Islands of Consciousness - is not a simple combination of the two concepts but a great advancement. Sound and Images enter a very close relationship in which the randomly arranged musical phrases are taking direct influence on the visual outcome. So when you look at this piece keep in mind that all the visuals are assembled in realtime using photos downloaded from Flickr.com. All the transitions and effects are entirely random and only happening on you screen. Other people will see a movie and hear a soundtrack that is totally different from yours.

The infinite soundtrack is built upon Oleg Marakov’s idea to run multiple mp3 players parallel in shuffle mode just like musicians playing different instruments. In this case the instruments are not only pianos or synths but also natural atmospheres and sound effects. Islands of Consciousness consists of four parallel layers: Layer one plays synth background pads, layer two is the piano track, layer three holds ambient atmospheres and layer four contains all kinds of different sounds and effects. Just like in a regular composition the sounds vary in length and in fidelity and a very important part is also the space in between the notes - the pauses of different duration. [posted by Luca on Ecopolis]

Related: N. and 90ºS by Andrea Polli (who is currently in Antarctica as well; ANTARKTIKA: a climatic time-travel by Frank Halbig.

SignalPlay is an interactive installation that employs wireless sensors to control a spatialized sound environment, allowing participants to explore a distributed collaborative system. Unexceptional.net is a web-based application for visualizing and sonifying network, database and player information of a multi-modal online role-playing game. Sonic Panoramas utilizes image sonification, immersive projection and camera-based machine vision to allow users to create an interactive musical experience from panoramic landscape imagery. Datascape is a periscope-like system for the visualization of geographic information. This system allows users to explore a 3D topography and musical soundtrack that are generated from geospatial information such as marketing demographics.

In addressing the impacts of digital technologies on culture, these artworks employ the very technologies being investigated. Through the production and exhibition of this work, I hope to engage the public with these important issues and to help shape the ways that technological methodology embeds itself in our world and in our daily experience.

Flock is a full evening performance work for saxophone quartet, conceived to directly engage audiences in the composition of music by physically bringing them out of their seats and enfolding them into the creative process. During the performance, the four musicians and up to one hundred audience members move freely around the performance space. A computer vision system determines the locations of the audience members and musicians, and it uses that data to generate performance instructions for the saxophonists, who view them on wireless handheld displays mounted on their instruments. The data also drives the real-time generation of a multi-screen video animation and an electronic soundtrack.

Flock was commissioned by the Carnival Center for the Performing Arts in Miami. Additional support has been provided by the Georgia Tech Foundation and by the Seed Grant Program at Georgia Tech’s GVU Center. Flock’s premiere performances at the Carnival Center are additionally supported by the Funding Arts Network and are produced by iSAW.

ESPACES CROISES + PYROGENESIS (FR) - October 5, 2007; 8:30 pm :: iMAL invites Pascal Baltazar and Mathieu Chamagne, two artists supported by GMEA, the musical research group of Albi. They will play personal compositions where they explore new types of gestural interfaces for controlling multi-channel computer-based sound processes :: AND MIKROMUSIC by HC Gilje (NO) & Justin Bennett (UK) - Mikro is a series of improvised performances using the immediate surroundings as raw material. A microscope captures everyday objects and surfaces like wallpaper, coins, clothing, furniture, newspapers and transforms it into an explosive universe of textures. Contact microphones and electromagnetic sniffers pick up unhearable sounds to create the live soundtrack. Mikro is a collaboration between HC Gilje (video) and Justin Bennett (sound).

sCrAmBlEd?HaCkZ! by Sven König (DE) :: October 6, 2007; 8:30 pm - “sCrAmBlEd?HaCkZ!” is a Realtime - Mind - Music - Video - Re - De - Construction - Machine. s?H! is a conceptual software which makes it possible to work with samples in a completely new way by making them available in a manner that does justice to their nature as concrete musical memories. s?H! is the result of an effort to develop an artistic strategy that could shed some light on evident but very confusing problems of intellectual property. Intellectual property is a misconception deeply conflicting with the basic principles of any cultural production because it is completely negating its collaborative nature.

Cut up segments of music videos are reordered and reassembled so fast that, no sooner have the words left your mouth, you hear them spoken back to you. sCrAmBlEd ?HaCkZ! analyses the audio portion of a video file to determine the tempo of the incoming audio, and then slices it up into discrete chunks of a quarter note, eighth note, sixteenth note and so on. Using a large number of vectors, those slices are classified into a database according to their sonic characteristics. When the user sends new audio information to the program using e.g. voice and microphone, it follows approximately the same process, becoming classified in the database.

The software outputs the pre-analysed sample that is most similar to the newly cached sample. The result, which can be seen in the video, is the ability to reconfigure a number of music videos on the fly, so that they produce a sound similar to whatever is input. On screen the software plays the frames of video that accompany the selected audio.

On June 30 an exhibition in de kabinetten of De Vleeshal will open with works by Thomas Köner, Jürgen Reble and Jan-Peter E.R. Sonntag. This exhibition is guest curated by Lucas van der Velden, director of Sonic Acts and member of the artist collective Telcosystems. On the same day Ryoji Ikeda will open an exhibition in de Vleeshal with his new work, Data.Tron. During the opening he will also perform Dataphonics, a multi channel work.

Thomas Köner: In Nuuk Thomas Köner condenses 3000 web-cam images made in Greenland and Finland into a single grey-white snow landscape. In combination with its hypnotizing soundtrack, Nuuk evokes a mesmerizing sense of glacial stasis.

Jürgen Reble Yamanote Lightblast: Images filmed from Tokyo’s Yamanote train travelling its route around the city, transferred to 16mm and treated with chemicals result in a sombre journey through clouds of film particles - accompanied by an equally dark soundtrack.

Jan-Peter E.R. Sonntag: Sonntag’s 612.43WEISS brings two historical documents produced in 1943 - a photograph of Stalingrad and a recording of Schubert’s famous song Der Leiermann - to life in a work that can best be described as ‘almost film’.