On Saturday 26 April and Sunday 27 April 2008, the Veenfabriek and the Art History Department of Leiden University organise the Symposium On Sound. This symposium is a gathering of scientists, performers and artists, who will focus on the issue of mutual influence between art and science, more specifically with regard to sound. The exhibition On the Sensations of Sound, which is organised in cooperation with Museum De Lakenhal in Scheltema, will be opened during the symposium.

COOPERATION VEENFABRIEK & LEIDEN UNIVERSITY: Since 15 April 2006, the Veenfabriek and the Art History Department of Leiden University have been in charge of the unique, joint Scholar on Stage project. This project investigates the mutual exchange and confrontation between arts and science, applied to sound. The first Scholar on Stage is technique philosopher John Heymans. Heymans carries out interdisciplinary research into the influence of Helmholt´s standard work Die Lehre von den Tonempfindungen (1863) in the development of early-electronic and contemporary music. His doctoral research will result in a thesis which will be finalised at the end of 2008, and in the reconstruction and installation of the Siren Orchestra. In addition, Heymans is the main force behind the Symposium on Sound. The symposium includes an expert meeting for invitees only, during which Heymans will discuss the contents of his research with a group of international experts, as well as a public programme.

Symposium On Sound: Two international keynote speakers have been invited; the Canadian art historian Jonathan Sterne, who published The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (2003), among other works, and the American composer David Behrman. Both speakers will, emphatically from their own disciplines, discuss how the development of the art of sound, in the broadest sense of the word, is influenced, on the one hand, by the arts and, on the other hand, by science, and how this can be stimulated.

On Saturday 26 April, the programme also features a concertante lecture by the British composer Aleks Kolkowski who reconstructs instruments and machines from the pioneer days of recording and reproducing music. In addition, Sing Song — an ensemble that was established to make live ‘musique concrète’ — visual artist / actor Benjamin Verdonck and musician/composer Paul Koek will perform together.

On Sunday 27 April the Siren Orchestra will be launched officially, and the exhibition On the Sensations of Sound will be opened. This exhibition presents works by contemporary artists Carsten Nicolai (Germany), Suchan Kinoshita (the Netherlands/Japan), James Beckett (UK, Zimbabwe), John van Oostrum, Jochem van Tol and Der Wexel. The evening programme consists of a public interview / debate with the American composer and performer Laurie Anderson, who will comment on the theme of Symposium on Sound.

Siren Orchestra: As a result of the findings of Scholar on Stage John Heymans, the Veenfabriek sponsored the reconstruction of a number of musical instruments. These instruments go back to the work of the 19th-century physicist Hermann von Helmholtz: the sirens of the Dutch physicist H.A. Naber, and the intonarumori, the noise intoners, of the futurist Luigi Russolo. What originally seemed to involve a philosophical investigation into the effect of Helmholtz’s On the Sensations of Tone on early-electronic music was actually realised with this orchestra.

During the Symposium on Sound, the complete orchestra, consisting of twelve sirens and six intonarumori, will perform for the very first time. Leading composers have been invited to compose works for this unique orchestra. The Siren Orchestra will perform new works by David Behrman (USA), John Butcher (UK), Yannis Kyriakides (NL, UK, CY), Paul Koek and Martijn Padding (NL), introduced by the composers themselves.

On the Sensations of Sound consists of sound objects and sound installations by contemporary artists Carsten Nicolai (GER), Suchan Kinoshita (NL/JPN), James Beckett (UK, Zim), John van Oostrum, Jochem van Tol and Der Wexel. These artists use sound as their basic material. Through sound they change or intensify the perception of space, of material or objects. Much of their work has a scientific or investigative angle. James Beckett, John van Oostrum and Der Wexel will compose new works, especially for On the Sensations of Sound.

British essayist and composer David Toop will open the exhibition on Sunday 27 April 2008 at 4:00 p.m. Toop published Ocean of Sound (1995) and Haunted Weather (2004), among other works, and also presented the exhibition Sonic Boom: the art of sound, in the Hayward Gallery in London in 2000. [via Mediateletipos]

The chapter discusses histories of audiovisual performance, including its ancestry in color organs, visual music filmmaking, light shows, cognitive science, and more - as well as various approaches to current practice including VJ’ing, live cinema, and digital media art performance. This one is not available online, but the book is available from the usual sources.

The Cambridge Companion to Electronic Music includes original contributions from many international artists, including Karlheinz Stockhausen and Max Mathews. Chapters introduce the reader to the history and practices of electronic music, including electroacoustic music composition, perceptual aspects and sound synthesis. Considers recent contemporary trends and promotes new movements in this continuously evolving field.

Horatio Oratorio is an exploration through the history of recorded sound. The earliest recording and playback technologies and rare mechanical-acoustic string instruments are combined with vintage and state-of-the-art electronics. A magnificent array of acoustic horns and custom-built loudspeakers project sound from historic wax cylinder phonographs, gramophones and stroh violins, layered and transformed by live digital sound processing.

Aleksander Kolkowski (born 1959 in London) is a British musician and composer whos work combines instruments and machines from the pioneering era of sound recording and reproduction (Stroh violins, wind-up Gramophones, shellac discs and wax-cylinder Phonographs) to make live mechanical-acoustic music. He lives and works in London, England.

Stephan Mathieu (born 11.October 1967) is a German musician and sound artist whose work is based on digital and analog processing techniques. He lives and works in Saarbrücken, Germany.

Sponsored by Harvestworks Digital Media Arts Center and the Art & Technology Program at Stevens Institute of Technology, founded in 1966 by engineers Billy Klüver and Fred Waldhauer, and artists Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Whitman, to provide artists with access to new technology and to promote collaborations between artists and engineers.

Saturday, April 5, 2008

2:00 * Exhibition opening *E.A.T. Revisited: Documents and Works* (through April 28). Included is an installation of photographic documentation entitled The Story of E.A.T.: Experiments in Art and Technology, 1960*2001 by Billy Klüver; a selection of classic works: Floats by Robert Breer and Silver Clouds by Andy Warhol; and an installation of new works, *Transduced Objects,* created in a workshop inspired by David Tudor*s *Rainforest,* taught by John Driscoll and Phil Edelstein to artists and students from both Stevens Institute and Harvestworks.

3:00 * Panel Art and Technology, Historical and Current Perspectives with panelists Robert Whitman, Julie Martin, John Driscoll, Steve Bull, Scot Gresham-Lancaster and Anne Swartz (Savannah College of Art and Design), moderated by Julie Harrison (Stevens Institute of Technology).

5:30 * Performance Cellphonia: Tempo Variable (Cellphonia: Changeable Weather by Steve Bull and Scot Gresham-Lancaster, with Phil Edelstein, Hans Tammen, and Brooks Williams * a surround sound memorial concert for John Cage and David Tudor in which live performance, cellphone calls, transduced objects, and synthetic voices are mixed by the musicians and the neural synthesis ETANN, or electronically trainable analog neural net, developed by Forrest Warthman and Scot Gresham-Lancaster for David Tudor.

6:15 * Reception to meet the artists, panelists, and organizers

Sunday, April 6, 2008 (suggested donation $5, free to students and seniors)
1:00 * Film Screening *9 Evenings: Theater & Engineering* include Robert Rauschenberg*s Open Score; John Cage*s Variations VII; Öyvind Fahlström*s Kisses Sweeter than Wine and a work-in-progress on David Tudor*s Bandoneon!. Producer Julie Martin and director Barbro Schultz Lundestam, will be present to introduce the films and answer questions.

For more information, contact:
Carol Parkinson (Harvestworks) 212-431-1130
Julie Harrison (Stevens Institute) 201-216-8583

An icon on the balustrade instructs participants to adopt a contemplative position - one must lay ones elbows onto the balustrade, cover ones ears, and look at the Old Town. While in this position, they hear the sounds of bombers and explosions, which travel through their arms directly into their inner ears via bone conduction.

People who attempted to block out the noise during the bombing are memorialized by Touched Echo. By striking the very same pose — blocking ones ears — visitors to the installation hear rather than obscure the terrible sounds.

Does hearing via bone conduction produce a more empathic response? Or is it the element of surprise, the lack of audio queues — speakers, headphones, amplifiers — that proves powerful?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHLobipEwBI

In their collaborative practice Achim Lengerer & Dani Gal deal with audio-acoustics and storage media used for acoustic material. Their core interests are audio-recordings, particularly of language, spoken word and speech, original footage taken from radio-broadcastings or other archives. Their work found its multiple form in the project voiceoverhead which is rooted in a record collection of approximately 350 records, including footage documenting political speeches and language orientated radio-programs. The records aurally cover historical events and were originally designed to function as “documentations of the real”. This notion of the ‘documentary’ has been questioned throughout the history of the medium itself and developed as one of the inherent debates around the emerging modes of reproduction in the late 19th century - the phonograph, film and photography. Starting with the early Lumière-movie ‘Workers Leaving the Factory,’ this discussion emerges. Harun Farocki has shown, in his 1995 video-essay on the Lumière-sequence, the complexity of a playful representational conspiracy between the audience / viewer, the document / documentarian and the documented beginning at the birth of the genre itself. This act of conspiracy takes place when any document from the archive is brought back to the public sphere as a kind of reenactment of a communicative and rhetorical figure.

Lengerer & Gal developed the idea voiceoverhead in order to locate the record collection and their artistic practice within a broader context and to include the work of other artists, filmmakers and musicians working with archived language materials in multiple ways and diverging modes. So too do divisions exist in the cultural field: such as electronic music that is entrenched in elements of language and radio-sounds and there is a sub-genre of visual artists, filmmakers and documentarians who also focus their work in this area. Both fields are conceptually and practically applying different approaches to the given speech material: differences in working and presentation methods, as well as differences in distribution and public reception. voiceoverhead presents, confronts and merges the approaches applied in these diverse cultural productions in the exhibition and in an evening of sound performances, taking place on Friday 29 February.

voiceoverhead is a co-production with the Jan van Eyck Academy.

http://www.smartprojectspace.net/

And now we have a review, which I hope will encourage you to pick up a copy. As Smith writes:

Noise/Music is most easily appreciated as a “disturbingly succinct” history of 20th century music and perhaps the most appropriate text to compare the work to is Michael Nyman’s “Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond”. However, where Nyman’s text is a comprehensive “academy friendly” catalog of sequential progressions and developments, Hegarty’s text covers more ground and wanders into a more diverse and adventurous territory - one characterized by amplitude and excess….. More.

Sound Spaces are not just spaces in which sound can be heard. Rather, it is sound itself that creates the space and its special qualities. Therefore the experience of hearing not only enables us to experience the space around us, they can also make it possible to experience physical space as an “inner” space. Bernhard Leitner’s work leads us to a quality of sound (as space) that remains concealed within stimulus streams. It shows the potentials of sensual experience that we are barely conscious of because they are either lost or have remained unknown as possibilities. - Cathrin Pichler

This exhibition addresses the question of the artistic invention of so-called sound sculpture. During the late 1960s in New York, Austrian architect and artist Bernhard Leitner designed the first sound-space sculpture or architecture – a multi-channel architecture of sound – prior to the advent of the technical possibilities required for its realization. The idea stemmed from Leitner’s interest in space (architecture), classical and modern music, modern dance and the spectrum of technologies at the disposal of twentieth-century art.

Conceived in close collaboration with Bernhard Leitner for the Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart, the present exhibition assembles sketches, notations, models, photographs exclusively pertaining to this early field of experimentation whose scope was initially confined to the realm of theory. At the center of the exhibition in the White Cube is the revival of the first sound-space investigations realized between 1971 and 1973 with the aid of a manual crank-driven circular relay switch and a punchcard programming device. It is not a historical reconstruction, however, but rather a re-inception, on the basis of modern control systems, of the first sound-space-sculpture in the history of the visual arts.

Since 1968 Bernhard Leitner has been designing spaces with sound as material and carrying out theoretical and practical sound-space investigations. Since 1970 Leitner has been exhibiting his sound-space objects and sound-space sculptures in the international context. Leitner’s works have been shown a P.S.1 New York, Künstlerhaus Wien, ZKM Karlsruhe, Kunsthalle Bremen, at documenta 7 and the Donaueschingen Music Days among other key venues. In Berlin his works have been exhibited at the Akademie der Künste, the Klangkunstforum and at sonambiente 1996 and 2006. In 1984 he realized his first permanent public sound-space installation at the Technical University in Berlin. [posted on Mediateletipos]

Stalactites covering 3 1/2 acres of the surrounding caverns produce tones of symphonic quality when electronically tapped by rubber-tipped mallets.

This most unique, one-of-a-kind instrument was invented in 1954 by Mr. LeIand W. Sprinkle of Springfield, Virginia, a mathematician and electronic scientist at the Pentagon.

He began his monumental 3 year project by searching the vast chambers of the caverns selecting stalactites to precisely match a musical scale. Electronic mallets were wired throughout the caverns and connected to a large four-manual console. When a key is depressed, a tone occurs as the rubber-tipped plunger strikes the stalactite tuned to concert pitch.

A variation of the story of the instrument’s conception, according to Wikipedia, is that Sprinkle’s son Robert hit his head on a stalactite, producing a tone that inspired Sprinkle to invent the instrument.

Listen:

Recounts Lifton of an audience’s response to new interactive music projects, “I’ve seen with this last system … people being very suspicious and they stand a few feet away from it and just wiggle the end of one finger slightly to try and test the thing out and see what would happen. Five minutes later you come back and they’d be screaming and dancing all over the floor”.

[blogged on Disquiet]