SOUND CONSTRUCTIONS > audiotheque
open Saturday and Sunday from noon
including works by Hans Appelqvist, Peter Cusack, Robert Curgenven, Rowena Easton & Mike Blow, Elaine Wing-Ah Ho, Ernst Karel, Brandon LaBelle, Eric La Casa, Seiji Morimoto, Jodi Rose & Michael Bates, Aaron Ximm
Hans Appelqvist – Bremort
Bremort is a fictitious swedish small town. Listening to these tracks you get a feeling of what everyday life is like in Bremort and also a chance to meet a few of it's inhabitants.
Robert Curgenven – Silent Landscapes no.2
Nightfall by a riverside camp near Wollumbin (Mt Warning), walking in dry grass, the sharp call of a single insect emerges. Above the nearby road, power lines catch the breeze - an echo finding resonance over 3000 kilometres west at Karlu Karlu (Devil’s Marbles) in Central Australia, where the wind strikes a parallel rhythm some years before. Further north, other winds blow in grevilleas lining the Buchanan Highway, en route to the Tanami Desert. Along a river, 20 metres deep in a flood that isolates a town, crickets pulse agitatedly on the Tropics’ edge. Two thousand kilometres east, aeolian currents bring the Musical Fence in Central Queensland to a slow crescendo. Finally, 2000 kilometres south east again, returning through the grass to camp, the cycle is, for now, complete.
Peter Cusack – Beijing Sonic Bike Ride
"Beijing has an amazing soundscape that immerses you as soon as you arrive. It is vibrant, rich and varied, running the gamut from head-banging cacophony to profound quiet. One of its most distinctive features is the ubiquitous sampling loudhailer used by every street vendor to advertise their wears. These devices record eight-second slogans, which playback repeatedly, and loudly, until the batteries run out. This very affordable technology has made Beijing into a city of sound loops and gave the original idea for my participatory sound piece 'Beijing Sonic Bike Ride'. 8 loudhailers are attached to 8 bicycles and used to playback specially created sounds as they are cycled around Beijing's streets. Routes were planned around the Xicheng district so that the bikes would alternate between being together in one group and being wide distances apart. The 8 layers of sound are designed both to work seperately and to harmonise when heard together. One can listen by following on one's own bike or by staying in one place. Bystanders hear the piece emerging in and out of familiar neighbourhood sounds. This track has been edited from the recording made on the day as I cycled around the district myself. Also heard are the sounds of the 'knife sharpener man' who I met en route."
Rowena Easton &
Mike Blow – Machines for SInging
Machines for Singing is an audio installation that plugs into the fabric of a building, using feeds from accelerometers and microphones as the raw audio material for a real-time sonic composition. The transducers are attached to various sonically relevant parts of the structure so we are in effect hearing 'what the building hears'. In addition some of the sources are pitch shifted up, making audible sounds that are normally of too low a frequency to hear, allowing visitors to appreciate the forces and processes occurring around them of which they would otherwise be unaware. The presented piece is composed in real time using data from sensors placed around the building which sense the structure's reaction to its environment and the rhythms of the occupants' use of the building. Machines for Singing shows that it is possible to reinterpret the urban environment using sound, in such a way that it engages people's attention and enables them to appreciate that a structure has its own 'life' and reactions to external stimuli. The piece attempts to capture the essence of the building in audio. By listening to the piece at different times of day we come to realise that a building has a diurnal cycle, that it reacts to the actions of its occupants, and that it is capable of singing in a way we would have previously never imagined.
Elaine Wing-Ah Ho – Bus, Candy Foil
Bus, Candy Foil is part of an on-going diary of binaural field recordings started in the Netherlands in 2005, since traveling through Belgium, Beijing and Kyoto. They are an attempt to document one's sense of place within the urban environment by way of describing distances from the tips of one's skin to the depths of an imaginary objective vision.
Ernst Karel – Heard Laboratories
Heard Laboratories is a sonic ethnography of the research laboratories at Harvard University. The audio recordings of lab activities, equipment, and devices draw attention to the everyday sounds of scientific research. The research going on in these laboratories provides a ground for our contemporary, technologized society; Heard Laboratories brings the background sounds of these spaces to the fore. This 10-minute selection is from a chemistry laboratory which works in the area of thin film deposition, involving metallic thin films, in particular through a process known as atomic layer deposition (ALD). This research is relevant to semiconductor engineering, microelectromechanical systems, and nanotechnology applications.
Brandon LaBelle – prototypes for the mobilization and broadcast of fugitive sound #1-4
Domestic: For domestic situations, to be placed in the vicinity of kitchen windows, bedroom closets, secluded bathrooms or in the courtyard of apartment complexes for the stimulation of buried dreams, sudden fantasies, poetic reveries and imagined murmurs.
Festivals: For country dances, parties, raves, ho-downs, rodeos or circuses, to compliment, through break down and multiplication of percussive expressions, and other various punctuations, the movement of bodies, animals, monsters and clowns, and their ritualistic catharsis, rapture or laughter, and the audiences that gather therein.
Street: For urban stand-offs, street fights, or other revolutions, particularly involving military force and other official figures, and which can be used to diffuse the territorializing capture of city streets that arises from both those who fight for change and those who try to defend the status quo. [
http://www.errantbodies.org/prototypes.html]
Eric La Casa – air.ratio
"It all started in 1994, in a bathroom. An air vent above the bathtub attracted my attention. There, in the dusty environment, air became noise, music. Microphones were brought into contact with this acoustic territory to transmit the sonority of the aeraulic device directly. Since that day, I have been attentive to the flow of air in modern architecture. This is a selection of sound recordings made in Paris in buildings of various ages and dimensions. Without seeking to itemize mechanized ventilation systems in any methodical manner, I was interested in documenting their sonic and musical qualities. My approach wasn't strictly scientific, but nor was it primarily musical: I selected some locations – the Maison Radio France (dating from the 1960s), the Pompidou Centre (the '70s), or the Georges Pompidou European Hospital and the new François Mitterrand French National Public Library (the '90s) – as symbolic places of ventilation."
Seiji Morimoto – Whisper
More than 20 people were interviewed. The faces were warped by a glass with water, voices turn to sound because of the resonance of glass. The images and voices lose their transmittal function. Images are transformed and voices become minimal sound. [
www.seijimorimoto.com/Fluestern.htm]
Jodi Rose (Singing Bridges) and Michael Bates (Sydney University Dept. of Architecture - Audio and Acoustics) – Global Bridge Symphony - Sampler
Composed mix of recordings from bridges around the world, for surround sound installation.
Aaron Ximm – The Stone Giant, or, a millstone breathing in Nodar, Portugal
This is an unedited recording I made earlier this year in Nodar, a very small town in the hills a few hours from Porto in northern Portugal, while an artist-in-residence at the Nodar Guest Studio, operated by Binaural Media, the Lisbon-based arts organization.
Hidden in the trees in one of the valleys surrounding the town is a disused but functional mill house, which is built (like all the buildings in Nodar) of local stone. The millstone looks old but the wheel has been upgraded to a steel one, but at the time I was there the stream flowing below the mill was just a trickle (I believe the flow could be controlled by opening irrigation channels above). To give proper 'voice' to the mill I thus had to climb down under the stone and spin and swing the wheel myself; doing so, I quickly discovered that the rasping of the spinning stone sounds very much like a deep lingering breathe.
What you hear in this recording is me 'playing' the stone while wearing my microphones, with the the intention of reproducing the gradual lengthening of breathe as one falls into sleep. My hope is that listening to it, one might fall into unconscious sympathy with the rhythm of the breathe and become relaxed... (evidence that this is possible was quickly provided, as the first person I played this for promptly fell asleep on the couch while listening!).
There are photos documenting the mill house (and the effects of the recording) on my
flickr set devoted to my time in Nodar. These recordings were made with a Sound Devices 722 and my beloved Sonic Studios DSM-6S/EH quasi-binaural 'dimensional stereo' microphones, mounted in a WHB windscreen-headband with windsocks for wind protection. I always wear the WHB on my head (not on a false head) with the mics positioned just in front of my ears.