The Shape Of Music

The Shape of Music:

Zaha Hadid/Swarovski Crystal Palace Collection

Roughly 2,500 years ago, Pythagoras observed that objects, such as the anvils he purportedly studied, produced harmonious sounds while vibrating at frequencies in simple whole-number ratios.

More complex ratios gave rise to more dissonant sounds, which indicated that human beings were unconsciously sensitive to mathematical relationships inherent in nature. By showing that the world could be described mathematically, Pythagoras not only provided an important inspiration for physics, but he also discovered a particular affinity between mathematics and music--one that Gottfried Leibniz was to invoke centuries later when he described music as the 'unknowing exercise of our mathematical faculties.'

Read the entire article"

(Via Seed Magazine.)

John Cage - A Dip in the Lake: "EMF presents the New York premiere of John Cage's A Dip in the Lake. Performed only once before, A Dip in the Lake is the exploration of a city by means of a 'random' soundmap that leads performers, listeners, or participants to places they may never have been before. The score identifies up of 427 locations within a city. The 'locations' are either very specific (such as the intersection of two streets), or more general (such as 'a park' or 'Lake Ontario'). Recordings are made at each of these locations, and divided into 10 groups of 2 (quicksteps), 61 groups of 3 (waltzes) and 56 groups of 4 (marches). These groups of recordings are then mixed live by the performers.
Originally scored for the city of Chicago, this performance, created by George Boski, Bill Blakeney, and Gayle Young, will use sounds recorded throughout Toronto, Canada. The three performers will each control four channels of sound, distributed throughout the Judson Church Meeting Room. The audience is then invited to walk around the space to hear the piece from different sonic perspectives.

Friday, October 12, 8:30pm

Judson Church
55 Washington Square South
New York City"

(Via Unidentified Sound Object.)

Digit and Thinking Machine: "

Beautiful things at Tesla (which will be shut down after this fall since Berlin has recently decided to kill its funding) last night –

Julien Maire's Digit, which was also awarded at this year's Ars Electronica is 'a performance that is also conceived to be presented as a piece of living Art. A writer sits at a table writing a text. Simply by sliding his finger over a blank piece of paper, printed text appears under his finger. The spectators can come very close to the 'writer' and read the text following the movement of the finger. The writer remains absorbed in his task.' The effect is quite spectacular since the actual mechanism is invisible. He doesn't give away how it works if you ask him and neither should we.




Digit


Maire says that 'Digit enlarges the concept of projection and the concept of a project that operates in interstices between literature and moving image as well as referring to the surrealistic tradition of cutting and rearranging text: 'Digit' is a kind of Soft machine. In opposition to other types of writing where machine interferes, the human movement is free and can print in any direction. The performance interfaces the human process between the thought and printed word.'

'Thinking Machine', as opposed to his famous Talking Machine, is artist Martin Riches' (zero homepage but read an essay on him here) answer to Masahiro Miwa's proposal to him: 'How about a thinking machine = computer? ... my dream is to build a very special or unique 'gate' ... a ''pseudo-random number generator with a simple and elegant algorithm and a long repetition'. Miwa (awesome homepage), who won the Digital Music award at Ars with his Reverse Simulation Music – music that borrows from algorithms and gears to create patterns according to which the sounds are performed – suggested the following: newn = (6 - newn + previousn) mod 3.



Thinking Machine

Martin Riches' realisation took him 1200 hours to accomplish. '6 large steel balls (4 cm diameter, 250g.) are first loaded by hand into a rotating storage wheel (or shift register), and then its driving motor is started. On leaving the wheel, the balls run down a gentle, 2-meter-long gradient and, on their way, operate various mechanical gates, which pre-determine the course of the following ball, according to the algorithm. Depending on the path taken, they then play one of three percussion instruments: a tubular bell, an instrument similar to a vibro-slap, or an instrument similar to a temple block. They then return to the storage wheel to await their next turn.'

Amazingly, the music that the machine creates is instantly recognizable as coming from the same composer as the utterly hypnotic 'Bolero by Muramatsu Gear Engine' which the Brucker orchestra was performing in Linz.

Further niceness included Ignaz Schick's 'ghosts/vibrations', 24 speakers 'linked to one another with nylon ropes, which are adorned with various small, sounding objects' and a big performance including Christopher Bauder's electric moOns.

More photos to be found here.

(Via we make money not art.)

Evolutionary musical organism

Evolutionary musical organism:
Bacterial Orchestra is a self-organizing evolutionary musical organism made of audio cells. Every cell -consisting of microphone and a loudspeaker- listens to its surroundings and picks up sounds trying to play them back in sync with what it hears. It can be the background noise, people talking or sound played by other cells. Every cell is simple, but together they create a complex whole.


Every cell is born with a unique set of characteristics (its DNA) that control the way it will react to sound. If it’s not fit enough, the cell dies and is reborn with a new DNA (you can also adopt a cell, btw.)


The result is a musical organism adapting to its environment, evolving with neighbouring cells and spectators and becoming musically smarter and smarter.


The piece was developed by Olle Cornéer, Christian Hörgren and Martin Lübcke. I asked Olle a couple of questions about the Bacterial Orchestra:


What motivated you to make this installation?


We are really interested in systems that are self-organizing and has it's own life. You never know what would will be created in the end. The only thing you could do is to give birth to the creation. Then wait. I have been interested in sound installations for a while now, but I often think that they're more "sound" than "music". This is musical organism. It might sound a bit random, but it creates music. All sounds from the Bacterial Orchestra are played in interaction with the other cells and with sounds in the room. It's music.



Any plan to show the installation at other venues or to keep on improving it?
Yes, we have just showed it one time. First we are interested in showing it in another environment - since it will react competely different. We're also interested in making it larger. Today it's built around 16 cells, but the idea is to add a few cells every time we show it. It can easily be scaled - since the cells only are communicating through (analog) audio. We hope to one day be able to show it when it's built of hundreds of cells. That's what I call a pendemic!
The work sounds kind of "human", did you develop some sort of affection for it?
Yes, actually we did. It really didn't react the way we wanted it to, which was really interesting. For example it started to scream - from self oscillation in the room. This is not supposed to be possible, since the cells don't listen and play sounds at the same time. Feedback is impossible. And still sometimes there would be strange noises, similar to a musical feedback. At that times all the other cells picked up the uncontrolled sound and the whole installation was screaming. At points when we were in other parts of the building, me and Martin would react to the screaming sounds down in the basement, where the installation was showed. I think you could compare it to a father or mother reacting to a crying baby in the room next door. You think you hear it, but it's not there all the time... It comes from your concern.

From: we make money not art

Untitled Sound Objects

Untitled Sound Objects:
Pe Lang and Zimoun from Untitled Sound Objects have a fantastic portfolio of interactive sound pieces. Their poetic and extremely elegant installations seem to live and thrive from the walls, ceilings, and windows of the art galleries where they are installed.





For one of their pieces, they covered the entire window display of the art space with simple robots standing next to one another. Sensors register whether and at what distance somebody is standing in front of the display.


As soon as the sensors detects a presence, the robots knock on the window display. The further away the person is, the more hesitant and at greater intervals the knocks occur, the nearer the person comes, the more intense and faster the knocks get, until – when the person is right in front – the machinery is running at high speed, thus weaving a dense carpet of rhythms.



The window itself, but also the parts knocking on it are slightly manipulated to cause a wide variety of different, interweaving sounds in a small space. Through subtle inaccuracies and constant slight


variations of the robots the installation appears to become organic and alive.



Untitled Sound Objects will be the guests of the espacio menos1 in Madrid, from February 8 till 18.


Via mediateletipos which is, imho, the best source of information about anything related to sound art.

Air acoustics

Air acoustics:

The museum "Waalsdorp" in the Netherlands has a ton of amazing gear designed for military purposes from the 30's, check out the listening equipment section - "From the first world war until the 30's air acoustics played an important role in the air defence. Air vehicles carrying a weapon could not be located from the ground e.g. at night time or under cloudy conditions. As radar was still to be discovered, vision had to be supplemented by hearing using the sound of the engines." [via] - Link.
Miniaturized listening equipment - Link.
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Message in a bottle

Messages in jars:

Paul De Marinis’ The Messenger deals with the interrelationship between electronic communications technologies and modern lifestyle.

The installation splices up old-fashioned telegraphy to electronic e-mail traffic. E-mails are received by a computer and distributed to three systems of output devices that enable installation visitors to experience the messages sensorially:



- 26 washbasins arrayed in a large oval; each basin is assigned a letter in the alphabet and a unique voice. Built-in loudspeakers serially intone the individual letters of the incoming e-mail.

- 26 dancing skeletons wearing ponchos displaying one of the letters of the alphabet. The letters of the message activate the corresponding skeleton and the chorus line’s dance reproduces the text of the e-mail.

- 26 electrolytic jars with metal electrodes in the form of the letters A to Z oscillate and bubble when electricity is passed through them and let the letters of the e-mail glow in color.

Movie.



The Messenger is inspired by XVIIIth Century physician and naturalist Francesc Salva i Campillo's output device for his telegraph equipment. The system involved an array of 26 servants who, following an electrical shock, would each call out a particular letter of the transmitted message, which could then be understood by a listener.

One of the winners of Ars Electronica 2006. Via ars electronica blog (cool! means that someone else is extensively and professionally covering the festival so this year i'll finally enjoy the festival and won't bother writing about it like a maniac).

Other work by De Marinis: Fire speaking to you.

Paul is my favorite sound artist - I worked on his CD "music as a second language" check it out...

via we make money not art