Zach Herchen

Above is a piece called Years by Bartholomäus Traubeck. From his project page:

A tree’s year rings are analysed for their strength, thickness and rate of growth. This data serves as basis for a generative process that outputs piano music. It is mapped to a scale which is again defined by the overall appearance of the wood (ranging from dark to light and from strong texture to light texture). The foundation for the music is certainly found in the defined ruleset of programming and hardware setup, but the data acquired from every tree interprets this ruleset very differently.

There’s some great info about it on the Creative Applications Network website.

Shoutout to Boing Boing where I first saw the video.

First off, let me just say that there was a ton of music at SEAMUS 2011. Rather than try to list everything, I am going to share the installations and workshop here and then post once more about pieces that stood out to me.

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What the Blind See by Aaron Einbond
(pictured above)

This installation used the sounds of people and anything else nearby to trigger a system that would imitate their gestures. From Einbond’s description:

This installation explores sound descriptors as a basis for notation, interaction, and synthesis. Samples are arranged in an imaginary space of timbres, a virtual notation system, a garden of signs. [...] The title, taken from an article by neurologist Oliver Sacks, suggests the metaphor of notation for the internal representations of sound that we all carry with us.

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Toys’ Opera by Yonatan Niv
http://www.toysopera.org/

Toys’ Opera used a staged model train set with computer controlled cameras, lighting, video projection, and sound to create a real time, computer directed “opera”. From Niv’s description:

..the work explores the boundaries between suggested and real worlds by discarding literal narrative in for of indifferent yet logically organized procedural activity. At play is the tension between machine-like formal procedures and the seductive, slightly perverse temptations of implied realities.

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Thirteen by Joe Abbatti

Sadly, I didn’t make it to this final installation. It involved interactive audio and mixed media. I wish I had the time to check it out!

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Dr. Christopher L. Bennett gave a nice workshop on hearing physiology. He summed everything up with an excellent video by Brandon Pletsch (shown above).

Boing Boing had a neat post last month about Papa Sangre, a video game with no video. Instead of video, the game generates binaural audio on the fly.

From the Papa Sangre website:

Papa Sangre is a video game with no video. It’s a first-person thriller, done entirely in audio by an award-winning team of game designers, musicians, sound designers and developers. We’ve created an entire world using the first ever real-time 3D audio engine implemented on a handheld device. Which was BLOODY HARD.

I came across this a while ago, but never got around to posting it. Pat Metheny has taken the idea of a player piano and expanded it to a whole orchestra.

From his website

“Orchestrionics” is the term that I am using to describe a method of developing ensemble-oriented music using acoustic and acoustoelectric musical instruments that are mechanically controlled in a variety of ways, using solenoids and pneumatics. With a guitar, pen or keyboard I am able to create a detailed compositional environment or a spontaneously developed improvisation, with the pieces on this particular recording leaning toward the compositional side of the spectrum. On top of these layers of acoustic sound, I add my conventional electric guitar playing as an improvised component.

Read more at his website. Video from YouTube.

I’ve worked with Paul Leary several times over the last few years and finally got around to interviewing him. My group AM/PM has performed his sax quartet “I Have a Past Life Memory of the War that Blew the Fifth Planet into the Asteroid Belt”, and other stories from AM Radio several times and I commissioned him to write Number Stations which I premiered earlier this year at The Stone.

Paul Leary (b. 1974) is currently a PhD candidate at Duke University. His compositions involve pop and hip-hop influences, choral music, computer generated tape parts, found sound, and a healthy interest in the occult. Paul’s music has been selected as a finalist at the International Computer Music Conference (Copenhagen, Denmark 2007), winner of the Look & Listen call for scores (NYC, 2008), and has been performed in Munich, Prague, Dresden, the Florida State New Music Festival, the Ball State New Music Festival, the Army Band International Saxophone Symposium, the Denison New Music Festival, and at the Mather Dance Center in Cleveland, Oh. Currently, he is collaborating with Salt Lake City artist Amy Caron on a art installation at Duke University. You learn/hear more at his website.

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Zach – What composers or musicians have inspired you?

Paul – The music that affects me most is popular music. I love genres that use lots of electronics like drum and bass, techno, and trip hop. My favorite artist right now would probably have to be Imogen Heap. Classical influences include Arvo Pärt, Gorecki, Stravinsky, Bartok, Adams, and Britten to name a few.

O Nata Lux by Paul Leary

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Zach – You’ve written Concerto for Trumpet and Turntables and O Nata Lux, a choir piece with Latin text. What draws you do these very different styles? Do you always use non-classical styles with electronics and classical styles with acoustic pieces?

Paul – So far that’s been the case. But it’s partly just out of the opportunities that have presented themselves to me. I can’t ever imagine writing a piece for chorus that is inspired by hip-hop, but I could definitely write an instrumental piece that is more pensive and quite like O Nata Lux. I’d love to write a choral piece with electronics, but it would be more in the early music/Arvo Pärt style like my choral music.

Read more…

AudioScope is a microphone/camera system that can filter out individual sound sources as the camera zooms in on them. Its rather impressive and scary at the same time.

From an article at New Scientist:

Physicists Morgan Kjølerbakken and Vibeke Jahr, formerly at the University of Oslo, Norway, were working on sonar technology when they came up with the idea for what they call a supermicrophone, now dubbed the AudioScope. The device is made up of around 300 microphones arranged in a fixed circular array above the sports ground. They are used in conjunction with a wide-angle camera that can zoom in to any position on the pitch. Because the camera is also fixed, it can be calibrated to zoom in to any location within its range.

The AudioScope software then calculates the time it would take for sound emanating from that point to reach each microphone in the circular array, and digitally corrects each audio feed to synchronise them with that spot.

“If we correct the audio arriving at three microphones then we have a signal that is three times as strong,” says Kjølerbakken. Doing the same thing with 300 microphones can make a single conversation audible even in a stadium full of sports fans (see video)

After way too much time, I am finally ready to share my interview with Danish composer and sound artist Niels Rønsholdt (b. 1978)! I met with Niels and percussionist Mathias Reumert last November after our concert at Scandinavia House in NYC. We discussed Niels’ music while eating paella and tapas at a restaurant on the lower east side. I have included two videos (from our concert) of pieces we discussed. You can hear much more at his website http://www.nielsroensholdt.dk/.

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Zach – Do you have a particular process for writing music? Do you experiment with ideas or start by deciding a structure?

Niels – I’m totally blank when I write. It’s a very straining process, going back and forth with ideas. Working a lot with ideas that suddenly turn out to be empty. Just one morning, empty. I am constantly starting over from scratch. Then suddenly the final concept is there and I don’t change a thing. It’s a very strange process. To be frank, it’s not very comfortable. The temperature of the ideas and the need to make me constantly feel them. I’m really going along with a mood. My mood controls everything.

Zach – Do you have an ideal venue for your music, such as a concert hall, bar, or theater?

Niels – Actually, a theater. A black box theater with good lights. Definitely not in a bar. A concert hall is ok.

Read more…

From Wikipedia:

A hydraulophone is a tonal acoustic musical instrument played by direct physical contact with water (sometimes other fluids) where sound is generated or affected hydraulically.[1][2] Typically sound is produced by the same hydraulic fluid in contact with the player’s fingers.[3] The term also refers to an acoustic sound-producing mechanism used as an interface or input device involving the monitoring of fluid flow. Examples include hydraulophones for fluid-flow monitoring and measurement applications, such as building automation, equipment monitoring, and the like (for example, determining which faucet or toilet in a building is operating and how much water it is consuming).[4] The hydraulophone in the first sense was invented and named by Steve Mann.

From the YouTube page:

An homage to the great Alvin Lucier, this piece explores the ‘photocopy effect’, where upon repeated copies the object begin to accumulate the idiosyncrasies of the medium doing the copying. Full words:

I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice as well as the image of myself, and I am going to upload it to YouTube, rip it from YouTube, and upload it again and again, until the original characteristics of both my voice and my image are destroyed. What you will see and hear, then, are the artifacts inherent in the video codec of both YouTube and the mp4 format I convert it to on my computer. I regard this activity not so much as a demonstration of a digital fact, but more as a way to eliminate all human qualities my speech and image might have.

Video 1 from YouTube, Video 1000 from YouTube

For everyone snowed in on the east coast right now, go check out Get High Now. The website is a companion to the book Get High Now (without drugs) The author has gathered examples of audio and visual “highs” designed to blow your mind. I would recommend Risset Rhythm and Shepard Tones. If you enjoy the visual illusions, then check out Beau Lotto’s TED talk.

Image from Flickr by user ClintJCL, license: CC BY-NC-SA 2.0