Posted my latest boingboing.net piece yesterday, this time focused on seaquence.org, a lovely and nifty petri-dish-themed music sequencer produced under the auspices of gaffta.org. It’s browser-based and free, which is to say it has resisted the lure of iOS that so much interactive music has succumbed to in recent years. I’ve been interviewing the developers of Seaquence as part of the series of music-app investigations I pursued recently in regard to the iOS apps Thicket and ShapeSeq.
In the boingboing.net piece, I inserted a video produced by the Seaquence crew that serves as an introduction. Here’s another video, this one produced apparently by someone not associated with the production of the software:
Balancing Act: Depiction of artist Bill Fontana’s Sonic Shadows installation in the bridge at the SFMOMA
In a recent one of its Artcasts, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art interviewed sound installation artist Bill Fontana about the alchemy inherent in his work, and in particular the beauty of mechanical sound (MP3).
He discusses his use of the accelerometer in his piece “Sonic Shadows,” which he describes as a “kinetic acoustic wall drawing.” (There’s also an M4A version of the podcast, which includes embedded images.) The above photo is a still from a massive (114 MB) video document of the installation, available for download (MOV), and showing the set-up from a variety of angles. It opens with the question “What ambient sound does the museum generate?”
“Sonic Shadows” was commissioned by SFMOMA as part of its 75th anniversary. As the museum describes the piece: “This sound sculpture uses moving ultrasonic speakers and vibration sensors to transform the space below the dramatic circular skylight, surrounding the fifth-floor pedestrian bridge, into an acoustic drawing in real time. As visitors cross over the bridge, their footfalls contribute to real-time recordings of ambient sounds.”
Work such as Fontana’s seems especially appopriate for an anniversary of an institution, as it will be impressive to individuals who have spent significant periods of time in the building previously yet not been aware of this sonic aspect of the place.
A press release attributed to curator Rudolf Frieling goes into more detail:
Speakers installed in the ventilation holes above the bridge are paired with moving ultrasonic speakers below whose narrowly focused audio beams reflect off of the surrounding surfaces, creating what the artist describes as a transparent, acoustic wall drawing in which “the shapes of the architecture become sound.”As visitors cross the bridge their footsteps contribute to the live composition. Exploring the internal resonance of structural elements, the piece mixes real-time recordings of sounds produced by the bridge, the walls, and the pipes in the boiler room hidden behind the opposite wall. Whereas some of the artist’s past sound sculptures integrated recognizable sounds from nature or urban locations, this site-specific piece transforms more abstract, mechanical noises into an ever-changing dreamscape complemented by shifting patterns of sunlight and shadows. Fontana activates this transitional, non-gallery space, producing an immersive sensory experience of the museum itself.
There’s also video of Fontana working in the bowels of the museum at sfmoma.org, in which he discusses the influence on his work by Italian Futurists and their symphonies of industrial noise.
Future Present: An image of artist Bill Fontana in the boiler room of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
The piece opened on November 20, 2010, and will run through October 16, 2011. More at sfmoma.org.
A dozen musicians respond to an article in the Telegraph that attacked Susan Philipsz, winner of the 2010 Turner Prize.
/ By Marc Weidenbaum
Featuring new original music from: all n4tural, Kate Carr, He Can Jog (Erik Schoster), John Kannenberg, Mystified (Thomas Park), Tobias Reber, C. Reider, Cheddar Rimtorn (Stephan Richter), Mark Rushton, Subscape Annex (Steve Burnett), Robert M Thomas, and Stephen Vitiello
On December 6 of this year, 2010, Glasgow-based artist Susan Philipsz won the Turner Prize for her work “Lowlands.”
It was the first time ever that a work of sound — a sound installation, or piece of sound art — had won the award.
The next day, art critic Richard Dorment of the Telegraph wrote, “I loathe the kind of think-me sensitive tuneless stuff Ms Philipsz sings.” He wrote a lot more, mauling an adventurous and long-running series on BBC Radio 3 called Late Night Junction, and dispensing with folk music as a whole. (Philipsz’s “Lowlands” involves several overlapping recordings of her singing the 16th-century lament from which the piece takes its name.)
Dorment apparently feels obliged to question the status of Philipsz’s “Lowlands” as a work of art. That’s fair, even if fretting over what is and is not art is a time-consuming parlor game that keeps people busy when they might be looking for the art in things. It’s equally fair to say that what Dorment wrote is not art criticism; it’s a rant, a bullying and uninformed one that is more an expression of the author’s personal taste than an investigation of the subject at hand.
Of Philipsz’s win, Dorment wrote dismissively, “Cue a long low collective sigh from art lovers across the country.”
We took that cue seriously, as lovers of art across the world, and admirers of Philipsz’s work.
And in taking it seriously, we took it literally. This is a compilation of a dozen recordings by musicians incensed by Dorment’s assault.
Each recording on this compilation was recorded for this project, and uses the human sigh as its source material. That is Lowlands: A Sigh Collective. The words here are my own and do not necessarily reflect the thoughts of the participants. Their response is in their music, in their sound.
PS: Dorment’s article can be read at telegraph.co.uk. More on Susan Philipsz’s “Lowlands” and the Turner Prize at tate.org.uk. Special thanks to Geeta Dayal, Sean Lester, and archive.org.
Boom Times: Baltimore carolers in 2009 carrying their Unsilent Night boomboxes
It was Unsilent Night two nights ago in Dallas, Texas, and in Charleston, South Carolina, as well as in San Francisco, where I live, and in lower Manhattan, where Unsilent Night was created by composer Phil Kline in 1992.
The night prior it was in Asheville, North Carolina, and the night after it hit Salt Lake City plus three spots up the West Coast: San Diego, Los Angeles, and Vancouver. Tonight, December 20, it starts in Cambridge (the one in Ontario). And those are just a few of the many instances of Unsilent Night this year. Last year it hit London for the first time, this year Hong Kong.
Unsilent Night is a non-denominational ambient caroling event, no singing required. You download one of a handful of tracks from the Unsilent Night website (unsilentnight.com) or Facebook page (facebook.com/unsilentnight), and show up at the appointed spot at the appointed hour. From there, however many dozen or hundred participants will click play at more or less the same moment, and walk along a pre-determined route. The one in New York goes from Washington Square Park to Tompkins Square. In San Francisco every year it starts and ends at Mission Dolores Park. The tracks are not all exactly the same, and in addition to the way their sound complements each other, you have the slight variation in reproduction quality and time-sync from all those boomboxes. The result, chaotic as that might suggest, is a glistening holiday treat.
I’ve attended many times (while looking for Creative Commons images to accompany this article, I stumbled on several candid photos on Flickr.com in which I was prominently featured), and have joked/planned with one friend for some time that we would walk it backwards. I’ve also intended to stay put and listen to it pass. Last night ended up being appropriate for the latter. I staked out the path from a second story apartment, and put a digital recorder on the window sill. This is the result:
This is not the full piece. It began several blocks away prior to when the recording begins, and ended many more blocks after it passes. It seemed like the smallest showing for Unsilent Night that I’ve ever witnessed, perhaps owing to the cold weather, and thus the crowd was sparse and the line relatively brief. In other years, the gathering boombox-holders (and people who love them) have filled the street as they made their way. Last night, they walked two at a time down the sidewalk.
Still, the recording is a good representation of the sonic experience, the way the sounds interact, the way street noise and camaraderie add further elements of chance sound, and the way the built environment shapes the overall aural experience.
For historical context, here’s a good piece by Kyle Gann from 1998 that considers Kline’s work in the broader context of what he, and others, called “downtown” music, referring to the music of Lower Manhattan:
And so the Downtown composer is attracted to media and materials that don’t carry a strong sense of tradition. Phil Kline makes music for an array of ghetto blasters. David Weinstein’s Impossible Music orchestra performs on hot-wired CD players. Many of the best Downtowners are pioneers in sampling, using bits of other recordings to make their own music. Or else Downtowners borrow rhythms and instruments from other cultures, combining elements into new hybrid musics. Downtowners do not feel that the meaning of a piece of music can be entirely captured by notation, and they often develop pieces in rehearsal rather than by trying to notate every nuance for an ensemble of complete and possibly unsympathetic strangers.
Full piece at kylegann.com. Unsilent Night has become such a phenomenon, it’s helpful to understand from whence it came, the group of composers out of which Kline arose, and the community in which his music first took root. The work’s blossoming in some ways is reminiscent of other ’80s and early-’90s New York City projects like William Wegman’s dog photos and the Blue Men Group, one-time art-world peculiarities that went from modest pursuits to global perennials. Wherever in the world Unsilent Night happens this time each year, its boombox-wielding participants are briefly transported to lower Manhattan in spirit.
(Above photo courtesy of the Commons at flickr.com.)
Posted my latest boingboing.net piece yesterday, this time focused on seaquence.org, a lovely and nifty petri-dish-themed music sequencer produced under the auspices of gaffta.org. It’s browser-based and free, which is to say it has resisted the lure of iOS that so much interactive music has succumbed to in recent years. I’ve been interviewing the developers of Seaquence as part of the series of music-app investigations I pursued recently in regard to the iOS apps Thicket and ShapeSeq.
