- Hearing the sound world processed in realtime on iPhone/Touch with the @rjdj app = sonic heaven. It just hit build 0.9.9: http://is.gd/b0X8E #
- RT @soundscrapers I swear that the sound of brewing coffee is just as enticing as the smell. #
- First major change to our domestic soundscape: the city's paving the street. Will it dampen traffic noise or will cars drive faster/louder? #
- Headed across town in minivan masquerading as a taxi, its aged hull creaking like I'm deep in the bowels of a leaky sailboat lost at sea. #
- Great office sounds: business cards shuffled into a deck, printer settling into sleep mode, muffled chatter from closed conference rooms. #
- Desk across from mine covered with 200+ plastic shot glasses. Sounds of them being stacked, unstacked, moved around is the music of my day. #
- This would be an awesome Firefox addon: In Google Contacts you click on an email address; it triggers the default email client, not Gmail. #
- Morning sounds: matter of potential energy; construction equipment perched on street, awaiting hour when it may begin pneumatic pounding. #
- Morning listening: Larry Johnson's mix of field recordings from the great Wandering Ear netlabel: http://is.gd/aUkXI #
- Generally not a proponent of elective surgery, but glad to have upgraded the RAM from 1Gb to 2 on my new (and great) Toshiba NB305 laptop. #
- Monday morning sounds: more than anything, the uptick in car traffic, and the slightly tighter bus schedule, signal start of a workweek. #
- More LiveMetallica set-detail intensity: "first performance of Shortest Straw in 2010. only played six times in 2009 after 12-year absence." #
- Bonus: BBC Radiophonic book in August: http://is.gd/aSalj … RT @stasisfield Saturday for Delia Derbyshire fans: http://bit.ly/deliaderb #
- LiveMetallica-release trainspotting detail is extraordinary: "third performance of Sanitarium in 2010. last played January 31 in Sao Paulo" #
- Lee Scratch Perry's 73th birthday yesterday; JS Bach's 325th today. Seems like a good time to put the Solo Cello Suites through a Kaoss Pad. #
- Having one of those "Exactly how many of my browsers' tabs are emitting sound?" moments … #
- Sunday morning sounds: clack of intermittent typing from across the house, through mild droning haze of heater, hard drive, & fridge. #
- Another great Virginia Heffernan sound article, on the origin, shape, artificiality, & inherent human-made-ness of beeps: http://is.gd/aR9NU #
- Local church bells ring at 10:30. Recollecting what Gilbert & George said about this when they visited @deyoungmuseum — must revisit notes. #
- Belated RIP, Jun Seba (ç€¬å ´ 潤, b. 1974), Japanese hip-hop DJ/producer better known as Nujabes. Audio & tribute: http://is.gd/aQhVh #
Glass Marimba v. Frog Caller
The gentle, childrens-toy sing-song melody that runs through “Glass Marimba / Frog Caller” by Stephen Vitiello has a lullaby vibe, so to speak, even if it’s ever rubbing up against a frog caller, one of those rough wooden instruments that simulates the throaty gargle of its namesake amphibian.
The two instrumental lines are never fully aligned, and that adds to the contrast in melody and texture. It also allows each to highlight the corresponding aspects of its counterpart — the caller bringing out the hard consonance hidden at the heart of the marimba, and the marimba getting the listener’s ear to pay attention to the taut but not non-existent range of the caller.
The music serves as the score to an installation by video artist Pawel Wojtasik, with whom Vitiello has collaborated on several occasions. The piece, titled “At the Still Point,” is currently at the gallery Smack Mellon in Brooklyn (smackmellon.org), where it runs through April 11. A still from the video appears at the top of this post.
Via email, Vitiello explained a bit more about the video, and the sound sources with which he constructed its score:
“It was shot in India. The glass marimba is this instrument built by the Brazilian group Uakti. They make all their own instruments. It’s made from two wooden frames (resonator boxes) and pieces of window glass, which are cut to size, so they’re in the correct pitches. Eder Santos, Brazilian videomaker and friend, asked them to make one for me many years ago instead of paying me for a soundtrack. The frog caller is something they used in the making of the sound design for District 9 and I thought to get one and play with.”
There’s a massive gallery of instruments at the Uakti website, uakti.com.br. The marimbas are filed under “Idiofones” (other categories include Aerofones, Electromecanicos, Cordofones, and Memranaofones).
Original track at soundcloud.com/stephenvitiello. More on Vitiello at stephenvitiello.com. More on Wojtasik at pawelwojtasik.com.
The Antiquity of the Electricity-Free Turntable
Just to follow up the portable, electricity-free turntable I noted this past weekend, Steve Roden (artist, musician, and tireless archivist of fascinating music- and sound-related ephemera) points out that the design has been around for many a year:
Here’s the subject of my original post (disquiet.com):
Roden’s full post (“when new things are actually old…”), with numerous images, at inbetweennoise.blogspot.com.
40 Minutes of Small Sounds Mid-Transformation (MP3)
The squiggly, squirming sounds at the heart of Craque‘s “justBelow” are all too irritable, all too nervous, to ever retreat fully into the background, even though most of the initial ones in question are exactly the sort we train our ears to not pay attention to — the rush of air, little metallic clinking, slight textural roughness.
Heard here in a slowly evolving, nearly 40-minute improvisation, the raw materials (referred to by Craque generically as “electro-acoustic resources”) begin to come out of their hiding. There’s a whirly synth tone, as well as a slow hovering, that brings to mind a Bebe Baron analog UFO sound effect, and much more.
The piece needs to be heard straight through to be fully appreciated for what it is: an ever-shifting, ever-changing testament to transformation.
Original track at soundcloud.com/craque/justbelow. More on Craque, aka Matt Cooke-Davis, at craque.net.
One Night in Geneva (MP3)
Katja Rupp is a composer and sound designer living and working in Geneva, Switzerland, where she provides audio for commercial video. But in the age of inexpensive HD, the divide between roles is becoming less and less strict.
One night, she wandered her city with a brand new video camera, a Canon 7D, capturing in the dim light the pace of traffic, the lingering couples, the chance encounters, and the various establishments, both open and closed.
The next morning she put back on her primary hat, and composed this splendid electronic backing audio for the video — emerging from snatches of feedback come elegant pulses and subtle percussion that perfectly capture the aura of an urban enclave when it’s experiencing an enticing lull:
While the audio stands on its own, the full video is available, too. Much as there’s no surprise, based on the score, that she lists James Newtown Howard and David Holmes among her favorite composers, there’s also no small hint of her favorite movie directors, who include Steven Soderbergh, Wong Kar-wai, and Ridley Scott.
More on Rupp at katapulse.com. Original
audio at soundcloud.com/katapulse. Original video at vimeo.com.