Initial images of the AMK, a modular sound toy intended for children:
More info at the site of the manufacturer, pknts.com. (Found via synthtopia.com.)
Quote of the Week: R2-D2’s Descendents
Sound designer Ben Burtt on his work on the film Wall-E:
Eve is a very high-tech robot and so, unlike the motors and squeaks and metallic sounds you’ve got with Wall-E, Eve is held together with some sort of force fields and magnetism. A great deal of her sound is purely synthesized musical type of tones that I could make in a music synthesizer and treat it various ways, because her whole character was supposed to be graceful and ethereal, so she always has an electronic noise associated with her floating around.
Read the full interview with Burtt, who was also responsible for the voice of Star Wars‘s R2-D2: moviesonline.ca.
Early Tamara Albaitis MP3
How does one pronounce the given name of sound artist Tamara Albaitis? Well, the answer is buried in the audio of one of her early works, in which she recorded herself saying her name three different ways and then mixed and matched the various pronunciations (MP3). There’s the correct way — “TAM-ara” — and two common but mistaken ways: “tam-era,” “tam-ARA.” As she explains in a brief description of the track, “I also included ‘ahh’s’ and ‘no’s!’ which is normally my response to their attempts.”
Albaitis is perhaps best known for her scupltural work, which often involves speakers, such as the one pictured here, the seven-speaker “Drop” (2007), which included a four-minute soundtrack and brings to mind the spidery forms of Louise Bourgeois:
As for the earlier, auto-biographical sound work, which dates from 2002, it focuses on audio at a syllable-by-syllable level, contrasting various content, from fly-buzz syllables to recognizable words and word fragments, with small amounts of post-recording transformations, like stereo play and effects that emphasize the electronic nature of the process. More on Albaitis at her website, burnthebox.org.
Tom Lawrence’s Irish Forest Field Recordings
The latest podcast from the Touch label is a brilliantly detailed documentary recording by Tom Lawrence, who’s in the Humanities and Social Sciences department at Dublin City University. Titled “Donadea Forest,” after the Irish location where the sounds were recorded, it captures, in a languorous half hour, bird calls, breezes, and the rain amid the trees.
One especially appealing segment introduces more traditional musical elements into what is otherwise a collection of field recordings. This is accomplished by working in chimes at play in the forest. Also complicating that portion of the overall piece is the presence of traffic noise — it’s a smart moment, as humankind makes its presence heard simultaneously as tone and noise, as organized musical sound and unintended aural presence.
To assist in the listening process, Lawrence has helpfully provided a time-code guide to the work’s five constituent parts:
00:00-04:27 Castle Crow’s Cacophony (31st December 2007, 7.20am)
04:28-10:23 January Gales 9th January 2008 10.45pm (contains references to 9/11 forest monument and the avenue of trees, captured with contact mics)
10:24-14:48 Forest Rain 12th January 2008 1.15am (extensive flooding)
14:49-20:36 Forest Harmonics 8th March 2008 6.20-11.50am (sampled forest chimes, forestry felling, and the ‘carbon chorus’ [surrounding motorways]).
20:37-30:47 The Dawn Chorus (recorded on National Dawn Chorus Day 20th May 2008, 4.35am)
The set of recordings was made between December 2007 and May 2008, and was just released on Touch’s Touch Radio series. The entire piece is available for download: M4A. More information at touchradio.org.uk. And more on Lawrence at his website, tom-lawrence.net.
How Drones Redeem Melisma (David Tagg MP3s)
Contemporary r&b has given a bad name to melisma. Once upon a time, that mode of moving a single vowel around the octave and back was an emotive rhetorical tool in popular music. These days it’s just sung and otherwise employed by tools, showy vocalists and instrumentalists whose emphasis on their own virtuosic prowess has the unintended effect of leaving listeners doubting their sensitivity. So, leave it to drones, of all things, to rejuvenate the melisma. Now, much drone music is more akin to static, an investigation of random data and texture. But there’s a growing field of drone-like music that has a melodic soul.
Take for example David Tagg‘s Skin Diagram, a free download from the archaichorizon.com netlabel. All six of its tracks are built in one way or another on a steadily flowing foundation of thick, tubular drones, like the nearly subaural tone that threads through “Life Drone” (MP3) and the gentle cloud-like patterns that inform “Deep Breathing” (MP3). In all the tracks, a single sound can be followed as it snakes its way — or slowly swells and wanes, or otherwise is transformed without losing its essential quality — around the composition.
Tagg is credited on the album as having played “electric guitar, low pass filter, ring modulator.” Perhaps explaining the high sound quality, Skin Diagram also includes a credit for a mastering, which is not the norm for the often low-budget projects that appear on netlabels (the credit goes to Brian Grainger, who records elsewhere as Milieu). Get the full set at archaichorizon.com.