In occasione del suo passaggio alla Roundhouse di Londra (7-31 Agosto), abbiamo una immagine un po’ più accurata dell’installazione Playing the Building di David Byrne di cui abbiamo parlato in febbraio.

It’s all mechanical. There’s no speakers, there’s no electronics, or any of that modern rubbish.

È un po’ buffo che Byrne chiami “rubbish” quello con cui ha giocato fino all’altro ieri. Ma forse questo approccio si adatta alla struttura vittoriana della Roundhouse, che, in origine, era un capannone adibito alla riparazione di motori a vapore.

In realtà Byrne sfrutta, con grande spiegamento di mezzi, idee che girano come minimo dagli anni ‘70 (se non prima) e hanno raggiunto una certa notorietà all’epoca delle performance Fluxus (far suonare gli oggetti). Cioè, in questo caso quello che fa non è farina del suo sacco. Però almeno, grazie alla sua notorietà, ha il merito di proporre le suddette idee a un pubblico che altrimenti non le avrebbe mai conosciute…

Ed ecco anche un nuovo video

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In particular conditions the sound waves can become visible. This Atlas V launched from Kennedy Space Center at Feb. 11 2010, fly through a sun dog.

A sun dog is a prismatic bright spot in the sky caused by sun shining through ice crystals. The Atlas V rocket exceeded the speed of sound in this layer of ice crystals, making the shock wave visible from the ground.

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After the fibers made by cassette tape played by moving a tape head over the fabric, here it is fibers that can hear and sing by themselves.

To Yoel Fink, an associate professor of materials science and principal investigator at MIT’s Research Lab of Electronics, the threads used in textiles and even optical fibers are much too passive. For the past decade, his lab has been working to develop fibers with ever more sophisticated properties, to  enable fabrics that can interact with their environment.

In the August issue of Nature Materials, Fink and his collaborators announce a new milestone on the path to functional fibers: fibers that can detect and produce sound. Applications could include clothes that are themselves sensitive microphones, for capturing speech or monitoring bodily functions, and tiny filaments that could measure blood flow in capillaries or pressure in the brain.

Despite the delicate balance required by the manufacturing process, the researchers were able to build functioning fibers in the lab. “You can actually hear them, these fibers,” says Chocat, a graduate student in the materials science department. “If you connected them to a power supply and applied a sinusoidal current” — an alternating current whose period is very regular — “then it would vibrate. And if you make it vibrate at audible frequencies and put it close to your ear, you could actually hear different notes or sounds coming out of it.”

In addition to wearable microphones and biological sensors, applications of the fibers could include loose nets that monitor the flow of water in the ocean and large-area sonar imaging systems with much higher resolutions: A fabric woven from acoustic fibers would provide the equivalent of millions of tiny acoustic sensors.

Read more details here.

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Interesting idea by Richard Reigner

Denoising Field Recordings documents an early attempt at using denoising-techniques in a creative and compositional manner. Instead of utilising noise-reduction-algorithms for their intended purpose (the restoration of damaged audio signals), these processes are applied to various field recordings of trains, streets, swimminghalls and public transport. Due to the fact that these recordings consist entirely of noises this operation transforms the originals into an uncanny hybrid of newly introduced processing artefacts, occasional silence and sporadically audible traces of the original field recordings. What kind of sound-aesthetics can emerge while denoising field recordings? Which audible parameters are able to resist this audio-erasement-process? How are these traces comparable to the visual remanences of Robert Rauschenberg’s erasure of a De Kooning drawing?

Denoising Field Recordings is released as a limited edition of see-through 12″ vinyl with an intruiging white-on-white cover designed by Hans Renzler. The digital version is available exlusively at Zero” (not free - must register to download).

Click here or here to listen to some results of applying noise reduction algorithms to noise.

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A great bunch of free sound samples from Open Path Music, The Berklee College of Music and the Worldwide Community of Csound Developers.

Some links are broken, but the majority are working.

Get the index here.

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Sonic Fabric is a textile woven from 50% cassette tape and 50% polyester thread.

And it can even be played. While moving a tape head over the fabric, a mixture of recordings can be heard.

See the video below or click the image for more information.

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Installation by Kathy Hinde
The inside of an old upright piano, rescued from destruction, is transformed into a kinetic sound sculpture. Video projections move across the surface of the piano strings, triggering small machines to twitch and flutter causing the strings to resonate. The video is visually akin to a musical score or piano roll, and this installation can also become the site for a live performance.
The video is analysed by a MaxMSP patch which divides the screen into a 5×5 grid to correspond to the motors and solenoids which are also arranged in a 5×5 grid on the piano. Movement or any change sensed in the video triggers a device in the corresponding square of the grid - the result is that the fluttering and movement of a bird triggers a device closest to it on the piano.
MaxMSP programming by Matthew Olden
Commissioned by Lumin, May 2010

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Sun Boxes is a sound installation created by Craig Colorusso.

It’s comprised of twenty speakers operating independently each powered by solar panels. There is a different guitar sample in each box all playing together making the composition. The guitar samples are all of different lengths so the whole piece keeps evolving.

Participants are encouraged to walk amongst the speakers. It sounds different inside of the array.  There is a different sense of space inside. Certain speakers will be closer and louder therefore the piece will sound different to different people in different positions throughout the array. Creating a unique experience for everyone.

There are no batteries involved. The Sun Boxes are reliant on the sun. When the sun sets the music stops. The piece changes as the length of the day changes making the participants aware of the cycle of the day.

It’s a very interesting idea. I would like to know how powerful each speaker is. 20 Watt? 50? or more?

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If you find hard to tolerate the vuvuzelas constantly playing below the World Cup’s matches, there is a solution.

According to isophonic.net, this instrument plays a note about 230-235 Hertz (roughly the B-flat below middle C). So we can apply a notch filter on the fundamental frequency and the first harmonic (460-470) to greatly reduce the buzz. Listen to the before and after audio to confirm that it has indeed worked: you can still hear the horns, because the higher partials are intact, but they aren’t so loud. (Note that the effect takes a couple of seconds to work, at the start of the “after” sample.)

People at isophonic.net has created a VST plugin for windows and a LADSPA plugin for Mac OS/X that makes the job. Download from isophonic.net page.

The LADSPA plugin should work on Linux also, but we can do the same work using jack-rack. Here there are instructions that works on any linux box with jack and jack-rack.

But the real solution is to love the vuvuzelas. As John Cage argues:

If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all.

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ATLAS is a particle physics experiment at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. Starting in late 2009/2010, the ATLAS detector will search for new discoveries in the head-on collisions of protons of extraordinarily high energy. ATLAS will learn about the basic forces that have shaped our Universe since the beginning of time and that will determine its fate. Among the possible unknowns are the origin of mass, extra dimensions of space, unification of fundamental forces, and evidence for dark matter candidates in the Universe.

ATLAS is known because of the research for the Higg’s Boson, the so called “God particle”. Now this research generates sounds. Lily Asquith is a particle physicist who has just finished her PhD at University College London. Her work on this project has been to identify physics processes for sonification and to convert real and simulated ATLAS data into files readable by audio software. Lily came up with this idea whilst trying to describe to a very patient friend what she thought different particles would sound like.

Now a group of particle physicists, composers, software developers and artist is working on sonification of ATLAS data. The data are first processed using the vast and all-powerful ATLAS software framework. This allows raw data (streams of ones and zeroes) to be converted step-by-step into ‘objects’ such as silicon detector hits and energy deposits. We can reconstruct particles using these objects. The next step is to convert the information into a file containing two or three columns of numbers known as a “breakpoint file”. It can also be used as a “note list”. This kind of file can be read by compositional software such as the Composers Desktop Project (CDP) and Csound software used for this project.

An excerpt. Many more examples at lhcsound.com

• The decay of a God particle
  This example maps properties of the Higgs jet to properties of sound as illustrated in the picture below. A jet is made up of lots of cells containing energy deposits. Each cell has an energy, a distance and an angular distance (dR) associated with it. So each cell can be heard as a separate note in this example. This is quite a long track (about 90 seconds). The sounds reduce in density very much towards the end, with isolated events separated by silences of several seconds.
  

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