Demirjian & Seldess's "Nitrogen Cycles"

I've been meaning to blog about Andrew Demirjian & Zachary Seldess's Nitrogen Cycles (2009) ever since I saw it early this year at Gallery Aferro.

A video of the artwork can be seen on Demirjian's website.

Here's how Andrew Demirjian describes the work:

Nitrogen Cycles is an 8-channel sound art installation that sonically maps the daily activity of live fish into the gallery space. A rectangular fish tank stands in the center of the gallery and each fish is assigned a unique tone that spatially travels through the rectangular gallery corresponding to that fish’s activity. The music generated is a reflection of the dynamic shifts in the location, speed and the relationship between the fish in their daily lives. Through motion and color tracking a sonic transposition is created that immerses the listener into an aural experience of the movements inside the fish tank. This twists the visitor's traditional sensory experience by putting their ears inside the tank and the eyes outside of it.

Four speakers are low to the ground and an additional four are over six feet high in the air, so we hear the fish sound travel and pan with height fluctuations as well as width. The pitch scales from low to high on the y-axis, and the x-axis controls a tremolo effect that is fastest at the center of the tank and slower at the edges. When a fish moves quickly the sound is processed with a filtering effect that emphasizes their sharp movement.

Steamboat Ed's calliope

Steamboat Ed left this comment on my post about my vocoder project:

Ha! Interesting timing! Got a Stamp-controlled mini calliope working today; only took a year to get the bugs out, hehe. I suspect it'll take another year to make it as elegant as your slide whistle tho... ;-)

Below is his calliope project... I like his use of sprinkler parts for controlling airflow.

Study for a Vocoder

I recently concluded a residency at LEMUR with a performance Study for a Vocoder. For quite a while I've been wanting to build a few vocoder-like sculptures/musical-instruments... and this is the first step towards the first of them.

It's built out of a ink-jet printer and a slide-whistle. It replicates whatever sounds are spoken/sung into a microphone. It can also play pre-recorded music ala a player piano. Its main short coming is being a bit slow in changing notes, but a more powerful stepper motor should help improve its response time.

Roman Haefeli's "Solenoid Concert"

A nice little musical installation by Roman Haefeli using solenoids what looks to be Pure Data or Max programming language.

It reminds me a bit of David Byrne's Playing the Building and the work of League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots (LEMUR). Incidentally, I'm just finishing up a residency at LEMUR and will be wrapping it up with a performance at 8pm on Thursday October 9th.

[via Boing Boing]

Related:
More Songs About Buildings

Everything That Happens & Bicycle Racks

Everything That Happens Will Happen Today is not a new Miranda July project (it does have that ring, though, doesn't it?)... it's the new album by David Byrne and Brian Eno.



David Byrne wrote about the project on his blog:

In a nutshell, Brian wrote most of the music, and I composed most of the vocal melodies and lyrics, and then sang them. Other musicians play on the album too. It's not Bush of Ghosts II: this is a record of sung songs, and the result really surprises me. Despite a sinister inflection to both the lyrics and the music, many songs feel fairly uplifting and the overall tone is hopeful. From where does this quality derive?

Eno and I hadn't worked together for many years, but since the Nonesuch reissue of Bush Of Ghosts in 2006, we'd kept in contact fairly regularly. In spite of a slow start, we began to collaborate, still with no plans to make a whole record (or whatever a collection of songs might be called now). After a while though, it became obvious that we were indeed making a record. As it neared completion, we decided to try releasing it ourselves -- so far there is no record label involved -- though various independent distributors will handle the physical CDs. Those who follow the music industry will know this idea is not entirely new; but every experiment in this area turns out a little different, as no model is right for everyone.

The artist and designer Stefan Sagmeister is busy creating the packaging and graphics. We've worked together before and it always results in something new and surprising; I have no doubt it will happen again here too. Do I sound like a salesman? Am I too enthusiastic?

Other recent David Byrne projects include Playing the Building and these bicycle racks:

See more of his bicycle racks here. The racks were inspired by David Byrnes's love of bicycling. Unfortunately they're only up (in Manhattan and Brooklyn) for a year, then they will be sold by Pace/MacGill Gallery. Byrne wrote about a bicycling mishap on his blog last May:

"You drank too much and fell off your bike" could be the title of a drawing by David Shrigley. But in this case, it actually happened to me after meeting Shrigley for dinner and drinks. While riding home, C and I were briefly separated. Upon reuniting, my tire slipped on the cobblestones of West 14th St., and I remember lying in the street, looking at oncoming headlights and rolling towards the curb so they wouldn't run me over. Two cops approached and looked down at me. "Have you been drinking?" they asked. Probably a typical question in that neighborhood at that time of night. "Yes, I've had a few drinks," I replied. "But I'm hurt." I managed to get up by myself and retrieve my bike (no help from the NYPD, though one of them asked if I was David Byrne) and it wasn't until later, when I was in bed, that the pain made itself truly known. I wondered how I would ever even get out of bed. The next day I went to the hospital and x-rays revealed two broken ribs -- numbers 3 and 5, way up high. They're healing now, little by little, and I was told that in 3 weeks I should be OK.

Dennis Havlena's musical instruments

Dennis Havlena has made a wide variety of homemade instruments. His website includes directions for making many of them.



[via Make]

Laurie Anderson interview

The Smithsonian has a short interview with artist/musician/performance artist Laurie Anderson.

From the interview:

What's the message in your work?
If I had a message, I would write it down and e-mail it to everybody. I would save a lot of paint that way. My work is more about trying to create images through words and pictures. I want to evoke a reaction more than explain anything clearly. I don't like things to be confused, but I like them to be multifaceted.

I recently posted about Anderson here.

[via BoingBoing]

Vocoders

Vocoder effects are familiar to us in the form of robot voices or musical effects such as Peter Frampton's "talk box":


They work by determining a base frequency of a voice and then measure the spoken words in terms of variation from that frequency. Then, the synthesized playback is done by generating the base frequency and varying it according to the measurements. For effects like Frampton's, the playback varies a musical tone (such as guitar chords) instead of generating & using the base frequency.

Development of the Vocoder began surprisingly early--1928. Bell Lab engineer Homer Dudley created the vocoder as a way of encrypting speech for secure radio transmission and compressing speech for transmission over telephone lines.

More precisely, a Vocoder is the component that analyzes speech and a Voder (Voice Operating Demonstrator) is the component that recreates it. The early voders were manual filters (requiring a trained operator) consisting of consoles with fifteen touch-sensitive keys and a foot pedal.

Voder operator in 1939 and as demonstrated at the 1939 World's Fair:

A sound sample from Dudley's 1939 Voder, with introduction (170k au file)

Obsolete.com writes:

Werner Meyer-Eppler, then the director of Phonetics at Bonn University, recognised the relevance of the machines to electronic music after Dudley visited the University in 1948, and used the vocoder as a basis for his future writings which in turn became the inspiration for the German "Electronische Musik" movement.

Laurie Anderson's "Hearring"

I'm a huge fan of Laurie Anderson and her Hearring (1997) always makes me smile (it plays her voice repeatedly saying, "Hey you! I'm right behind you!"). The wearable art was done in an edition of 150 for Parkett magazine. Inexplicitly, the edition is not sold out (perhaps art collectors think of Anderson a musician?) and a Hearring is available for the bargain price of $600.

To create the piece, Anderson worked with jeweler Josiah Dearborn and engineer Bob Bielecki. Bielecki has collaborated with Anderson before on such things as her magnetic tape violin:

Yuri Suzuki

[via We Make Money Not Art]

Yuri Suzuki recently earned an MA in Design Products program at the Royal College of Art.

The projects of his that caught my eye include Sound Chaser (which is a bit like a toy train that rides/plays rails of records, see above) and Prepared Turntable (a five-armed record player, see below).

Hydraulophones

A hydraulophones are musical instruments that uses pressurized hydraulic fluid, such as water, to make sound. They were invented by Steve Mann ( who is perhaps best known for his work in wearable computing). I particularly like the instrument's public art incarnation:


Pachelbel's Canon being played on the hydraulophone:


Overview of the instrument including early prototypes:


A variety of hydraulophone-related videos, photos, & links can be found at Steve Mann's wearcam website.

Tristan Perich

Tristan Perich is musician, artist, & hacker. Marisa Olson posted about his work recently on Rhizome:

Unsurprisingly descended from Warhol-era conceptual artist Anton Perich, the younger Perich has become a fixture in the local avant garde scene, bringing his own brand of circuit-bent instruments to the contemporary music sphere. His band, The Loud Objects, have made a very well-received international magic-show of their singular work, which involves soldering musical chips together atop an overhead projector--clad in futuristic sunglasses, no less!

I have a copy of Perich's 1-Bit Music (2004-2005), pictured above. It is a clever bit of electronic hackery that is contained in a CD jewel case. Plug in headphones, flip a switch, and you have lo-fi electronic music that puts many 16-bit works (the bit-depth that compact discs are recorded at) to shame. I picked up the Whitney Museum store's last copy, so if you'd like a copy of 1-Bit Music your best bet is Perich's online store (which sells a variety electronic, musical goodies).

Tonight (Wednesday June 18th), Perich is premiering his untitled (Bernadette Mayer) 5 voices and 15-channel electronics at 8pm in the Issue Project Room in Brooklyn.

Here is Perich's Active Field, 10 violins, 10-channel 1-bit electronics (2007)

See The Village Voice for another profile of Perich.

Phyllis Chen & her toy pianos

The other night I heard a fantastic performance by Phyllis Chen at the Christopher Henry Gallery on Elizabeth Street (NYC). It's amazing to see & hear virtuoso piano playing on the tiny keyboards. Each different toy piano seems to have its own unique characteristics, but overall they are more percussive than regular pianos.

Here's a video from the performance: