interview with Golan Levin

On Turbulence.org's Networked Music Review has an interview by Peter Traub with Golan Levin.

The interview focuses on Golan's Dialtones (A Telesymphony), 2001, which was a concert performed through the choreographed dialing and ringing of the audience's own mobile phones. Golan did the project in collaboration with in collaboration with Gregory Shakar, Scott Gibbons, Yasmin Sohrawardy, Joris Gruber, Erich Semlak, Gunther Schmidl, and Joerg Lehner.

Go here to read the interview and hear the concert.

Telemegaphone

Telemegaphone is a 23-foot loudspeaker of a Norwegian mountain. The loadspeaker receives phone calls and projects them out over the lovely and remote village of Dale.

The project (which just ended due to deer hunting season) powered the speakers using the wind--on calm days no calls received!

From the FAQ:

Some people complained that the volume was too loud for sleeping with open windows during calm, warm summer nights. After adjusting the volume slightly, others complained that the volume was now too weak.

One woman said: "This is great. I will sit on my porch with a cup of tea and listen to the world."

Another woman said: "We like things a little bit crazy here in Dale."

Expect many more opinions from Dale-ites to be published here in September.

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.

A day without the mobile-phone

Recordings of the sculpture made by Andrew McKenzie, h3o

Eve Arpo & Riin Kranna-Rõõs coordinated "a day without the mobile-phone" last September in Tallinn, Estonia. The project is a an installation made up of cell phones collected from the people in the city. The phones are hung on a tree where they create a light- and sound-installation. Through out the night the phones light up, ring, & vibrate as they receive phone calls--some inadvertent and some specifically to trigger the sculpture.

The artists are organizing a second installation for June 2008 in Edmonton, Canada as part of of The Works Art & Design Festival.



Part 1: TV coverage in top evening news, Reporter, Kanal2.
Part 2: documentation from the installation, recorded by Üllar Luup, Reporter, Kanal2