Category: LookingOutwards-11

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In this week’s Looking Outwards post, I’d like to focus on two examples of sound art and computational music, mainly focusing on a specific artist first (whose project fits into the sound art option more than the computational music option). This artist is named Cevdet Erik, a Turkish artist and musician.

A particular work of his, SSS – Shore Scene Soundtrack / SSS – Sahil Sahnesi Sesi, is a sound installation in which the participant moves and slides their hands along a carpet in massage-like movements which cause the sound of the ocean to play. Typically putting his works in site-specific locations, Erik uses his knowledge from his studies of architecture and sound design and explores themes such as rhythm, time, and space in his work.

Still from SSS – Shore Scene Soundtrack / SSS – Sahil Sahnesi Sesi

What I really love about this sound installation is that it is based on user experience. Sound doesn’t just happen to you—you’re the source. I find that this project of Erik’s helps people feel more in touch with their bodies as fluid organisms rather than something that just helps them get around.

Lastly, I wanted to mention that I found out about this Artificial Intelligence named Aiva that was created to compose soundtracks for films, video games, tv shows, and commercials. Aiva was taught to compose classical music specifically. It was fascinating to many that the pieces created were still emotionally touching, and surprised audiences that an entity that is not human is capable of doing so: https://newatlas.com/creative-artificial-intelligence-computer-algorithmic-music/35764/

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I chose to look at a film called ODDSAC made by the band Animal Collective in 2010. In the video above, I skipped to the part where the digital art shows up and where I most enjoyed it. The play between the visuals and the sound really caught my attention because I can’t tell whether the sound is informing and driving the visual, or vice versa. When reading about the film, Animal Collective talks about how some of the music involved in the film was inspired by the art made by the director, Danny Perez, which I think is reflected in segment I highlight from the movie. The back and forth between what inspired what.

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http://www.myriambleau.com/soft_revolvers.html

This week I looked at Myriam Bleau’s project Soft Revolvers from 2014. This is a project in which Bleau performs with spinning “tops” made of acrylic that generate electronic music based on the way in which they move. Bleau is the musician, controlling the music that is generated by spinning the glowing tops. I really admire that this piece is just as visually interesting as it is aurally interesting. The sounds vary just as the glow of the spinning tops change and flicker as Bleau interacts with them. This creates an interesting experience because the visuals can very much influence the way in which a viewer experiences the music. The sounds are generated through gyroscopes and accelerometers that are hooked up to each top, which wirelessly send movement data to a computer to be interpreted, and “[inform] musical algorithms designed in Pure Data.” Bleau is interested in exploring the ways she can blur the lines between musical performance, installation, interface, and performance. She is “interested in finding original strategies for musical performance by creating cohesive systems that integrate sound, light and movement.” This very clearly manifests in her piece as the beautiful halo light of the tops, their movements, and their generative sounds all interact to create a beautiful musical performance.

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Textile Piece Being Made

Link:

Soft Sound – Textiles as electroacoustic transducers


Project: Soft Sound
Creator: EJTECT (Esteban de la Torre and Judit Eszter Karpati)

Project “Soft Sound” combines textiles with sound and explore the possibilities of creating multi-sensory experiences. They do this by trying to create textiles as an audio emitting surface. They created soft speakers and embedded it into fabrics in order to emanate sonic vibrations, which could not only be heard but could also be felt due to the pulsating sound.

What I admire about this project is that they are trying to allow people to not only hear sound but to also feel like, just like someone who lost their hearing would experience. This interests me like one of my previous looking outwards about a sensory experience for the blind. I’m really fascinated with technology that try to enhance your experience with someone by allowing you to understand what its like for someone who lost one of their vital senses.

The textiles were laser cut with flat copper and silver coils and then connected to an amplifier to enhance the signal, which ultimately allows the textile to move rapidly back and forth, causing sound waves to emit from the piece of tech.
The creator was trying to design something that could possibly be used as a contemporary interior structure design in the future by going from a small scale to a bigger scale in the future.


Video of how it works

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Houdini1

Houdini 2 

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Simon Russell’s project, The Creatures of Prometheus, is a series of Generative visualisation of Beethoven’s ballet. Houdini, the algorithm used to generate visual effects, reads the notation and emits particles using the pitch to derive their height and amplitude to derive their speed. The color of the particles emitted is also affected by the volume of each node.
This project might not be the most visually compelling computational music. However, I admire this attempt to break down, analyze and display aspects of music through an accurate function. Math is involved in the process of visualizing, rather than feelings or emotion. I think this is the true visualization of music.
For the algorithm, I’m guessing it can take a piece of music, analyze and turn it into some sort of data, and use the data to generate geometries according to the user’s setting.
Read more here

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Mesa Musical Shadows – Montréal’s venerable Daily tous les jours studio

For this assignment, I chose the work Mesa Musical Shadows because it both serves as an interactive art project and also a media that actually produces real music. It allows the audience to engage in spontaneous exploration, play, and even compose their own music. The piece was created for th

e Mesa Arts Centre, Arizona, known to be the sunniest state. This piece is created by Montréal’s venerable Daily tous les jours studio. It is installed in the north plaza at the Mesa Arts Center in Arizona. Mesa Musical Shadoes have four modes which will change according to the four different time periods (Morning, midday, evening and night) of the day. This is controlled by a MaxMSP patch linking Arduino Mega boards via OSC. Most sounds here were composed by sound designer David Drury to reflect varying atmospheres and — pragmatically — shadow lengths throughout the day. The installation’s 47 sensors are run through six control nodes, comprised of an Arduino Mega, ethernet shields, and custom connector shields – each of which is protected in a waterproof enclosure, placed underneath the tiling. Each sensor unit has a custom PCB with a light sensor on top and an LED on its bottom. The music is coded to the sensors,  for nighttime illumination and the more sensitive gear (computers, amplifiers, etc.) is all installed in the museum.

Sensors Being Connected to Computers | 2016
The Structure of the Sensor | 2016

A normal sensor will be easy to create for anyone who owns some coding skill, however, what Mesa Musical Shadows is manifested by creator’s artistic sensibilities of audiences’ relationship with the artwork. Quoted from “Creative Application Networks”, “From simple post-it notes to fully interactive mats, we brought different prototypes on site to get direct feedback and help refine the project … These consultations helped us figure out what the project’s essence had to be and hopefully, the results honor that process and reflect the community’s various contributions.”

Audience Interacting with The Work | 2016

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Porter Robinson Performing on Stage

One of the most interesting development in recent music development is how technology has allowed new types of musicians to create a whole new genre. In the forefront of this ‘evolution’, Porter Robinson is one of the most famous up-and-coming EDM musician, DJ, and composer. By using sample sounds recorded from an instrument to a sound made purely from electronics, Porter Robinson and his assistants are able to showcase a music that would require a large amount of people to perform the piece. To add on to the previous mentioned comfort, computer generated music allows for a whole new different types of sounds to be created, whereas traditional orchestras may have limited sounds. My favorite piece from Porter Robinson is his collaboration with Madeon, Shelter. I am personally excited to see how far computer music will develop the genres.

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According to the

Stanford Laptop Orchestra, ” The Stanford Laptop Orchestra (SLOrk) is a large-scale, computer-mediated ensemble and classroom that explores cutting-edge technology in combination with conventional musical contexts – while radically transforming both. Founded in 2008 by director Ge Wang and students, faculty, and staff at Stanford University’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA), this unique ensemble comprises more than 20 laptops, human performers, controllers, and custom multi-channel speaker arrays designed to provide each computer meta-instrument with its own identity and presence. The orchestra fuses a powerful sea of sound with the immediacy of human music-making, capturing the irreplaceable energy of a live ensemble performance as well as its sonic intimacy and grandeur. At the same time, it leverages the computer’s precision, possibilities for new sounds, and potential for fantastical automation to provide a boundary-less sonic canvas on which to experiment, create, and perform music. ”
Ge Wang, the founder of Stanford Laptop Orchestra is giving a TED talk to the public on the DIY Orchestra of the future using computers and phone to create digital music.

They are becoming one of the first innovators and pioneers on this area and theyr are performing a lot.

Site for the Stanford Laptop Orchestra(SLOrk) 

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Florian Hecker: “Event, Stream, Object”

“Event, Stream, Object is a sound installation by German artist Florian Hecker, that has now been acquired for MMK’s collection in Frankfurt. Presented in the exhibition ”Radical Conceptual“ (February 19 – August 22, 2010), the work consists of a loudspeaker system suspended from the ceiling used to convey a computer-generated, eight-channel sound composition. Each individual loudspeaker plays a sequence of sounds allocated to it and, in itself complex, becomes a part of the acoustic whole with its differing frequencies and volumes”.

What I like about this sound installation is that the mirrors that hung from the ceiling can actually alter the atmospheric sounds’ waves, besides that it can reflect the visitors’ appearance. His concept of incorporating space and architecture into music. His projects are not actually traditional music that is composed. Rather, it is more like a interactive sound art because the sound shift and vary depending on the listener. When the audience change their physical locations in the space and also their personal biases and points of reference, the sound will change as well. I think his idea that listing is driven by the desire for understanding is shown here in a very elegant way. Also, the mirrors are able to generate eight channels of sound, which makes the sound very dimensional.
I think the idea of taking the listeners into account of sound generating is really appealing and interesting. It not only attracts the audience to pay attention on or play with your work, but also provides more opportunities for artists in creation.

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Example of the visualizations of the computer generated music

Atlås, created by Agoston Nagy, “generates music in a conversational cognitive space”. The app basically creates music through programming language in Pure Data and creates graphics with javascript’s p5js library. What I like about this project is that music is not just something that can be heard, but also visualized. The graphics locate the sounds within space, which brings an aspect of cognitive process into the experience of listening. The sounds generated by the machine through coding may seem random and distinct from each other, but through the visuals, such sounds then seem to show a narration and a relationship with each other.

 

Below is a video example of his work.