Category: LookingOutwards-10

Austin Garcia – Looking Outwards 10 – Section C

While still not entirely sure what sound art could be defined as, I was looking around online and found this piece by Jana Winderen called “Out of Range”. This piece was created by using a variety of different, specialized microphones and hydrophones to capture sounds of various animals that are out of the range of human hearing. From the echolocation of bats to the communications of whales and dolphins, this audio ensemble combines all these inaudible noises and brings them to our ears. The result is a suite of natural sounds that seem familiar but are truly unique.

I am still not 100% sure what could be considered sound art and what could not. However, I do certainly believe that this piece ought to be classified as sound art due to the grace in its composition but also its reason for existing. To bring these sounds to human ears in such a way is truly an artistic feat.

Link

Jasmine Lee – Looking Outwards – 10

During my search for computational sound art, I stumbled upon the Looks Like Music exhibit by Yuri Suzuki. Created as an installation for MUDAM, the piece involves small robots which create sound based on the tracks they encounter. These little robots move using little wheels, following a black path drawn by the user. When colored marks are also drawn along that path, the colored visuals are translated into sounds as they are encountered by the machine.

Above: Video of MUDAM 2013 Looks Like Music exhibit

The installation invites people to interact with it, encouraging people to make their own marks using colored felt pens on a large roll of white paper on the ground. There are five of the sound robots, each with their own distinct set of noises. The noises include low bass noises, computer percussion, drum samples, arpeggio, and chord samples. The artist’s sensibilities in the way he chose to depict the installation as a whimsical playground for visitors to enjoy. This is shown by the curvy, exploring lines drawn in the video example, the colorful visuals, and the abstract shapes of the machines.

Some of the drawn notations used in Suzuki’s project.
From left to right: drumcar, glitch car, arpeggiocar, basscar, melodycar

Looking Outwards 10- Alice Cai

What do machines sing of?

“And I will always love you…” 
This sound art by Martin Backes blurs the lines of AI and humans but at the same time makes it all the more clear. Martin Backs feeds a computed system number-one ballads from 1990, and all of them are extremely EMOTIONAL songs. He has the computer reproduce the song with its own “emotional interpretations”. The machine attempts to replicate the human sentiment in the original song. While I listen to the machine, I can hear what seems to be crescendos and decrescendos as well as vibratos in the notes. However, it is glitchy and very clearly electronically made. You can tell that code is constantly running during the song.
The code is calculating current pitch, found pitch, frequency, and loudness. 



I find this project extremely intriguing because I was actually very impressed with the replication of the song by the machine. However, because of the clear distinctions and flaws in the replication, it also reassures me that human emotion is the one thing that cannot be replaced by electronics.

lee chu – looking outwards 10

visuals from Porter Robinson’s Worlds tour

Porter Robinson, renown producer of electronic music, is also well known for his visuals at his live performances. Not only do the visuals need to be visually stunning, but they also need to correlate with and move with the music logically.

Porter aimed to bring beautiful and immersive sounds and visions to a genre of music too often associated with heavy bass drops. Porter sought to transport his audiences into hyper-real, neon-toned worlds of anime and MMORPG’s. These videogame-esque worlds unfold before you to bring back that childhood escapism into fantasy and fictional worlds.

Hyejo Seo – Looking Outwards – 10

Ge Wang’s Ted Talk on computer music

Ge Wang is a professor at Stanford Department of Music and a co-founder of ‘Smule’. As a professor at Stanford, he created different instruments for the Stanford Computer Orchestra, using programming language, Chuck, and game track. Game track was first commoditized for golf players as it is a device that tracks your hand gestures. After coding for different instruments, the orchestra members play these instruments using this device. It not only produces different sounds depending on how much you have pulled or the location of your hand (left or right), but it also promotes interactions just like the traditional instruments.

As a co-founder of Smule, Ge Wang created an app that would function as portable instruments. In his Ted talk, he demonstrates playing ocarina with this app. As he is blowing into the microphone of his phone and pushing different buttons on the screen, the app starts to make sound. The app has Chuck code – music programming language – that detects the strength of your blowing and synthesizing the sounds.

I decided to talk about this talk for several reasons. First, the fact that Stanford University has Computer Orchestra was really impressive. Students are able to learn and experience the future of music – exploring the interdisciplinary field of Computer Science and Music. Furthermore, I thought it was really interesting that Ge decided to keep the interaction between the people and their instruments. Overall, his works are innovative and pioneering.

Carly Sacco – Looking Outwards – 10

LINES by Anders Lind.

LINES is an interactive sound art exhibit by Anders Lind that allows users to make music by moving their hands and feet over lines. The lines are paired with sensors and electronics to create the sounds of three different instruments. It works by distance sensors that are connected to an arduino board on a mac mini. The signals from users hands are then translated from distance to sound. Lind created LINES to allow people to experience a new form of musical interactions and experiences. 

I admire that this project has a direct correlation between human interaction and the sound produced. People can work together, or participate alone and the results will always be different based on how the people move their hands. I thought it was very interesting how Lind even incorporated the lines on the floor too to create more possibilities of interaction.

  • A group of people interacting with the exhibit.
  • Lind doing the exhibit solo.

Xu Xu – Looking Outwards – 10

For this week’s looking outwards, I decided to focus on an algorithmic sound art called “I am sitting in a machine” by Martin Backes. The work first begins with a recording of an artificial human voice reciting a text, which is run through an MP3 encoder over and over again. Through each iteration of the loop, the artifacts of the encoding process reinforce themselves and gradually distorts the artificial human voice, thus revealing its data format. This piece of work is a homage to composer Alvin Lucier’s sound art piece “I am sitting in a room” in 1969, but in a computational way. “I am sitting in a room” features similar ideas, where an recording is played over and over again, due to the emphasis of certain frequencies in the room, slowly the words become unintelligible, replaced by the pure resonant harmonies and tones of the room itself.

Alvin Lucier’s work explores the physical properties of sound, the resonance of spaces and the transmission of sound through physical media; whereas Backes’ work is more about digitized information and its artifacts, hearing science and telecommunications. He wanted to show how digitized information produces unexpected phenomena the same way physical environments do. He explains how he achieved this phenomena through computational techniques: “I have rewritten the original lyrics from the perspective of a machine. As a next step, I used the artificial human voice of a text-to-speech function and recorded the text via a script. I then wrote another script and ran the recording into a MP3 encoder automatically, over and over again. By the help of this recursive algorithm, I produced 3000 successive iterations of the 128 kbps 44.1 kHz MP3 encoding.”

I admire this project because it creates a connection between the computational and physical world, revealing that similar phenomena are able to occur in both situations. There is also a web version of this sound art online: I am sitting in a machine

Xiaoyu Kang – Looking Outwards – 10

The project that I looked at is named Data Peluda. It is a performance done by Jorge Chikiar and Luis Conde at Roseti in Buenos Aires, on August 11, 2017. Jorge Chikiar is a composer and sound artist from Argentina. He has worked at many places such as Colon Theater, CETC, and Michell  Maccarone’s Art Gallery. He has been experimenting with different ways to present music for many years, and many of his project involves the use of different kinds of computer technologies.

This performance itself used a combination of saxophone and computer technologies. The music that the audience heard is the sound of the saxophone modified electronically by the computer. The processed sound turns out to be a combination of classic instrumental music and contemporary music. The most impressive part of this performance is that the music is produced live, which means that the process of modifying the saxophone music happened at the same time as the saxophone is played. I found this to be a great example of how computers are used in live music performances.

Monica Chang – Looking Outwards – 10

MI-MU Gloves

by Imogen Heap

Anatomy of a Mi-Mu Glove: Communication over Wifi
Anatomy of a Mi-Mu Glove: Breathable palm designed for the stage
Anatomy of a Mi-Mu Glove: Change Batteries between soundcheck and the show
Anatomy of a Mi-Mu Glove: Vibration Motor for Haptic Feedback
Anatomy of a Mi-Mu Glove: Flex Sensors Measure bend of the fingers

I first discovered the Mi-Mu Glove through a participating music artist: Ariana Grande. As I have been a fan of her music for a long time, I became aware of this new, technological way of expressing and performing music through movement of the performer during Ariana Grande’s tour in 2015.

  • PYANOOK, a pianist and composer.
  • Ariana Grande, singer

These gloves, however, were created by an award-winning musician and technology innovator, Imogen Heap. With these gloves, a wide variety of musicians have explored different ways of performing. For instance, artists such as vocalists, classical pianists, pop artists, beat boxers, and guitarists participated in the earlier versions of these gloves since they were released in the year 2010.

Once Heap began collaborating with a range of musical artists, the MiMu design team began to expand with engineers, designers, and artists specializing in software, textiles, electronics, sensors, UX/UI and music! With this team and these gloves, she continues her search for a relationship between music software and hardware as a musical tool.

Steven Fei-Looking Outwards 10-Sound Art


Bridging a connection between music and digital art, computational tools have created a new genre – the sound art.

Inspired by the heritage of the Polish Radio Experimental Studio, a project called Apparatum is born. Written with javascript, the designer panGenerator takes advantage of the digital interface that emits purely analogue sound. Based on magnetic tape and optical components controlled via graphic score composed with a digital interface, the user is able to flexibly produce sounds from various levels and both graphically and musically invent a symphony of electronic music.

Meanwhile, the physical form of the equipment is designed in the modular fashion inside two steel frames. the 2 tape loopers, optical generators producing sinusoidal tones and noise generators are all presented in a more visual way for the user to have a direct understanding of how and what they are manipulating certain aspects of the sound. The most inspiring feature of the project is its human interaction program. the printout of the user graphical score with the link to the mp3 file of the recording gives the user a much clearer and easier understanding of the sound art and how they are able to control and play with the sound levels, amplitudes, frequencies, noise, and pitches. The artistic sensibility is manifested both in its acoustic flexibility and the visual appearance and the recordings of the varaiations of all the variables that the users are playing with. The project attracts and enlightens me to have more variables for user to control and to design a clear and elegant-looking appearance of the program to arouse the interests of the audience.

The elegant physical appearance of the sound art equipment

Click here to visit the report about the project

Click here to view the Apparatum Project