LookingOutwards-10

LO 10 – Computer Music

*“Chapter 1: The Discovery”, Felix Luque Sanchez, 2009*

“Chapter 1: The Discovery” is a responsive light-sound object created by Felix Luque Sanchez in 2009. This installation consists of a sculpture representing an unidentified object in the shape of a dodecahedron and a number of videos re-staging the moment of its discovery.

With different perceptions conveyed in different rooms, this piece causes the audience to question the truthfulness of what is shown. In short, it outlines a journey from the initial visioning of a series of videos with synthetic images, and eventually ends up in a physical encounter with an interactive object that co-opts information flows, sound and light transmission. More specifically, this piece dramatizes a fiction on the discovery of the dodecahedron, as if it were a scene from a science-fiction movie, where the tension lies in the encounter of the character with an unknown, alien figure.

Through the sculpture’s response to presence, the audience can detect a will to communicate as well as some sort of simplicity in generating apparently complex behaviors. This project renews an “age-old cultural groundbase, questioning the limits of our notions of artificial intelligence and cutting across our collective imaginary of science fiction.

For a more in-depth look into the project and its experience, check out this video below!

LO – 10 Computational Music

Endel by Oleg Stavitsky

Endel (CEO and co-founder Oleg Stavitsky) is a generative music app that creates sound based on the user’s environment. The app pulls data from the user’s phone including the weather, heart rate, physical activity rate, GPS location, and circadian rhythms to create personalized soundscapes (ex. Gentle music for sleeping, studying, and relaxing) by adjusting the sonic output to match user activity. It can siphon heart-rate from your smartwatch and create a beat to match your pulse and footsteps. I think this app is extremely powerful in that it has been used to aid in ADHD, insomnia, and tinnitus by curating relaxing and peaceful personalized music. It never creates two compositions that sound the same—I almost want to download it and try the app out myself!

Review: Endel – an app for fine-tuning your mind - TapSmart

Endel App - Personalized sounds | UI Sources

Andrew id: heyingw

The Reverse Sessions,Tarek Atoui (2014)

The artist built 10 unconventional instruments including horns and tea-cups and used them to give a performance. Atoui invited a group of instrument makers and composers to improvise with them. The performance was very energetic and inspiring.

I really like how the artist reversed the order in which instruments are usually made. He collected sounds of a series of ethnic musical instruments and collaborated with the instrument makers and composers to recreate the objects that they believed to be producing these sounds. I think this is an imaginative and unconventional approach to the creation of sound and music: With the audio already established, it was the artist’s job to figure out the source of the sound. It provided the artist with great possibilities and freedom to make something experimental.

The outcomes were completely out of the audience’s expectations. The piece followed genesis of sound making and employed some mechanism create Atoui’s makeshift instruments. The piece demonstrated another attempt of the artist to explore how people perceive and sense sounds.

Looking Outwards : 10

Weather Thingy by Adrien Kaeser is a project that uses a sound controller that takes weather and climate events and then modifies them into musical notes and the sounds they make.

This real time instrument is made up of two parts, a weather station on a tripod microphone and a custom built controller connected to the weather station. The controller has sensors that collect data from the climate it is in and the controller interprets the data to create different sounds. The machine can collect sophisticated weather data by means of a rain gauge, a wind vane and an anemometer. The user then uses the interface to choose what sensor he is working with and uses a potentiometer to modify the data and create different sounds.

I found this project particularly interesting because of its presence in real time and its ability to act as a diary. It is also possible to use the device in the studio by pre-recording the climate data of a certain place at a certain time. This allows the musicians to capture moments that he/she have found inspiring to create new melodies. I can see the potential of using this to study climate change and begin to review the effects over time.

LO 10 – Computer Music

Cymatics

Nigel Stanford

For my Looking Outwards post, I will be talking about a sound visualization project done by Nigel Stanford. For his latest music video for Cymatics, Stanford decided to use various methods of visualizing sound through natural materials, demonstrating how sound waves affect different types of matter. He uses instruments and computation to effectively convert the sound to waves that can be demonstrated physically. I admire this project because the main focus was creating the visuals of sound: “I looked for interesting science experiments that showed how sound waves affect things, figured out what looked good, and then wrote the musical parts for each experiment” (Stanford). Not only is he using his creativity for his music, but also pushes himself to visualize sound, which allows for a whole new experience for the viewer.

View his portfolio here

View the video here

LO -10

My Sound Art blog post mainly focused on music so this week I will be focusing on sound art.
The piece I chose is an audiovisual art installation titled Meandering River. This piece premired in Berlin in 2018. The installation is comprised of visuals generated in real-time as well as music that was composed by an A.I.
The piece illustrates the movement of rivers through visuals and sound representing the rivers impact on earth.
I was attracted to this piece due to the unique interpretation of movement. The visuals are stunning and the concept is very intriguing. The piece emphasizes the beauty of nature and leaves the viewer with a sense of appreciation and harmony.

LookingOutwards-10

The Stanford Mobile Phone Orchestra (MoPhO) is an innovative ensemble that explores social music-making using mobile devices, instantiated in 2007, directed by Ge Wang.

This project takes advantage of existing technologies and turns them into personal musical instruments. People on the internet could also add sound to existing music.

I admire how this project affords new possibilities for us to be expressive in the field of music creation. In the past, only those who received special training could play certain instruments, but with MoPhO, anyone interested in music could easily express themselves musically with available devices. For example, one of the instrument it could mimic is the ancient flute. By simply blowing into the microphone, the sensor embedded in the phone could detect the strength of your sound and synthesizing the sound according to where the fingers are pressing on the screen interface. This changes the way humans think about making music and the approach they use.

Looking Outwards 10

A project in the area of computational music that I find interesting is “The Holophone (2015)” by Daniel Iglesia. “The Holophone” is a digital instrument that generates music and projects three-dimensional animations in response to inputs on its interface. The projected animations are abstracts and are in sync with the music generated. The animations can be viewed in 3D if one wears 3d glasses. The instrument generates sounds based off of tactile inputs on the screen or vocal inputs. I assume that “the Holophone” has algorithms that generate sounds based off of different paramaters define by the tactile inputs. There is most likely a slider for the bpm, time signature, key, etc. Additionally, “the Holophone” must have an algorithm that listens and records the vocal inputs and converts it into MIDI to imitate it. The artist intended to create an instrument that creates sound and three-dimensional shapes, and while “the Holophone” merely produces projections that appear three-dimensional when viewed with 3D glasses, I think the result is accurate to the artist’s vision.

Looking outwards 10 computer music

Pixelh8 is a well known musician and digital music researcher that really pioneered the digital music field early in the 2000’s developing a software calle dMusic tech for the nintendo gameboy and the Game Boy Advance as well as the Nintendo DS, which turned the gaming consoles in to real time synthesizers similar to the ones electronic musicians use now on live stages. What’s interesting about Chipwave is that it has evolved into a subgenre of electronic music with a group of passionate followers that delve deep into modding and making music out of early digital devices such as a Gameboy or NES. This type of music is characterized by their synthetic sounds we often associate with electronics. What’s important about their work is that it really gives us an opportunity to look into a piece of living computational history. A look into what it was like when computational music was just begining to become a thing.

Youtube user JustinThursday demo-ing Music Tech on the original GameBoy

Looking Outwards 10

Since my LO-4 assignment focused on a form of sound art, I chose the option to investigate a piece of music that you could hear in a concert hall. Which in this case, actually took place in one. I was drawn to this project because it wasn’t just auditory, but also a beautiful visual experience as well. The Stanford Laptop Orchestra used SLork musical lanterns that communicate with ChucK via wifi to translate the movements of the lanterns into sound and light.

The musical performance was called “Aura” since they used multiple people with different light color and sounds that harmonized with one another in a similar way that people do in society. I thought it was a very clever and interesting way to create music through movement.