Everyday Listening

Music for Forgotten Places

Hugo Verweij — Sat, 18 May 2013 13:26:43 +0000

Wandering around a city we might encounter these forgotten places - a vacant lot, an old ruin, a building no one lives in anymore. These spots always fascinate me, make me fantasize about their history and former inhabitants. Inspired by their mystique, Oliver Blank composed pieces of music for them - Music for Forgotten Places.

Visitors and residents can call a phone number found on a sign at the forgotten place they pass, and listen to its music. A mindful moment in a busy city. The project is created in Coruña, Spain, but Oliver will visit cities across the world to discover and compose for their forgotten places as well.

Find out more and listen to a piece of music at musicforforgottenplaces.com.

3845 m/s

Hugo Verweij — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 20:56:17 +0000

Korinsky Studio consists of Abel, Carlo and Max Korinsky. They mainly focus on their shared passion: exploring the possibilities of using sound in vertical surfaces. 3845 m/s is their newest installation using their own software, in a former coal power plant in Berlin. See the Korinsky Studio website for more information about their work.

Volumen Sintetico

Hugo Verweij — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 16:57:20 +0000

We all know those white earphones can get pretty loud. And when they do, many times it’s not just the listener who enjoys the music, it’s the whole bus or train. So why not make use of this and create a piece of sound art made with 1629 of them? It’s called Volumen Sintetico and it’s created by Chilean artist Ariel Bustamante.

The earphones are embedded in a 180 cm wooden ‘antenna’. Its parabolic form creates a sonic hotspot right in front of the installation, and the composition played in the movie below is created using abstract sounds, designed to make use of the rooms’ resonant features. Volumen Sintetico deliberately translates personal audio to the public space.

Orchestra Da Camera

Hugo Verweij — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 20:41:16 +0000

We’ve seen work of the Quiet Ensemble before. Now I don’t like the use of animals in art installations, but the mice in Orchestra Da Camera seem to have quite some space, and while they run around they can play a lullaby by Brahms, Schubert or Mozart.

Visit the Quiet Ensemble website to have a look at more of their work.

DrumTime & the perfect metronome sound

Hugo Verweij — Sat, 02 Feb 2013 13:38:03 +0000

Most sound designers probably won’t get very excited when they’re asked to create a metronome sound. No sticking microphones onto fancy cars to record their roaring engines, no impressive out-of-this-world explosions. But I guarantee you, that metronome sound will reach the listeners ears many times more than those sound effects! After I started selling minimalist ringtones over 1.5 year ago, I started focusing my sound design on simplicity and effectiveness. From that perspective, creating the perfect metronome sound for the newly released app DrumTime offers a nice challenge.

DrumTime is a Mac App created by Siemen and Felix of badRabbit, a small startup located in Amsterdam. It connects to MIDI enabled percussion devices (electronic drum kits, drum modules), analyzes a drummer’s input and gives visual cues about the timing. The metronome is flexible - it can be set to every beat, or less if the drummer is getting more confident and needs less guidance.

The design of a metronome sound to be used with drums only comes with a few requirements to keep in mind:

There should be the least interference with the sound of the drums as possible. The sound should not get masked by whatever the drummer is playing;
This means a broad spectrum has to be present in the sound - a drum kit covers a large part of the sonic spectrum and its sounds contain a fair amount of noise;
That said, the sound should still be pleasant to listen to during an extended practice session. So it’s all about finding the right balance between loud, clear and present on one hand and subtle and pleasant on the other;
There should also be a clearly distinguishable tone in the sound, so the first beat can be indicated with a higher pitch. This might not sound like a problem, but while focusing on the other requirements it is easy to forget about the tonal aspect of it.

With this in mind I started working on some examples which could be tested in the app. After a pre-selection three sounds were chosen, of which finally one proved to work best during ‘field trials’ with drummers. I received feedback like “good frequency spread but muffled, it lacks tone. Hurts a bit when played loudly”, or “during the sound the glass tone sweeps down a bit, it sounds wacky to us”. After some more testing it was the wacky one which got revised and made it to the app. You can get an impression of it in the introductory video below, and you can read more about the app on the DrumTime website.

FS/Partial

Hugo Verweij — Wed, 30 Jan 2013 20:39:34 +0000

Teaching Music Technology brings back additive synthesis, year by year. For some students the concept of every harmonic sound being a multitude of frequencies is hard to grasp. Visualizing it is always a good way of crarifying things. FS/Partial would come in handy during those lessons.

FS/Partial is an instrument created by Dogo Tudela and is meant as a visual way to perform additive synthesis in live contexts. Eight partials can be controlled by the user, by pushing the columns up and down, increasing and decreasing the volume of the sine waves:

SPINE

Hugo Verweij — Sat, 12 Jan 2013 17:32:14 +0000

It’s like the building comes alive, it moves and shivers and moans. This is caused by SPINE, and interactive installation consisting of twenty glowing cubes which move around in fluid motions. The sounds you hear, as well as the movement of the cubes, is influenced by visitors who come nearby.

SPINE was created by Kollision, a Danish ‘design office’, and was displayed during the Media Architecture Biennale 2012 in Aarhus, Denmark.

WOW

Hugo Verweij — Mon, 19 Nov 2012 18:49:24 +0000

The Mother, called MOM.

Isn’t it smart to call you project ‘WOW’? Everyone using this as the title will look impressed. You know I like my things simple. The Cleartones project is a good example of this. But WOW, created by Carl Schilde, takes minimalism to the next level. It’s a vinyl record with just one sine tone. You can change the pitch of the tone yourself though, by switching your turntable from 33.3 rpm (a tone of, indeed, 33.3 Hz) to 45 rpm. The groove of the sine wave creates a nice visible pattern on the vinyl.

So why would you want to play a record like this? I like the way they describe how the record will bring up the little imperfections of your record player. Each needle and each tone arm will sound different. You will hear wow and flutter, and WOW will shake the whole building when you turn up the volume. You can read more about WOW and order one of the records (priced at €33.33) on wow.heavylistening.com. Is this the thing you’ve wished for all your life? Then why not forget about that brand new car and spend €33,333.33 on the silver master record of WOW, called MOM (pictured above).

Forgotten Songs

Hugo Verweij — Sun, 04 Nov 2012 21:02:44 +0000

When I first saw Forgotten Songs by Michael Thomas Hill, I was struck by the beauty of the image. Watching all those empty bird-cages hanging over the street I automatically start hearing the sound of birds in my head, even though it isn’t there. The image is so strong, the installation doesn’t need sound. I was slightly disappointed when I found out the artist doesn’t leave it up to our imagination - it actually does make sound.

There is a message though: the fifty birds that can be heard in this installation in Sidney, used to live there. But habitat loss is credited as the biggest threat to bird survival. The birds that can be heard in Forgotten Songs were forced out of the city by European settlers. At night, the sounds change to those of nocturnal birds.

Via My Modern Met

Dyskograf

Hugo Verweij — Sat, 27 Oct 2012 14:39:02 +0000

Dyskograf is like a turntable, but this time you can draw the record yourself. OK - you cannot actually create a song, but a loop of electronic music. It’s like a circular step sequencer with a nostalgic appearance, as it bridges the gap between virtual instruments and the tactile way of writing music with pen on paper. The audible result is not all that inspiring, but it sure looks good.

A camera reads the information drawn on Dyskograf’s paper disks and transfers the information to the software which plays the sound. The installation is created by French new media collective Avoka. Will this make you more creative, or is it just a good looking toy? Watch the video to see Dyskograf in action:

Via The Verge