Sonikebana is a long-form composition / sound installation featuring sounds of the local area where the project is shown. Six custom-designed speakers on wheels with on-board computers and sensors manipulate the sounds every time a speaker is moved.

The mp3 file below is a virtualisation of the installation made with recordings taken from Edinburgh’s Meadows as part of the citysounds.eu project, hosted by New Media Scotland at St Cecilia’s Hall in April 2018. Sound from each speaker box has been captured and mixed for playback on headphones.

Further details

Sonikebana is an installation or long-form composition that is transformed and shaped by listeners as it happens. Six boxes on wheels each contain a small computer, amplifier, speakers, battery and a compass sensor. Playing through the boxes are sounds recorded in and around the local area where the installation is shown. In the case of the sound file above, it’s the Edinburgh Meadows. As you move the boxes around, the sounds change. If you discovered positions that you like, sit back, lie down, relax and wait for others to shift things. If you want to make a change, intervene.

Sonikebana gets its name from the Japanese art of flower arranging known as Ikebana. Etymologically Ikebana comes from ikeru which can mean ‘keep alive’, whilst hana is flower. The idea of keeping something alive that’s been harvested for its aesthetic value is a key idea that I kept coming back to when designing the sound processing for this project.

The surfaces of the speakers have been laser-etched with drawings and fragments of text by artist Anna Chapman Parker. The drawings are derived from a series of ink drawings, Too evergreen to answer, inspired by a reading of an Alice Oswald poem.

If you’re interested in hosting Sonikebana…

Please get in touch with me at mp@tinpark.com to discuss.

The installation is portable and the boxes can be flat packed and moved in a car, by train or couriered. To make the best of the local sounds I can come the day before the opening to make these and embed them into the project. It should be possible to do this even on the day of the opening if the opening happens in the evening. More time exploring the area will reveal a more unique and diverse set of sounds to work with.

With more advance planning and funding, I can run engagement workshops with school children or other groups. We can make recordings and sound walks together and it is possible to feature some of these recordings in the installation.

Sonically, the piece is atmospheric and peaceful. The speakers aren’t too loud and therefore audience-listener-performers can get close to the speakers, developing relationships with how the speakers react.

The installation works well in spaces ranging between approximately 6-18msq. The floor material has a sonic effect on the installation too. Wooden floors, hard carpets, linoleum work well. Bumpy/industrial floors like rough concrete work less well, but alternativel wheels can be fitted to the boxes to account for this.

For openings with larger audiences, a sound system can be brought in to augment the sound playing from the boxes.

Acknowledgements

Photos above by Anna Chapman Parker

Project originally funded and developed as part of City Sounds, an Organicity grant hosted at the University of Edinburgh.

Michael Edwards mastered this room recording of Lapslap’s concert in Bologna (7th May, 2013).
This was part of the 2013 MaskFest, a New Music festival organised by Nicola Baroni.
I’m playing an electronics-only improv setup with multitouch graphics tablet, mics, a faderfox and a footpedal. Karin is playing piano and Michael augmented sax. I’m sampling both the sax and piano and playing a synth controlled by the graphics tablet.

Thanks Nicola, thanks Michael.

holding sound is a project I’ve been developing since November 2011. It is based on the idea that sound itself can be used as an interface to drive reactions from a computer. Importantly these are controlled by a very limited sound generating instrument – a pair of glass jars.

The title relates to two ideas. The first is that given the jars should be large enough to hold and the microphones are placed inside them, you’re literally holding the sound in your hands as you play. By changing how much you cover the tops of the jars with your palms, you can directly control the frequencies of the feedback in the system. The second idea relates to the quality of music itself. As a multichannel piece, scalable to any number of loudspeakers, the sounds rove around the room – this movement is linked to the amplitude and frequency of the sound that is made by the jars. As I play, I have the feeling that I can freeze the sound into the room if I can discipline myself to stay still for long enough.

I have performed this on several occasions, firstly in Edinburgh in November 2011 at the Soundings Festival, again in Prague in December 2011 (AXA in action), then more recently at Keele University on the 31st October 2012 and again in Dundee at Generator Projects on the 12th November as part of Catherine Street’s Continuum project.

Below is a recording I made of the Dundee performance with an excruciating amount of reverberation added in post. This is a temporary mix that I may replace with the next performance of the piece at the Surrounded Festival in Munich later this month. Enjoy!

Performing in Pargue, December 2011, photo from here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/moje_moje/6461977761/in/photostream/

In June 2012, I had the great pleasure of working with Nick Fells rehearsing and developing a performance we would give in Munich in November 2012 as part of the Surrounded Festival.

During this period of development time, we attempted the combination of some of our existing instruments, feeding the sound from one of my toys directly into one of Nick’s and then back again. This 15 minute, one-shot improvisation is representative of the sounds we came up with one afternoon when I sent sounds from my graphics-tablet driven virtual cello tool into Nick’s delicate sound-fragger developed for his piece “Arine”.

Viola da Gamba Edition – premiere performance, Bangor, North Wales, 8900 gunts, Mark Summers, viola da gamba

Flute Edition – workshop run, 15000 Grunts, Anne La Berge, flute

Granita is Lapslap’s fourth release on Leo Records. You can get a copy here; http://www.leorecords.com/?m=select&id=CD_LR_636

Due to the goals we had and the approach we took, Granita took over a year to produce. A single piece of music lasting one hour, it was made to be listened to in one sitting.

The CD is composed from several long improvisations which, contrary to our prior recording practice, were never intended to be complete pieces by themselves. It was our conscious intention whilst recording that we lay down material to be combined with, or placed against, other improvisations. The compositional form was made in post-production then, even though all elements were improvised live and made together as a trio.

Granita was recorded by Michael and Martin in the Reid Concert Hall, Edinburgh, in September 2010. Mixing and mastering was also by Michael and Martin. Compositional form by Michael Edwards, cover design by Karin Schistek.

Here is an extract of the opening;

I just spent an exciting morning making noise with ace-clarinettist Peter Furniss. We were preparing the bass clarinet edition of GruntCount.

Pete is an extremely willing improviser so it was very easy to stretch the system and get some new, filthy settings for our concert in the Reid Concert Hall on the 13th March 2012.

The computer processing in GruntCount is fairly gritty (one of the reasons for its title) and this seems to work very well with the rich colours Pete can produce. The way we worked this morning was to take each voice of the processing system in turn and establish a series of settings that we thought worked well. We also got as far as finding some mixes of the different voices and parameters but have still to find a musical structure that makes sense of the wide variety of sounds that Peter can produce in combination with the software.
One of the features of GruntCount is that it can be scaled to fit different contexts. Depending upon what else is in the programme, it can be a long blow, full of atmosphere and tension, or it can be more flamboyant and short. As we’re preparing this for a concert featuring Stravinsky, Musgrave, Reich and a recent piece by Alex Harker called Fluence, we’re going for something in between the two. We’re hoping to give the audience’s ears a bit of a blast but should also show some of the reactive twists and turns the electronics can take.

The concert is a University lunchtime event, starting at 1:10pm in the Reid Concert Hall, the gig is free.

Here’s a rough snippet or two from the system as it sounds today (20th Jan 2012);

http://www.tinpark.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/Extract_02.mp3

http://www.tinpark.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/Extract_03.mp3

Please note, these are rough mixes from a draft session, certainly not the finished piece as you’ll hear it in concert.

02 – Crail Harbor
The sleepy village of Crail boasts a peaceful and atmospheric harbor with a view out across the Forth that looks towards the Isle of May. Crail is the furthest East of the Neuk’s fishing towns and therefore the view from the harbor also reaches out beyond the confines of the wash of the Firth of Forth. This far edge of the Neuk is exposed to Denmark, the Netherlands and Southern Norway as well as the Bass Rock and North Berwick. It is from this view that sounds collected from the sea shore take you out across the ocean towards unknown places on an unknown ship. This slow, drone-based piece regards the sea as a powerfully mysterious, inhospitable and possibly frightening place, its otherness and relentlessness reflected in the sounds of processed Chinese percussion samples. The music should leave you with space to hear the sounds of wind and sea through your headphones, listening at louder levels may mask the presence of the environment you are in though. Your ship drops you back on the harbor side to the accompaniment of digital rain and a distant defensive arctic tern.

Taking Sean Williams, Owen Green and Lauren Hayes to STEIM for a week of orientation and introduction to what’s going on there.

Here is a link to our blogs; http://steim.org/projectblog/.

Links to some of our late night studio 2 improvisations are below:

Ode to Sextant
Have we started yet?
Master System
Short, Sweet
Beetles and Chips
TVmovie
Frittata
Grimula
Long and Boring
Jurassic Parker (Vocal Mix)
LateLurpak
Chit Chat
VeeSeeEss
Smerge

http://sd.caad.ed.ac.uk/tinpark/media/sound/tripleMurder.mp3

Ein Klang records kindly invited me to remix some of their catalogue to celebrate 10 years of the label’s releases. The title should be fairly self explanatory, I did irreversible damage to three tracks from disc 2 of the 7th forum release. Apologies to those involved in tracks 1, 6 and 12.

http://www.einklangrecords.com/remix/remix.htm

If you want a multichannel surround version of this file, let me know.

This is a second and completely different performance of my project for drum pads, gel loudspeakers and room. This was performed in completely different circumstances to the first performance at Concept Space.

The piece starts with Alan Johnston drawing on the wall right next to a pair of DPA microphones. My sounds slowly emerge around the audience amongst the ambience of the campus as it slowly draws in for an evening of autumnal celebration.

The performance took place in a small gallery on the campus of the Zakei University of Art & Design in Nagoya.

Below is an image of the setup I performed with.

A live performance at the Concept Space gallery in Gunma, Japan using drum pads, gel loudspeakers and the resonant frequencies of the room.
This project was developed in collaboration with artist Alan Johnston who invited me to join him on his trip to several galleries in Japan where he produced a series of wall drawings.

In response to Alan’s well defined shapes, scratched onto the walls of the space using pencil, I placed small Gel-Based loudspeakers on the walls of the room.  These loudspeakers are very special.  They are designed to be attached to almost any flat surface.  Once connected, they make that surface resonate turning the entire surface into a resonating body (or loudspeaker).

Using measurements of the room, I devise rhythmic patterns and frequencies that emerge from the walls in 6 channels around a seated audience.

The performance above took place on October the 8th at the Concept Space gallery in Gunma, Shibukawa, Japan.

Beginner Drummer is a project that started in July 2008.  It is a live performance for midi drum pads and the sound of the pads themselves.

Grab

Oboe, Bass Clarinet, Percussion and Computer.
The score, parts for performance and software are available from sumtone.com | http://sumtone.com/work.php?workid=193

written for New Noise London in March 2008.

Premiere performances:
Purcell Rooms, London
The Bluecoat, Liverpool
Djanogly Recital Hall, Nottingham

Reviews of Grab

…Grab, by Martin Parker, was the highpoint. Scored for oboe, bass clarinet, percussion and computer, the trio effectively became a sextet, with the computer semi-randomly sampling and manipulating each instrumentalist’s contribution to create another three voices… producing some disturbing dialogue reminiscent of passages from Berio’s Visage.  The work gave the flesh-and-blood performers a chance to shine – Burgess in particular let his hair down with some excellent solos – a highly effective and enjoyable piece performed with considerable flair.

David Bignell, Classical Source, May 2008

Martin Parker’s Grab employs a live computer-generated shadow of the oboe, bass clarinet and percussion trio, which is triggered by the on-stage performers, growing Hydra-like until it threatens to utterly overwhelm them. This simple arc is made much more interesting by the complexity of the live music the performers are required to play, even as the rich details of their efforts are obliterated by the computer. The drama was in the palpable sense of waste and futility as performing skill and commitment was digitised and then redeployed against itself.’

Tim Rutherford-Johnson, Musical Pointers, May 2008

Martin Parker’s Grab, receiving its world premiere this evening, was one of the highlights of the concert.  With an exciting interplay between the live elements and electronics, the bass clarinet provided a lovely timbral variety to the oboe sound and the two complimented each other very well.
The percussion held all the disparate elements together and served as the main driving force for the work.  This was an exciting and dramatic work, which was given a highly convincing first performance.  I have no doubt that this will become a part of the core repertoire for this combination of instruments, and I look forward to hearing more from Parker in the future.
Carla Rees, Seen and Heard, May 2008

Accompanied by maracas, Steve Reich’s Four Organs took a dominant chord on an epic sleigh-ride. Kreuzspiel, for oboe, bass clarinet, piano and percussion, reflected Karl-Heinz Stockhausen at the start of his maverick career.  Thanks to computer resources, a trio became a dramatic sextet in Martin Parker’s Grab, the evening’s other new work.  Electronics helped to conjure the muted sounds of Pedro Gomez Egana’s recent Clark Nova, as well as the magic of Dennehy’s exploits in overtones.’
Peter Palmer, Nottingham Evening Post, May 2008

free improvisation ensemble with computers and instruments

not cheddar but from itch, July 2008

lapslap is a free improvisation trio with Michael Edwards, Karin Schistek and me.

Together we make well formed music in real-time with computers and instruments.
We’ve released two records on Leo Records so far; itch and scratch.
Check us out at www.lapslap.net

Martin Parker, Michael Edwards and Karin Schistek recording in September 2007

The extract above is a theme I developed for Helen of Troy as she slowly parades herself in-front of the broken Hecuba and war-weary Menelaus.

This was a commission from Theatre Cryptic to generate real-time visuals and sound/music for a version of Brendan Keneally’s adaptation of Euripides’ Trojan Women in 2005. The work was premiered at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in August 2005 and toured Scotland between September and November 2005.

My approach involved developing a continuous soundscape that was played by computer and distributed to a 5.1 surround system.  The computer part was performed by an operator (Angelica Kroeger) who learned to play the piece extremely well.  Live sound from the virtual chorus (Katie Dickie and Itxaso Moren) was converted into spectral data that windowed a processed choir of distant female voices.  These effects and other sounds were combined with a series of tracks that were brought into and out of focus by Angelica as she followed the emotional trajectory of the narrative.

Myra McFadyen as Hecuba
Kate Dickie as Andromache
Itxaso Moreno as Cassandra
Candice Edmunds as Helen
Keith Macpherson as Talthybius and Menelaus

Direction by Cathie Boyd
Design by Julia Bardsley
Lighting by Giuseppe di lorio
Sound design, composition and real time visuals by Martin Parker

Auto-route starts off with a live sound source, what follows is an automated response to the sound and information about that sound.  The response continues to eat itself until the concert organisers turn the machine off, the computer crashes or the feedback loops inside the system result in silence or white noise.

This piece attempts to illustrate what arbitrary, non-sentient but controlled music can sound like.   The piece runs on terms defined by the computer itself, makes its own decisions based on criteria that it invents as time passes but that are based on data extracted from the live input. Like most improvisations, initial musical ideas are first considered but shortly after this period, the machine begins to explore material dynamically, chewing on its own matter, quickly becoming self-referential and eventually running out of energy or coruscating into maximal debris.

Auto Route has been performed in several incarnations. A version was made for the Glasgow-based video artist Rob Kennedy and performed at Machinista in Glasgow in 2004. Two other versions have been made and performed without the composer present; once on a tourist boat trip in Belfast as part of the Sonorities festival, the other was performed in Newcastle by Mark Summers (Viol) and the Palindrome dance company.

The recording presented here was generated from a Marais Fantasie performed by Mark Summers (Viol) for whom the piece was written.

The input source : Fantasie 41 by Marin Marais for solo viol performed by Mark Summers:

Steinmetzarbeiten (stone work) for Piano and sinfonia

http://sd.caad.ed.ac.uk/tinpark/media/sound/steinmetzarbeiten_extract.mp3

Extract performed by Edinburgh Contemporary Music Ensemble, conducted by James Lowe with Simon Smith piano, recorded by Sean Williams, Artefact Records.

The score, parts for performance and software are available from sumtone.com | http://sumtone.com/work.php?workid=239

Written in 1997 for the Yorkshire and Humberside Young Composer’s Competition and performed at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Steinmetzarbeiten won category A of this competition. It was first performed by Nicholas Hodges (piano) with the Athelas Ensemble. This piece was written after finding a limited edition print of Elizabeth Scherffig’s eight Steinmetzarbeiten drawings in a second-hand bookshop. Close-up viewing of the images shows evidence of a pencil that has always been moving, shifting constantly and perhaps effortlessly over the paper. This conveys movement, change, light and shade. Pulling back to view the image from a distance, the drawings are of slabs of stone, locked in dense and un-movable layers. This piece reflects a similar contradiction. The music appears to be perpetually on the move, trying to go somewhere but it is actually stuck; continually representing the same ascending scale.