SoundLAB - sonic art projects

edition04.k. m’scape 08

Enter – m’scape 08 – directly here

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m’scape VIII –
includes these artists—>

Kari Besharse (USA)
Hervé Constant (UK)
Lukas Fütterer (Germany)
Gintas K (Lithuania)
Francis Heery (Ireland)
Volker Hennes (Germany)
John Maxwell Hobbs (Sweden)
Meri von KleinSmid (USA)
Luigi Mastandrea (Italy)
Jenni Meredith (UK)
Robert Rudolf (Slovakia)

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  • Kari Besharse
  • artist biography

    Title:
    Ear to the Ground
    (2005-06), 4:16
    Ear to the Ground was originally composed for dancer/choreographer Jessica Ray. The work operates on idea of memory on several layers. On the surface, feelings of nostalgia are brought about through a Chopin piano piece, which I can remember my grandmother playing when I was a little girl. Below the surface however, the work approaches the imperfection of both organic memory and the unreliability of mechanical storage. In the human mind memories lose their clarity and eventually disappear. If we try and hold onto a memory through a storage medium such as a recording or a photograph, that too will eventually become corrupt and decay beyond recognition.

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  • Hervé Constant
  • artist biography

    Title:
    ‘DREAM’
    2006, 4:30

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  • Lukas Fütterer
  • artist biography
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    01 – a bug’s life isn’t coordinated – 00:01:37 – 2005
    02 – mapleallee 7 dub – 00:04:30 – 2005
    03 – ich gegen niemand – 00:02:39 – 2005

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  • Gintas K
  • artist biography

    Interview for SIP – SoundLAB Interview project

    Title:
    ring of the past , 2:44
    Track “ring of the past“ is done out of one rhythmical segment which sounds at the beginning of the track. That segment is modulated, reversed, granulated and shuffled in various ways.
    Imaginable “ring“ from which the track is done reminds me something from the passed life, from overpast history which keeps trying to remind me (us) something what never returns again. Track is done with audiomulch software.

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  • Francis Heery
  • artist biography

    Titles:
    1. Brownian Motion
    (2005), 4:07
    The title is inspired by the chaotic movement of pollen grains in liquid whose paths can be likened to the countless, seemingly chaotic lines of thought that are pursued on an hourly/ monthly/ yearly basis throughout one’s lifetime. The thoughts we entertain at this moment are directly linked to those that precede them and so in this sense they are intimately connected with all the thoughts we have ever had. Because of this we can view the almost infinite strands of thought that are present in our lives as, in truth, belonging to one super strand; existing as one thought whose root lies in the most distant past. The totality of this chain of psychic events, summed and viewed at once so to speak, will create a pseudo-random, seething mass of memories from which the image of one’s entire life will emerge. It is this chaos, contained within the form of ‘lived experience’ that is expressed in the piece.
    The work was composed using granular manipulation of short soundfiles using Csound.

    2. Comet
    (2006), 4:48
    This piece was inspired by the following poem by Dylan Thomas:
    Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night
    Do not go gentle into that good night,
    Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
    Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
    Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
    Because their words had forked no lightning they
    Do not go gentle into that good night.
    Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
    Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
    Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
    Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
    And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
    Do not go gentle into that good night.
    Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
    Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
    Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
    And you, my father, there on the sad height,
    Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
    Do not go gentle into that good night.
    Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

    The sounds were created by manipulating and processing a recording of a detuned electric guitar played with a biro.

    3. Deep Blue
    (2006), 4:19
    This is an algorithmic composition based on the chess moves made in the final game between Gary Kasparov and the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue in May 1997. Rows a to h on the chessboard were assigned to notes a1 to a2 with the columns 1 to 8 representing octaves. In this manner the coordinates for each move can be assigned a note. What is heard are alternately Deep Blue’s moves (the long sustained notes) and the Kasparov’s (the arpeggiated sequence). Each time a player’s move is represented what we hear is not only where the player has just moved to but also the notes corresponding to the positions of all the other pieces in play for that player. Each successive combination of notes acts as a memory imprint of all the moves of the pieces that remain for the player. Sounds such as paper ripping are used to designate the capture of a piece and the bell like sound midway through represents a check for Deep Blue.

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  • Volker Hennes
  • artist biography

    Titles:
    1. »Bury And Forget«
    2006, 4:04 min.
    Speech as a medium of communication is both an acoustic and a semantic phenomenon. Sound and sense constitute an intimate connection. As transmission of sense is impossible without the transmission of sound in speech, we automatically perceive meanings from
    the music behind the words [expression-parameters: tone, pitch, strength, modulation, tempo].
    The recording-performance »Bury And Forget« uses a famous speech of the annoying voice from 1934. The recorded speech is processed using pitch analysis and assigned to an oscillator in order to remove any semantic parts of the annoying voice. Even so the annoying voice is still identifiable. Due to penetration it is burned in our collective associative memory. Therefore it was buried.

    2. »Five Years Simultaneity«
    2006, 3:00 min.
    The range of attention is an intersubjective phenomenon that is temporally terminated. Our neural mechanisms limit the duration of perceptional integration to more or less three seconds.
    How long is the integration limit created by media-machinery? What is the average decay time of the importance of information? This piece uses a method of superimposing sound. Audio source is an original three-minutes-excerpt recorded from german television on 9th of september 2001. During the three minutes it is first containing the hole information, then it thins out until the end. The metrum of the piece relates to a three-second-grid of awareness and is supported by a short click.

    3. »218 Seconds Thunderstorm For Ernst Pöppel« 2005, 3:18 min.
    This experiment consists of four recordings of a thunderstorm, each sixtyfour times compressed. What happens to the rain, the birds, the wind and the thunder? A flag in the wind? A forest fire? Significant schizophonia.

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  • John Maxwell Hobbs
  • artist biography

    From the book:
    “In a review of his interactive online instrument, Web Phases, Kyle Gann of the Village Voice described it as being ‘on a noticeably higher artistic level’ than the earliest tape-music and computer-music pieces, concluding that ‘the potential for social reorientation is even more incredible,’ and predicting ‘we’ll look back and say 1998 was the year our relationship to music entered a new era.'”
    For much of the ’90s he was the Producing Director of The Kitchen in New York where he produced the work of Philip Glass, DJ Spooky, David Hykes and many others.
    He is the Vice President of the board of directors of Vanguard Visions, an organization founded by Lauren Dyer Amazeen dedicated to fostering the work of artists experimenting with technology and also served on the Digital Arts subcommittee of the Mayor’s Council on New Media in New York City. His interactive composition Web Phases was one of the winners of ASCI’s Digital ’98 competition. He has collaborated with artist/programmer Mark Napier on Ripple, an interactive musical instrument.

    Title:
    2005-12-17 (Remembering memory)
    2005, 4’35
    2005-12-17 is a piece from the Cinema Volta: Daily Ambience project. As an exploration of ambient music and the limits of my own creativity, I composed and released a new song each day for a year.Sometimes these songs were sketches, sometimes full-blown compositions, it all depended on my inspiration and my available time. This project began on 30 January, 2005 and ran for a year’s worth of songs.
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  • Meri von KleinSmid
  • artist biography

    Title:
    Ethereal Tether
    2003, 4’54”
    Ethereal Tether portrays importunate, anxiety-laden, and ultimately unresolved memories attached to a very peculiar mind. The piece incorporates, among other sounds, a Taiwanese soda can filled one-quarter with water, bird song, and the composer’s own voice. It was composed on paper and rendered with computer software.

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  • Luigi Mastandrea
  • artist biography

    Titles:
    1. Anniversary
    2006 6’34’’
    Inspired by the Chernobyl nuclear accident on its twentieth anniversary, this work wants to be an exploration of interaction between sound, historical events and the transformation of natural elements which intervenes in the nuclear process. Radiations, as sounds themselves, are invisible but like music, they affect our bodies. So I recreated with the use of several sinthetic sounds the physical and chemical process of the nuclear fission. The composition is also a way to remember the victims of a potentially unmanageable and illusory concept of human progress. The taped voices bring to our memory the victims and were recorded by the author with the help of the singer Carlo Bonarelli.

    2. Memotechnique
    2004/2005 7’11’’
    Inspired by the fourth part of Dario Jurilli’s Book of seasons, “Mémoire”. After Birth, Knowledge and Death, this moment resume through music, together with writing and painting/drawing, the human faculty of overcoming death, the end of a single life so as that of an historical period, the end of childhood so as that of a section of a piece of music…The work is therefore full of internal references which return periodically, but alway slightly changed.
    I used sounds that suggest childhood, like children’ voices; that remind the gesture of writing; the H-note and its repetition at the higher octave is a bachian symbolism which indicates life after death.

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  • Meredith, Jenni
  • artist biography

    Titles:
    1) Caesiumn 137
    2006, 38 seconds
    An audio text about the dark ‘memories’ that linger in the grass around Chernobyl. Like the caeusium 137 memories have a long half life.
    Created using MacinTalk, editing layers of captured TTS audio in Premiere, Sound Edit and Adacity

    2) Universal Simulacrum
    2000, 1 min. 39.5 seconds
    Textscape exploring ideas about virtual identities and digital memory_ ‘the universe reduced to digits spins between the clicks and taps…’
    Created using vsptured audio processed and edited on both Apple mac and Windows platforms using various sound editing applications.

    3) Grandad’s Sparkle
    2001, running time; 45 seconds
    Computer generated voices reciting texts about the history of computing. The line ‘iterative loops’ is derived from one of the first programming techniques as recognised by Ada, Countess of Lovelace, a colleague of Charles Babbage in the mid 1800s.
    The early machines, The Difference Engine and the Analytical Engine are the ancestors of today’s miniaturised laptops, hand helds and desktops; great grandfathers of the computers which create and perform these texts about their own family tree and the hstory of the new. This is digital memory translated to mean the memory of anthropomorphised digital devices.

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  • Robert Rudolf
  • artist biography

    Title:
    Memory Ex Machina
    (june 2006), 9’45”
    Memory Ex Machina is based on idea witch is to outline a portrait of a computer using the complete repertory of its hard disk memory. This piece is a short version of longer 32 min. project. The starting point, the complete text of the contents of the machine, which is rearranged, is put in music by the voices of the automatic computer reading. This revision of the contents of the memory evokes the “memories” of the machine. She seeks its “memories” by its own means, while being lost in the avalanche of information contained in its hard disk. It is at the same time an attempt to be detached from the identity of its Master and to find his own image by sorting the information contained in its memory. The sudden appearance of the traces of deleted memories disturbs the obstinate search for a proper hierarchy of information. A panic process supervenes, before the machine arrives at a result likely to be regarded as an accomplished task.

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