Cybraphon is happy with your tweets

Does your Facebook follower count or the amount of Twitter messages you receive influence your mood? It does for Cybraphon, an interactive sound installation by Edinburgh-based artist collective FOUND.

Cybraphon is like a mechanic band in a closet which plays everything between very sad and very happy music, depending on its ‘mood’. This mood is determined by things like Facebook friends, or website visitors.

Cybraphon is an interesting attempt to link the physical with the online world through music. It actually sounds quite nice! What I do miss is a live stream of some kind which shows the effect of the online activities.

Cybraphon will be unveiled at the Edinburgh Arts Festival today, 5 August 2009. Here are some demos of the music it plays:

Sound Walk: a human sequencer

The Sonar festival is over, but there are some more projects from the exhibition which are worth looking at. Like Sound Walk, a 'human sequencer' created by Julio Lucio with music written by Nikka. 

Visitors walk through the space to interact with the installation, creating the music as they move along. A projector creates the images on the floor, and while moving though the space, visitors get visual feedback as well, as the video clearly shows. 

Soundclusters 2: Robotic instruments

The very first post on Everyday Listening was about music making machines. And while we know these machines can't put a lot of expression in their music, they're really fascinating to watch. Somehow it's hard to disconnect the image of an instrument being played from the person playing it. 

Roland Olbeter created Soundclusters 2, a group of mechanical string instruments and a drum. Pneumatic and electro-mechanical actuators operate the strings, which are picked like a guitar by two pneumatic plectrums. 

The movie shown here is an older one, where the machines are playing Elena Kats-Chernins' Fast Blue Air. At the Sonar festival, which starts next thursday, Soundclusters 2 will play pieces composed by Jon Hopkins and Tim Exile.

Octachord: Hail to the sine wave

A long rope hangs from the ceiling in the main hall of the Utrecht University Museum. Connected to the rope are eight speakers, spreading sine waves over the stairs. Low frequencies come from the lower speakers while high frequencies come from those at the top of the sound installation. The natural reverb of the hall cause the frequencies to melt together.

Octachord is a sound installation created by Mark Thur and Simon Snel, students at the Utrecht School of Music and Technology. They used sine waves as building blocks for the ever-changing soundscape generated by the installation. Here’s a small example of the piece:

Octachord is a good example of how to create an installation for a specific architectural space and its properties. Being aware of the influence of a space on your creation and using this knowledge in the design of the work is very important and can lead to a great result.

Sonic Marshmallows: whisper to me

These Sonic Marshmallows, created by Troika, use sonic reflection and enable you to listen to the other side of the pond. They can transmit and receive a whispering voice over 60 meters without any amplification, using only their shape.

Apart from providing a quite spectacular experience, the Sonic Marshmallows are fun to look at as well. It seems like some giant aliens dropped their candy in the Wat Tyler Country Park in Basildon Essex.

Troika is a multi-disciplinary art and design practice founded in 2003 by Conny Freyer, Eva Rucki and Sebastien Noel, who met while studying at the Royal College of Art in London.

Bridge Music by Joseph Bertolozzi

We've already taken a look at the Singing Bizovik bridge and the abstract soundscape created from it, but Jodi Rose isn't the only one capturing the sound of bridges. Composer Joseph Bertolozzi recorded the sounds of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Bridge and used them to compose his music with for this site-specific sound installation. Bertolozzi used various mallets made of different materials to strike the metal surfaces of the bridge.

There are two listening stations on the bridge itself, and there's a 24/7 transmission on 95.3FM within the parks surrounding the bridge. 

Passage: a dynamic sound corridor

The idea of creating a ‘sound corridor’ is not new, I’ve heard about similar projects before, a buildings hallway seem like a suitable place for a sound installation. Things change all the time, people move up and down the corridor, creating an ever changing pattern for an artist to capture and use to generate or influence sounds.

You need a good technical system to capture these movements though, and that’s exactly what IRCAM created and and what Pierre Jodlowski uses for his dynamic sound corridor ‘Passage’. 16 sensors detect visitors movements. The information is sent to Max/MSP so the composer can use it to control his music.

You can experience this sound installation yourself at the Agora event in Paris: Monday, June 8 and Saturday, June 13, 1pm-6pm.

Voxstrumental at Futur en Seine festival

The Futur en Seine festival takes place in Paris this week. The festival shows interesting new technological experiments and futuristic products. Voxstrumental is a sound installation shown by Voxler, a development team focused on vocal interaction, mainly for the gaming industry.

There are four pipes connected to the Voxstrumental sound installation. Singing into one of the pipes triggers a musical sequence. The pitch of the music changes with the pitch of your voice. The microphones are able to capture multiple parameters of expression. Four people can play the sound installation at the same time, you'll have to listen to each other to make it sound good together. And if you do, the robot in the middle starts dancing happily!

Watch a short movie about this sound installation on the Futur en Seine blog.

The whole building is your instrument

It’s so inspiring to see people who don’t like to keep things moderate. Why not transform a whole building into an instrument? That’s what David Byrne did with his sound installation ‘Playing the Building’. Three types of sound inducing methods are used in the sound installation - wind, vibration and striking.

The devices attached to the building structure don’t make any sound themselves, they cause the building itself to generate the sounds.The installation is controlled from a conventional musical interface: the keyboard of an old organ. It seems like quite an experience to be able to influence the sound in a huge building using just one finger!

You can see Playing the Building this summer at the Roundhouse, London, 8 - 31 August 2009.

Hello World! by Christopher Baker

Hello World is an audio and video installation with the subtitle 'How I Learned to Stop Listening and Love the Noise'. Christopher Baker shows us an immense amount of personal video diaries played back at the same time, creating a cacophony of voices, sharing their secrets with an imagined massive audience.

The installation is "a meditation on the contemporary plight of democratic, participative media and the fundamental human desire to be heard". There is no way we can listen to every single person. I love the way the multi-channel sound composition sometimes focuses on individual speakers and sometimes plays everything at the same time, creating an immersive swarm of voices around the visitor.
Via Joachim Baan