Stay Tuned

An audio work and installation based on the moment when an orchestra gets in tune, before a performance. An event that I wish could last forever, which is exactly what ‘Stay Tuned’ is about.

For this installation piece consisting of a multiple speaker setup, Rutger Zuydervelt (better known under his Machinefabriek moniker) asked 150 artists to record an ‘A’, the note an orchestra normally tunes to. Each recorded note has it’s own characteristics, and is part of the whole.

The speakers are spaced so that one can walk through this orchestra of sounds, created by individual speakers emitting one characteristic ‘A’ at the time. Walking through this orchestra, your experience of the piece slightly changes as your proximity from source to source changes.

The piece was presented at Sounds Like Audio Art festival last July in Saskatoon, Canada, as well as at the Into the Great Wide Open festival on Vlieland, the Netherlands. For the latter, speakers were strapped to trees at a spacious spot in the woods. Imagine stumbling upon this installation whilst walking through the forest at sundown. Would be quite the experience. 

For more Machinefabriek I can heartily recommend the collaboration with Banabila he recently released: Travelog.

WAVES

Light and sound are two types of waves. Like radio and the waves that our cell phones make to communicate with each other. We are continuously surrounded by waves, but we never see them.

GLOW Festival is a huge, annual light-art festival which happens every November in Eindhoven, The Netherlands. It provides a platform for artists, designers and architects working with light to expose their works in the public space. I visited yesterday, and the city centre was very, very crowded. A few minutes from the city centre, GLOW Next is organised, with more experimental and often smaller works.

One of these interesting projects is WAVES, by students from OPENLIGHT: the creative lab of intelligent Lighting Institute of the TU Eindhoven (with whom I’ve worked in the past), in collaboration with 15 sound experts from Sorama. The latter created a “sound camera”, a device with 1024 microphones which can very precisely locate a sound in a space.

The students from TU/e took this technology, placed it in an industrial space, and visualised the sound waves. People are encouraged to make sounds, whistle, stomp their feet, or play one of the instruments hanging in the room to visualise their sound waves. It was an amazing sight to see a dark space full of people actively engaged in making different sounds, amazed by the projected visuals they created.

HyperCube

HyperCube is an immersive light and sound installation created by Jaap van den Elzen and Augusto Meijer. In their own words it’s:

an art installation in which the viewer is immersed in an audiovisual environment. The cube-shaped space of the Hypercube - surrounded by mirrors and dynamic lightlines - guarantees a stunning multi-sensory experience. Infinite reflections, lack of spatial reference, intense focus, disorientation and a distorted sense of time and space are key. Hypercube gives its own definition of how space can be experienced and adds a new dimension to one of the most cultivated building blocks known to mankind: the Cube.

Augusto (sound) and Jaap (video) have collaborated on various projects. To learn more about their projects visit augustomeijer.com and jaapvandenelzen.nl.

Sonic Water

The most amazing results come from the simplest ideas, presented in a beautiful way. In this case, it’s a bottlecap filled with water, vibrating on a large speaker. The result: wonderful, complex patterns, recorded using a camera shooting in macro mode and projected on a large screen behind the installation. Sonic Water treats us to a great example of cymatics - the visualization of sound. 

Next to the installation there’s a room, a laboratory, where people can experiment with their own sound input: by playing a synthesizer, singing into a microphone or playing song from their phone, and see if Mozart indeed looks more harmonious than Slayer. 

The installation, created by Sven Meyer & Kim Pörksen has been shown in the Olympus OMD Photography Playground in Berlin from April 25 till May 24, 2013.

Fotos by diephotodesigner.de

Murmur

“Talking to walls” is the tagline for Murmur, a video and sound installation which translates sound waves into visuals. The audience can talk into the Murmur ‘echo chamber’, and a direct visible interaction with the visuals on the walls becomes apparent. The visitor’s murmurations become visible. 

Murmur was created by a multidisciplinary group of French artists. It’s an interesting experiment, exploring visualization of sound interactively. What the direct relationship between the spoken words and the resulting visuals are remains a mistery though.

329 prepared dc-motors in a toluene tank

Zimoun has done it again. His installations seem to get bigger and bigger, and all based around the same principle: many small prepared dc-motors spinning endlessly like a flock of insects. This time in the form of 329 prepared dc-motors, cotton balls, toluene tank.

The sound installation is designed very clean and well. The lack of visual disturbances such as cables enhance the feeling of autonomy of these things. The tank, located in Dottikon, Switzerland, melts the gentle knocking into a cloud of sound, like rain on the roof of a tent. 

The tank from the outside. Nothing seems abnormal here.

Also read Zimoun’s answers to the ‘five sound questions’ I asked him three years ago, back in 2010. See his website to read more about his projects. 

3845 m/s

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

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

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. 

SPINE

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.