Sterntaler

Sterntaler is a sound installation made by the Berlin based collective hands on sound. Accompanying an exhibition of gold jewelry made by young designers from Berlin, they attempted to resemble the sound of gold dust.

The team placed 70 piezo disks on the window and walls of the exhibition space. Metallic sounds were played through these little speakers, creating a whispering invitation to passers by to enter the store. I love the subtlety of this installation. We don’t need heavy amps and subs all the time.

Hangzavar / Cacophony

Recycling of old machines is good. But we all have iPods now, so what do we do with our old Sony walkmans? Chain them together using tape to create a great looking sound installation!

Hangzavar / Cacophony is a creation of Hungarian collective Nomad, consisting of Pásztor Bence, Pongor Soma and Tarcali Dávid. Check out their website for more information on their work.

So what does it sound like? Like with many good looking sound installations the main goal doesn’t seem to create a beautiful sounding piece of art. First of all it has to look good. And it does. Here’s a preview of its sonic qualities:

Dollar Note

Some images don’t really need a description. You can imagine what this sound installation by Robert Glogorov sounds like. Dollar Note looks wonderful, no doubt. 

Via Noise for Airports

Audio Palimpsest

While some artists are releasing albums on cassette tape again, you can also deconstruct your cassette player and build a beautiful sound installation from it. Like Anis Haron did with Audio Palimpsest, an interactive sound installation made with a “reconfigured cassette recorder”. 

When visitors come near the installation it starts recording ambient sounds, and playing them back at the same time. In the process many layers of sound are created. Hence the name (see the definition for palimpsest).

Self Organizing Still-Life

I’m intrigued by this Self Organizing Still-Life created by David Fried. Once in a while I find out about a project that is so simple, yet so ingenious, I wish I’d come up with it myself. 

These perfectly round spheres are set in motion by sound waves, through the level object they rest upon. The movement of each sphere can never be predicted, and they al move around in some sort of random choreography. There are more examples to be found on David’s website. 

Harmonic Fields

When I visited Ameland this summer I was surprised by the sounds I heard on the beach. Wind was blowing hard and played the ropes of the sailboats’ masts. I love to encounter those sounds, it’s like the elements are playing rhythms too complex for me to understand. 

But you can also help the wind a little by building some instruments. That’s what Pierre Sauvageot did with his Harmonic Fields sound installation. Wouldn’t it be magical to suddenly hear these wonderful sounds while walking in the dunes?

Door Augmented

Door Augmented is a ‘telematic sound sculpture’ created by Kathrin Stumreich whom we know from one of her previous projects: Fabric Machine. Door Augmented enables visitors to ‘remote control’ a door placed somewhere in an Austrian field, by opening and closing a door in the exhibition space. 

Sound and movement of the old barn door opening and closing are directly send back to the participant, thus ‘making the door an instrument’. 

Sonophore

It’s been almost two months since the last post on Everyday Listening. Summer came, I moved to a new house, and went offline for most of the time. Now the start of a new academic year is approacing and Everyday Listening is slowly waking up again. 

We start off with Sonophore, an project by the same group of people who made the Analog Tape Glove: Signal to Noise. Instead of a canvas full of tape, Sonophore offers a single line tape across the walls. A glove with a built-in tape head can be used to play tape and explore the sonic possibilities of the installation. To hear what this sounds like, watch the video below:

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Pendulum Sound Machine

Pendulum Sound Machine is a sound installation created by Kouichi Okamoto as part of an exhibition curated by Designboom, called Yakitate, which is Japanese for ‘freshly baked’. This nice set of pendulums hanging over a record player should sound as good as it looks, but does it? 

It really is one of those cases in which the form is well thought out, but the function is neglected. A plate just doesn’t sound as well as a lot of other objects could. 

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Behind The Wall

A series of sound installations called Behind The Wall was set up in Stockholm, in May. A ten spots passers-by could plug-in their headphones in what seem to be mirror-less mirror frames, to listen ‘behind the wall’. What they would hear was a selection of binaural recordings.

A binaural recording is experienced best on headphones, it will really make you feel like you’re the one listening to the (recorded) world around you, you’ll hear sounds coming from all sides, including front and back. Behind The Wall is a nice promotion of sound-awareness, even though it was commissioned by a headphones brand (JAYS).