Yesterday

I know, a lot of people are talking about the Beatles’ music finally being available in the iTunes store. But the concept for this sound installation was developed long before that fact. In Yesterday, 21 music boxes play the Beatles song together, but not in sync.  

The walls and the floor of the room resonate as the mixture of the Yesterday’s notes form a new composition. The makers, Evelien van den Broek and Dyane Donck created the installation as a “tribute to yesterday (the day all troubles seemed so far away)”, for the November Music Festival.

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186 prepared dc-motors, cardboard boxes

Another wonderful installation by Zimoun, this time created using 186 prepared dc-motors, cardboard boxes 60x60x60cm, apparently this is also the title of this sound installation. The audience can use their imagination.

If you have not done so already, be sure to also read Zimoun’s answers to the Five Sound Questions, and while you’re at it, the included video gives a nice overview of his work. His work can be seen at upcoming events in Venezuela, Switzerland, Germany, Estonia, the Netherlands, Poland and the United States.

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83,7 Kilo Ohm

German artist Erwin Stache created the interactive installation 83,7 Kilo Ohm. The installation is placed in public space, inviting passers-by to touch it, play with it and thus create their own sound and music with it. If more people touch the installation, they can also shake hands and touch each other to influence the sound. 

Each time two or more of the metal tubes are touched, the sound, playing from the speaker attached to the base, is triggered and manipulated. Some of the (more interesting, if you ask me) parts are more abstract, electronic sounding, while others are precomposed pieces of music a participant can ‘conduct’. 

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More TodaysArt 2010

On Monday I wrote about the sound installation ‘!’ which I saw at the TodaysArt festival last weekend. I only had time to visit during the day program, so I had a look at different parts of the exposition. Here are some more things I would like to share with you.

The above image is Squeeeque, an igloo made of old speakers by Alexis O’Hara. Visitors can enter the unit and play around with microphones, which will result feedback trough the speakers, creating an immersive sonic environment. It’s a bit of a toy, but it does really look great.   

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The Organ of Corti

The idea is wonderful: recycling the noises of a busy city and filtering them to create something beautiful, making people aware of the sounds surrounding them, which always is a good thing. That said, I wonder how well it works, especially when the listener is surrounded by noise. 

The Organ of Corti is a sound installation created by Liminal, a partnership between sound artist and composer David Prior and architect Frances Crow. The Organ of Corti won the PRS New Music 2010 Award, and will premiere at the City of London festival, July 2011. 

! at TodaysArt Festival

This weekend I visited the TodaysArt festival in The Hague. The festival explores the newest forms of art, music and technology. After having some fun with RovoVox, a giant 8 meter tall robot that will speak any text you send via SMS, I entered the impressive Atrium, The Hague’s city hall to be surprised by !. 

! is an installation by sound artist and researcher Anke Eckardt, which explores her theory of ‘vertical hearing’. Every three minutes a sound comes from above and ‘drops’ into a puddle of black water. It seems like an invisible object causes the splash, yet it must be a huge woofer beneath the surface.

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Lego Tinguely 2: a Lego Rhythm Machine

Last year I saw Pierre Bastien play live. Interesting how machines can act as a musical instrument and provide musical layers to improvise on. But it also appeared hard to keep it interesting as there is not much variation in the turning of a wheel. 

Roman Gerold was kind enough to share his latest experiment with me: Lego Tinguely 2: a mechanical rhythm machine made of Lego. A great idea to use such simple building blocks to generate noise and rhythms. Its sounds could play a role in a musical setting as well, if used in moderation. 

CD Sea by Bruce Munro

The way we consume or media changes and changes. While the CD brought ‘crystal clear’ digital audio into our living rooms, a few decades later, while some people still like them, many of us hardly ever touch them again. They just sit there in that box, collecting dust.

Why not use all these unused CDs to create a piece of art? Bruce Munro collected 600.000 old CDs for his installation CD Sea. A field full of them. And while the installation is visually striking, it is also a bit sad in a way. These pieces of plastic, these pieces of music, once cherished, now thrown away. Also watch this short video about the installation process:

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Seven Thousand Oaks

Touch at a Distance was a day organized by Seven Thousand Oaks, Festival of Art and Sustainability at the Heide Sculpture Park in Melbourne. Artists from around Australia contributed to the event. Watch the video to learn more about Touch at a Distance and Seven Thousand Oaks.

I love the description of sound artist and saxophonist Jim Denley, about how his “music is woven into the world or the world woven into his music”. The artists were spread out in the park, to add their own sonic touch to the local soundscape. 

Piano Migrations Installation

For her Piano Migrations Installation, Kathy Hinde took the inside of an old upright piano and transformed it into a kinetic sound and video installation. The projected birds seem to excite the strings as they fly by and sit on them. 

The twitching and fluttering of small machines, fastened to the piano, touch the strings and cause them to resonate. The image is analyzed by the controlling software to make sure only the string closest to the moving bird is heard.