Peter Vogel - The Sound of Shadows Documentary

We’ve seen some work by Peter Vogel on the site before, but for some reason I forgot about it, until I came across this documentary on the sound sculptures of Peter Vogel. His interactive installations are quite magical, and what I like about the documentary is that every part of it is demystified.

“Fascinated by the work of English neurophysiologist William Grey Walter (1910-77), who invented small robots (called Machine Speculatrix) that simulated basic neurophysiological behaviour, Vogel was intrigued to discover that, with the help of sound and light sensors, such machines could react to the world. Thus, at a time when many artists were pursuing the idea of the viewer as active participant, Vogel began to embrace interactivity as a major theme in his work. And all of this prompted him to move away from painting and start to create picture-like interactive objects.”

– Jean Martin. Full essay: vogelexhibition.weebly.com/jean-martin-peter-vogels-interactive-sound-art.html

From very simple components, Vogel creates complex interactive works with a lot of character and depth. Very inspirational to see.

DIRTI

At IRCAM, the Paris-based Institute for Research and Coordination in Acoustics/Music, Diemo Schwarz and his team have been developing the very interesting CataRT for quite some time now.

CataRT is a software instrument that realises interactive “corpus-based concatenative synthesis”. That means that it takes a sound, and splits it into little bits which it then analyses. These little bits can then be arranged according to loudness or pitch, for example, and can be played by navigating through the sonic landscape, or the “corpus” if you will. It’s like granular synthesis including knowing what all the grains are and being able to navigate them.

For DIRTI, Diemo Schwarz teamed up with UserStudio to create a physical interface with which children can play the little grains of sound, exploring the sonic body of the source.

There is a webcam under a transparent dish that contains the physical grains, tapioca grains in this case. The movement of the grains is tracked by a camera under the dish, and is sent to a Raspberry Pi, which in turn sends this information to an iPad where the interaction is visualised and sonified using the CataRT realtime sound synthesis system.

 I love installations or applications that are about exploring sounds and invoking active listening, especially for kids, as this really adds to their development. DIRTI makes it nice and tangible, making for a nice exploratory interface.

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.

Rainlith 2.0

Rainlith 2.0 captures the movement of the audience and reacts to this by moving it’s large rain-stick around. The sound of the stick is processed in real-time and fed back to the room via speakers. The nice thing about this kinetic sound installation is how it combines the acoustic sound of the rain-stick with electronic sounds, blending together both sound worlds.

The installation, created by Rui Gato, is located in an old grain silo, which seems to be like a perfect situation for a piece like this, as the sounds blend together perfectly, due to the acoustic properties of the silo.

DJ Light

DJ Light is an interactive light and sound installation. Well, it’s not interactive for all visitors; there is one person who can orchestrate the light and sound performance. Move your body and conduct the installation like an orchestra. 

The installation was created by Cinimod Studio. 85 inflatable globes shift colors according to the ‘conductor’s’ movements and a multi-directional sound system adds a field of sound to the experience. An impressive job. 

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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The Space In Between / Alpha-ville festival

The Alpha-ville festival is a new London-based digital arts, music and culture event that will take place on the 17th and 18th September 2010. The theme of this year’s festival is Visionary Cities.

One of the acts performing live at the festival is The Space In Between, a collaboration between electronic composer Nikka and visual software developer Alba G. Corral. Their video “Melophase” (shown above) gives you a impression of their work. It is a good example of how sound and visuals can come together and interact in one experience.  

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Oscillare; An Interactive Dawn

Almost a year ago I posted a work-in-progress video of Oscillare as it was presented at last years Sonar festival. Oscar Sol from Electronic Performers, the creators of this project was so kind to send me an update about the completion of the project and as we can see in the video, it has become an impressive piece of work. 

Oscillare; An Interactive Dawn is an interactive multimedia dance performance. Four accelerometers, a gyroscope and a wireless video camera capture the movements of the dancer, which are used to generate and influence the sound and images on the screen. 

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Pappeltalks

While for some of us the CD is far from obsolete, it is a fact that it is not as easy for an artist to sell a physical album as it was in the pre-iPod era. And as we can buy an album on iTunes for half the price we had to pay in the store, that is what many of us choose.

Limited editions of interesting boxes might convince music buyers otherwise. Like this design by Jaroslav Juřica. The first time you open the package the cover graphics are created. A limited edition: only 60 pieces are manufactured. 

Via Dave Haynes

Credit Synthesis

This little interactive installation made by Jonathan Vingiano reads the information magnetically stored on credit cards and translates it into sound.

Nothing too ambitious here, but a funny little piece of data sonifying art. I don't know what kind of algorithm is used to generate the sound, and if it would be possible to learn to understand what is on the cards? 

(via @Rodrigo_Medina)