We’ve featured some works of Marco Canevacci and Marco Barotti last January: Sound of Light. With Breathing Volume, they continue making immersive environments. Where Sound of Light sonified the weather by looking at the sky and the sunlight, Breathing Volume plays with the notion of space in an audio-visual context. For five minutes, the public is embraced between breathing walls, constantly changing their physical volume. This creates the perception of being inside a living organism.
Four ventilators make the lungs breathe in the same way humans do, and subwoofers transform the pulsing bass frequencies into the soul of the organism. Breathing Volume unexpectedly steers the focus from what surrounds us, to what is immediate, here and now, offering a distorted reflection on our relationship with space, its distance and extension. Again, as with Sound of Light, it reminds me of Space Odyssey, this time very obviously, als because of the black speaker-monolith at the end of the space.
Magnetoception: a sense which allows an organism to detect a magnetic field to perceive direction, altitude or location. Using the name Magnetoceptica, sound artist Dewi de Vree and costume designer Patrizia Ruthensteiner create performances and installations in which atenna-based costumes pick up electromagnetic fields and translate them into electronic sounds.
Using everything from bent hazelnut rods, bamboo stems to a recycled spinning wheel, de Vree and Ruthensteiner combine odd, imaginative objects with open electronics. Copper wire is wound into different patterns and part of the costume, really tying together the electronic and the physical.
The sounds picked up with the antenna depends on the location of the performers: they can modulate it by changing their position and moving in relation to the space and each other.
The different costumes have their own qualities, such as the Omega Birch (above) is inspired by and made of Baltic birch, which is the most sought after wood in the manufacturing of speaker cabinets, compensating for the roll-off of low and high frequencies on speakers, evening the tone. The Spherics Harp (fragment below) is inspired by Qing Dynasty’s tremendous hairdos and is able to receive subtle signals from up high, bouncing against the ionosphere (below).
In Neerpelt, a small town in the very north of Belgium on the border with the Netherlands, there’s the very unique Klankenbos (or Sound Forest). A public forest filled with sound art installations hidden between the trees, accessible to anyone for free any moment of the day. Something so unique, it’s strange we’ve never written an article about it here on Everyday Listening. Time to make up for that.
Made back in 2005 as a temporary sound art collection commissioned by Musica, the Belgian “impulse centre for music”, Klankenbos has since then become permanent and has been there for ten years already.
Pierre Berthet’s Houses of Sound: Two wires connect two huts on the banks of the Dommel. These are connected to exciters and tin can resonators in a network of wires among the trees around the installation. Inputs (mainly sine waves) transmitted through the exciters make the wires tremble, causing vibrations that create a buzzing resonance in the huts and cans.
With a few additions to the collection over the years, as well as the development of mobile installations, the Klankenbos is everything but a static collection. Just this year sound artist Laura Maes added an interactive sound-bench running on solar energy.
Staalplaat Soundsystem & LOLA landscape architect’s Composed Nature: Composed storms in the trees by washing machine motors, making the trees and it’s leaves shake.
Klankenbos does not only exist of installations in the physical realm: just recently artist Rozalie Hirs created Curvices, a musical grid that works with GPS tracking and can only be heard via a smartphone. Because the organization of Klankenbos is very aware that the forest is very important as well: it shouldn’t end up being a place of technology under some trees, and these technologies allow artists to put their own virtual sonic world over the actual one.
Erwin Stache’s Konversation: 12 mechanical plants conversating through signs and sounds.
On sunday the 18th of October Musica invites everyone to celebrate 10 years of Klankenbos with an afternoon with sound art, music, poetry and silence in the Klankenbos. Artists who will be present are Stijn Demeulenaere who will present his field-recordings of the past few years in a way fitting to the Klankenbos, Hans van Koolwijk in a performance with amateur musicians playing 65 helium-filled balloons, the robot orchestra of the Flemish organisation Logos who designed instruments for Aphex Twin, et cetera. They’ll be there presenting new work by young composers. Enough to see and hear!
Tom Moore is a musician playing traditional music, contemporary acoustic music and sound art. He’s primarily a violinist, but also plays other instruments and works with assorted electronics and hardware.
For his latest performance “Automatic Trio”, Tom performs with simple “kinetic” or animatronic instruments which play themselves. By attaching a bow to a simple bicycle wheel, he’s able to simulate the bowing of a violin or cello, making for some automated accompanyment to Tom’s playing. The set-up is quite simple, but really works with the ambient string loops and improvisation that he’s playing over the droning of the mechanical instruments. The fact that it’s part “installation piece”, part performance makes for something that is also visually compelling.
Christian Skjødt is a Danish artist and composer exploring temporal, spatial, as well as physical aspects of sound and aesthetics of noise. His installation works are often site-specific and include self-built electronics. Which is the case as well for his Illumination (2014): A site-specific piece for a 18th-century wine cellar in the Botanical Garden in Riga.
Illumination examines the translation of the outer circumstances, harvesting the energy from the sun, and bringing this into the cellar in the form of sound. In the cellar the sounds are spatialised, and the particular acoustics of the dome-shaped cellar are investigated.
Each circuit/speaker is tuned to 440 Hz when it’s receiving optimal sunlight. When it’s receiving less than optimal sunlight, the perfect pitch is distorted, resulting in a microtonal cluster-type of texture due to weather conditions and the rotation of the planet.
Steven White is an visual artist from Ontario. White got the idea to convert old argicultural machines into a collection of fanciful kinetic sculptures when he and his wife moved to rural Ontario, and found a lot of obsolete equipment there. Sprockets, gears and valves on many of the pieces are interactive, and when you crank them, the sculptures produce an eerie, mechanical kind of music.
Wall Street Sound Machine is an interactive, kinetic sculpture made from an old metal roofing vent, a cast-iron wheel, gears, steel, guitar strings and a large hand-lithographed Wall St. sign. The sounds produced are dissonant and somewhat random, echoing the look of the Wall Street sign; corroded, abandoned, broken, oily and wrong. Inspired by the “Occupy Wall Street” movement, this piece highlights the underside of big commerce, showing the obsolete, broken aspects of a system that is in need of change.
Herman Kolgen is a multidisciplinary artist, working and living in Montreal. He calls himself an audiokinetic sculptor. His Urban Wind installation is part of his longer running Windfields series. The installations in this series have in common that they relate to the dynamic characteristics of the wind in one way or the other.
In Urban Wind, wind sensors are installed in strategic points in the city, be it intersections, bridges, tunnels, parks rooftops, etcetera. The velocity and direction of the wind gets analyzed and transmitted by WiFi to a group of suspended accordions that emit a euphonic soundscape. This way the audience can experience the dynamics of the wind in the city through the accordion bellows, which create harmonies influenced by the wind flow.
Timo Kahlen is a German sound sculptor and media artist who has been making works since the end of the 80’s. While his sculptures and installations often need to be seen in real life to experience the tactile, perceptible vibrations, Kahlen has chosen not to expose his sculptural work online in video form. His interactive “net art” works are equally interesting however. A few of these are featured below. Put on your headphones, and click on the images to try them out:
These works which run in the browser develop individually, are generative. Always live and different, as the viewer moves across, pauses or clicks at the responsive visual texture of the sound objects. As these works are made using Flash back in 2011, they won’t work on most smartphones, sadly.
There are quite some more to explore as well in his net art series, such as Scratch, Undo/Delete, Numbers. The interaction with Kahlen’s works isn’t so direct that it feels like a website, instead he’s really searching for a good balance between the autonomous and the direct, so it feels that there’s something organic to explore.
If you’d like to experience Kahlen’s physical sculptures, the next exhibition of his work is in Berlin, at the Ruine der Kuenste Berlin (Hittorfstr. 5, 14195 Berlin) from April 26 to May 24.
Feedback is a phenomenon which is not uncommon in sound art. Steve Reich’s Pendulum Music used swinging microphones over speakers to create different tones in a certain rhythm, already back in 1968. There is something primeval about feedback, the way it can run out of control and become chaotic. Because of that, it’s no wonder there are still a lot of artists working with it.
(all photos by Emily Gan)
With his new series of works called The Sound of Empty Space, composer & media artist Adam Basanta explores relationships between microphones, speakers, and surrounding acoustic environments through controlled, self-generating microphone feedback. Adam’s work investigates perception, and listening in particular, as an active, participatory, multi-modal activity.
In The loudest sound in the room experienced very quietly, an endless feedback loop between microphone, public address system amplifier, and speaker cone is enclosed within a soundproof aquarium. A communication system disrupted and turned against itself, the sound level within the enclosure reaches an ear-damaging 120dB, approximately the loudness of a car horn at close distance.
The notion of amplification systems as self-generating sound producers is further developed in the piece Pirouette. Like a life-sized ballerina atop a music box, a microphone rotates slowly, bringing it in proximity to seven mounted speaker cones. As the microphone hovers over each speaker in sequence, a tuned feedback melody emerges. Throughout nine full rotations, a skeletal version of the main theme from Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake ballet can be heard.
Finally, in Vessel, the naturally resonant acoustic properties of a large glass jar are amplified, creating a feedback monody by varying the distance between speaker and microphone. As the components continually move closer and further away from each other, we encounter a system that offers no resolution. Interesting to see how Basanta is able to use a chaotic element as feedback in such a controlled way.
Sound of Light, by Marco Barotti and Marco Canevacci is a synesthetic sculpture which interprets and dynamically transforms sunlight into audio frequencies. It is a site specific installation designed for the former music pavilion in Hamm, Germany, which was built in 1912.
Cameras film the sky and sunlight, dividing it into six colours - RGB and CMY. The six hanging, coloured columns of the pneumatic structure – which stand for the primary RGB (red/green/blue) and secondary CMY (cyan/magenta/yellow) colour models – are designed to receive different frequencies and convert them from visible to audible sensory input. A series of woofers is fixed directly on the bottom of each column and convert the whole architecture into a giant vibrating loudspeaker.
By mixing sound and architecture, the audience experience a unique oneiric reality through the superimposition of colours, shapes, sounds and vibrations. Visitors can also discover their own concert by changing their point of view – an individual spectrum. Sadly, it’s hard to experience vibration through a documented piece, but I can imagine what it would be like to touch the column with a cheek. The structure reminds me of Space Odyssey. A space-ship like structure to experience sunlight using different senses.
Wednesday, October 28, 2015 at 15:51 tagged 
