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:

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).

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:

Click to read more ...

Analogue Tape Glove v1

As we have seen previously, we can use our old tapes to weave a fabric. In Analogue Tape Glove v1 though, the tape is used in an interactive sound installation. Using a tape head embedded in a glove, participants can explore the recordings on the randomly selected tapes. 

The sound installation is created by artists who call themselves Signal To Noise. It brings back memories from the days before we could all carry a complete music studio under our arm. A nice reminder of how fast technology evolves.

Sonic Fabric

Do you still have a cassette deck in your home stereo system? I bet many people still have some old tapes somewhere catching dust in a shoe box under the bed. Well, with Sonic Fabric you can wear those old mix tapes.

Sonic Fabric, created by Alyce Santoro, is woven from 50% prerecorded audio cassette tape and 50% cotton. And it can even be played. While moving a special glove with a tape head over the fabric, a mixture of recordings can be heard.  

The original sounds on the tapes are influential recordings in Santoro's life, from her high school punk band to ambient city street noises, the Beatles and Pachelbel. A highly personal piece of apparel!

(via Noise For Airports)

Update on Friday, November 13, 2009 at 14:12 by admin

A nice video of the production of the Sonic Fabric is available on YouTube.