Gloggomobil

It has been quite some time since I found this Gloggomobil on Noise For Airports, yet for some reason I did not share it with you yet. Which is strange, because I love beautiful, handcrafted toys, especially when they make sounds.

Children (and their parents!) can create their own compositions by pushing the black pegs in the holes on the drum. Very simple, yet very nicely constructed. The Gloggomobil was designed by Herbert Bächli and can be ordered online here. There is only one downside: the price is with $1102.00 a tad high. 

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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. 

Five Sound Questions to Damian Stewart

Some artists do not like to limit themselves to one medium. Damian Stewart, originally from New Zealand, is an artist like that. Working with sound, light and electronics he builds wonderful installations.

To read more about them and watch some videos of his work, please visit his website: frey.co.nz

 

1. What sound from your childhood made the most impression on you?

Stone-bedded rivers in natural state. All throughout my childhood we used to go free camping every summer (in fact, my parents still do this). We would always set up camp beside a river, which provided drinking water and recreation.

 

When I was very young I used to throw stones into pools, and was always fascinated by the range of sounds they would make, depending on the size of the stone, the height of the throw, the depth of the water. And falling asleep at night was always accompanied by the sound of water running over stones in the river. When it flooded, as sometimes happened, even in summer.

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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.

Soundw(e)ave

Soundw(e)ave (2004) shows a spectrogram of an audio file, woven into a beautiful piece of Jacquard cotton. Soundw(e)ave was created by Christy Matson. Visit her website to have a look at her other projects and watch a video of Movements, an interactive sound installation which allows visitors to influence sounds by touching the fabric on the walls.    

Also have a look at Alyce Santoro’s Sonic Fabric and Kathrin Stumreich’s Fabric Machine, both combining sound and fabric. 

Found on Noise for Airports

Color a Sound

Installations don’t have to be complicated to be fun. Color a Sound is more like an instrument, and it is not very difficult to operate: you use a colored marker to draw lines or shapes and you will hear the result immediately.   

To keep things simple and easy to operate, also for a untrained musician, only the major scale is used. Blue dots can be drawn to trigger the sounds of a vintage 808 drum computer, although this does not seem to work very well because it is impossible to keep it running at a constant speed. 

Five Sound Questions to Ray Lee

He is a sound artist and composer who “investigates his fascination with the hidden world of electro-magnetic radiation and in particular how sound can be used as evidence of invisible phenomena”. On Ray Lee’s website we find an impressive list of exhibitions and performances, as well as beautiful image material of his recent projects Siren, Force Field and Swarm. 

Visit www.invisible-forces.com to read more about these awe-inspiring projects. 

1. What sound from your childhood made the most impression on you? 

Audio memory is fickle. Try to remember your earliest sonic memory and it’s really hard not to reconstruct the sound that you think you should have heard. Sound is ever present, but not ever conscious in our experience of the world. The sound we remember is replaced in our memory by a more recent version of the same or similar sound. I use this as an exercise in some of my teaching, asking my students to try and remember their earliest sound from childhood. It can be very revealing and is important in the way that it shows how we prioritise our senses.

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SONOMATERIA

It is a multi-user sound sculpture, installation, tangible sound interface and inter sensory composition, according to Irad Lee, the creator of SONOMATERIA. The interface is quite similar to the ReacTable, although there is no visual feedback, users have to use their ears to understand what is going on. 

The physical objects are made of 16 different materials, such as coal, cork, wood, sponge and iron, which all add their own distinct sonic touch to the composition, created in real-time by by the users. 

Another Sound: Joanna Newsom

A few weeks ago I visited a Joanna Newsom concert, finally, after listening to her recorded music for many times with great pleasure. 

It was a wonderful, inspiring experience, so I decided to write the next edition of Another Sound on Joachim Baan’s Anothersomething about Joanna Newsom. 

“It was amazing to see how powerful the arrangements were brought to life with only a hand full of instruments, adding the right touch at just the right moment of a song. No lengthy, repetitive drums, just a very well measured percussive addition.”

Click here to read the full article.

Five Sound Questions to Tomas Postema

Some time ago we watched a short video of BOT, one of the main projects Tomas Postema is working on at the moment. 

I collaborated with Tomas on various projects, and he is a talented and inspiring person to work with. Tomas plays keys, is also a composer and sound designer inspired by both electronic and organic sounds, and with his CompActLab foundation he creates music theater performances. This summer BOT plays at the ‘Over het IJ’ festival in Amsterdam. See www.wijzijnbot.nl (in Dutch) for more information. These are Tomas’ answers to my questions: 

1. What sound from your childhood made the most impression on you?

I’m afraid that must be music. I’d have to choose between Miles Davis’ “Ascenseur Pour l”Echafaud” and the sound from a barrel organ. I was only three years old and astonished by the fact music was played by a machine, instead of a human being. Miles Davis brings me back to rainy days and hot chocolate.  

2. How do you listen to the world around you?

Again, as music. I believe our world of sound is based upon organisation. I hear layers, structure, form, dynamics, melody, musical sentences in everything I hear. Some people think we are able to structure sound and call this music. I think by making music we are just adding structured sound to  the world (of sound) in our human way.  

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