Wednesday, September 23, 2009 at 1:01tagged architecture
A space created solely for listening to and experiencing music and sound, that's what Mafoombey is. The space, created by Martti Kalliala and Esa Ruskeepää is carved out of a pile of cardboard.
The organic shapes invite users to relax and enjoy the sound from the integrated six speaker surround sound system. Aim of the makers was to create the ultimate listening environment, with great acoustics. And it's beautiful, too!
A "self-organizing evolutionary musical organism", that's how the makers of Bacterial Orchestra define this sound installation. The cells in this organism are made of speakers and microphones, listening to the sounds that are surrounding them.
Visitors interact with Bacterial Orchestra by simply making a sound. I like the idea of having a system that takes your input and gives it back in a new form. The installation is created by Olle Cornéer and Martin Lübcke.
Reflection, a data sculpture by Benjamin Maus, was inspired by a musical piece by Frans de Waard. Software was used to analyze the frequencies of the music. Unlike some projects we looked at before (Cylinder and this project), it's not the visualization of one sound, but of a complete piece of music.
Why do we want to see everything? Some things appear to be more real if you can see them, or touch them. We will not be able to tell what the music sounded like by looking at a sculpture like this. It does look quite fascinating though.
It's amazing to experience how a certain song can bring us back to a place, a situation, a feeling from the past. This is a highly personal experience. Most of us probably have experienced this, and some of us might even avoid listening to certain songs because of this.
As the experience is different for every person, you will not recognize the example I'm giving. I want to share it with you none the less. It's amazing how our brains can bring together music and images, even after years and years.
I was traveling to Prague by train. I can't remember if it was '97 or '98. I was going to stay there for about a week, together with a friend, in the middle of the winter. If you've never been to Prague I can recommend going during winter, the city was so beautiful!
It's quite a long trip so I brought a lot of CD's and a Discman - it was still the pre-iPod era. After being listening to mainly metal for quite a few years I got interested in electronic music. First the Prodigy, via Chemical Brothers to drum 'n bass. Along with New Forms by Roni Size, Colours by Adam F was one of my favorites back then.
And apart from the question if I still like the music today, I see the image of a snow white eastern German landscape flashing before my eyes, each time I play Music in my Mind by Adam F. For a moment I'm back on that train, on my way to a new wintry adventure.
Do you have an experience like this? I would like to hear about it!
Thursday, August 27, 2009 at 10:58tagged installations
Soundspace Yogya is a sound installation by Cilia Erens. She creates sound art without processing and manipulating the sounds. Recordings of Yogyakarta are filtered and selected to create the content for this installation.
There's no preview of the sounds available, so I don't know what it sounds like. It was the image that caught my attention. These listening stations look wonderful. Wouldn't it be great to find them on your way, to just stick your head in one, let the sound surround you and leave the real world for a while?
Saturday, August 22, 2009 at 19:33tagged events, water
As an avid swimmer I've been missing the ability to listen to music while working out. I recently came across a solution I would like to try; a waterproof MP3 player. But what would be even better than that? How about an underwater sound art gallery?
That's what Wet Sounds is. Wet Sounds tours swimming pools around Europe and presents sound art and music collages under water, away from their normal environment. A very interesting experiment, and I would love to be able to dive into a pool full of sound waves and get immersed by music.
Tuesday, August 18, 2009 at 12:50tagged installations
It's great to see how an artists work can be re-discovered through the internet. Take for example this one: Sound Looking by Kim Kichul. I wasn't there at the exhibition, but since it was uploaded to YouTube yesterday, it's again presented to a large audience, even though it would have been more impressive when seen live.
Sound Looking creates another visible representation of sound, but other than Cylinder, it shows us what happens in real time in stead of a static snapshot. We all know sound is basically moving air, but it's quite fascinating to see what really happens!
We can't see sound. We can only judge the beauty of it by listening. Sometimes it seems like people who work with sound don't really know or care about visual aesthetics. Look at a website like this, for instance. On the other hand I think the opposite is also true.
Now what if we could look at the sound waves coming out of our speakers? What would it look like? We've seen physical representations of sound before, but this one is absolutely worth looking at. It's so beautiful.
Andy Huntington and Drew Allan took musical and non-musical sounds and ran them through their own software to create a model for their sculptures. The result is Cylinder, a set of eight sculptures. The ones you see here are Market (left) and Breath (right).
I was reading this month's edition of Wired magazine when I came across this article. To keep a swarm of Asian carp from invading the Illinois River and disturbing the native fish, ecologist Greg Sass is experimenting with 'noisy bubbles'.
By using air bubbles combined with high, chirping sounds, the carp invasion is stopped. Carp can hear sounds up to 2kHz, frequencies the native fish can't hear. A curtain of bubbles and noise creates a loud 'wall of sound'. Sound in a bubble-water mixture can become extremely loud.
I never heard of such a 'bio acoustic fish fence', and one might question if we should interfere with nature at this level, but the idea of using the sensitivity of a certain species' hearing combined with the known properties of sound is at least thought provoking.
Sound is used in so many clever ways in this world, in places we don't know about. It makes me wonder what other purposes sound can have, in a completely functional, un-aesthetic manner. It's fascinating to discover what we can do with sound, and how it can help us in this world.
Do you know of any interesting, strange, unconventional ways of using sound? I'd be happy to hear.
As I wrote in my previous post, the Swedish lakes are so peaceful, quiet and beautiful. Especially the ones without a lot of motorized boats and far away from busy roads. The only thing you hear while paddling around is yourself, touching the water, and in this case you hear the sound of my breath and my raincoat now and then. It's not so much the sound of the place itself this time, as it was very quiet.
It was a rainy week, luckily we only had a little rain when we were on the water. It took us about five hours to paddle around the island in the middle of the lake. A beautiful, rocky island with lots of wild blueberries, providing a nice dessert to our lunch.
Wednesday, September 23, 2009 at 1:01 tagged 
A space created solely for listening to and experiencing music and sound, that's what Mafoombey is. The space, created by Martti Kalliala and Esa Ruskeepää is carved out of a pile of cardboard.
