Dr. Alfred A. Tomatis (January 1, 1920–December 25, 2001) was an internationally known otolaryngologist, and inventor. He received his Doctorate in Medicine from the Paris School of Medicine. His alternative medecine theories of hearing and listening are known as the Tomatis method or Audio-Psycho-Phonology (APP).
Some records will please you, others will disturb or mystify you. And then some rare specimens will extend your conception of life. Michael Prime's L-fields is of the latter category. The source material on L-fields consists of bioelectrical recordings of hallucinogenic plants. Yep. Prime records the fluctuations of the electric guitar field of a plant, fluctuations that trigger an oscillator. Prime later compresses, overlays, and integrates sounds from the surrounding environment to the signal and voilà: through a work aesthetically close to electroacoustics, the listener is invited to hear a plant live its life!
A geophone converts seismic energy inputs (or vibrations) into electrical voltage which can be accurately measured. The term geophone derives from the Greek word “geo” meaning “earth” and “phōnē” meaning “sound”. A geophone is a passive device requiring no additional power which converts seismic energy (ground displacement) into an electrical signal producing an output voltage which is proportional to the geophone velocity.
The instrument is based on the principal of a spring mounted coil which moves within a magnetic field. The geophone’s coil remains stationary due to its inertia and the case moves in relation generating a voltage as the coil windings move through the magnetic field. Compared to active (powered) sensors a geophone offers the advantage of extreme low noise having only Brownian motion noise. The bandwidth of a geophone is generally defined from its natural frequency to the spurious frequencies which are unwanted parasitic resonances present in all geophones and caused by the sideward motion of the coil.
It may be more famous for making typewriters, but Olympia has just revealed what some observers are calling one of the sexiest gadgets of this year's CeBit: a small device that can turn pretty much any flat surface into a soundboard.
Parabola vs. sphere If cross-sections of a spherical surface and a parabolic surface were made by slicing each surface in half, these would be the shapes you would see:
I've been wanting to make a parabolic reflector for quite some time now.
As I have heard more and more about them, from Marcus Coates using them to record specific birds in trees for his work 'morning call' and Chris Watson amongst various other sound artists mentioning them on several occasions, I thought it would be worth checking out what all the fuss is about.
I managed to find these instrucions of how to make a parabolic reflector on Instuctables. It also gives a dxf. file which is excelent as I could use this for the Laser cutter machine they have here at Bezalel.
There is also a rather good link to youtube on this page, showing a parabolic reflector being used to cook some bread and fry something (not sure what exactly).
And here is a very useful Java tool for anyone who might be wandering about how to calculate the radius of a parabola, according to it's length and therefore find the focal point - Equation of Parabola.
I was originally going to make a concrete parabola, something like what they used on the coast of britain to detect incoming aeroplanes during the war, using a large inflatable exercise ball.
However, after some research I realised that I had made one of thefundamental misconceptions - that a parabolic dish is part of a sphere. It is not. It is part of a paraboloid.
If you slice a cone with a plane that is parallel to a line on the cone through its vertex (such as UV on this figure), the intersection is a parabola. Here is a proof of this fact.
1 exhibition, 2 venues, 40 artists, 80 projects: «Dynasty» is the outcome of an innovative joint venture involving the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris/ARC and the Palais de Tokyo.
Robin Meier et Ali Momeni
Robin Meier and Ali Momeni both apply the rules of music composition to the confines of art and science. Their collaboration focuses particularly on the interactions between man and the machine. Even though their work integrates high-tech procedures, it resonates nevertheless with the purest traditions of the arts. Trained as a musician, Robin Meier studied composition in Switzerland and electroacoustics at the National Conservatory in the Region of Nice. Since 2004, he has pursued a degree in cognitive philosophy at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS). Ali Momeni is, as he holds a Ph.D. in Music Composition from the University of California, Berkeley, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art at the University of Minnesota. Robin Meier was born in 1980. Lives and works in Paris. Ali Momeni was born in Isfahan, Iran, in 1975. Lives and works in Minneapolis, USA.
For Dynasty Robin Meier's and Ali Momeni's work at the Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris /ARC combines electromagnetic waves with astrological rituals, echoing Raoul Dufy’s La Fée Electricité [The Electricity Fairy], which showed the impact of a growing urban electrical distribution on society. At the Palais de Tokyo, Meier and Momeni propose Truce: Strategies for Post-Apocalyptic Computation, an original reading of the works of Gabrielle Gibson and Ian Russel. These scientists from Greenwich University discovered a humming modulation in mosquitoes during copulation. The artists propose here to regulate this behavior by inviting three live insects to reinterpret a traditional Indian song.
I wanted to go to the Kelvingrove museum to see if there might be anything concerning antiquated forms of communication.
I didn't manage to find much on the matter however there was one thing which caught my attention which was the ventilation grills which at one point looked as though they were presented as a frame in themselves.
There was one which was emitting a particularly loud, high-pitched noise which sounded like it was coming from a massive heating room hidden somewhere in the basement of the building. I was quite interested in the idea of sounds being transported around the building in this manner, much like servants would be called for in a large Victorian house via bells.
Hunterian Museum - Lord Kelvin permanent exhibition
Lord Kelvin was born William Thomson in Belfast on 26th June 1824 and was the fourth child of James and Margaret Thomson. After the death of his mother, William along with the rest of the family moved to Glasgow where his father took up the Chair of Mathematics at the University. William entered the University of Glasgow at just 6 years of age, officially matriculating at age 10. In 1841, at the age of 17 he entered Cambridge, graduating there four years later before returning in 1846 to take up the Chair of Natural Philosophy (what we now call physics) at the University of Glasgow.
In the mid 1850s and for the next decade he became increasingly involved in the cable laying projects that were to allow, for the first time, Britain to communicate instantly with the other side of the Atlantic. By1866 his skills as a mathematician, applied physicist and engineer had led the Atlantic cable project to successful completion earning him a Knighthood.
This fantastic display was truly engaging and included pieces such as a a wine glass placed inside a perspex box, a certain pitch was then played through a bass amp which would cause the glass to resonate and wobble.
Some of the scientific apparatus were just fantastic items in themselves but I particulary liked a pair of brass parabolic mirrors with a description of an experiement carried out by Jean Antoine Nollet:
" I am persuaded that cokes act mostly by radiation like that of the sun. There is a pretty experiment in Nollets Lecons de Physique: he set two mirrors, (made of pasteboard gilt), parallel to one another, and face to face, in the opposite sides of a room: in the focus of one, a bit of charcoal, and in that of the other, a little gunpowder he blew upon the charcoal to brighten it, and the gunpowder took fire."
These seemed to me very similar to the sound mirrors which I had looked at earlier on. On further investigation I found this website which seemed to bring together these two apparatus. (follow the link here)
I thought this would be a very suitable material to use in my project as it has very ambiguous characteristics and is therefore escapes the boundaries of classification, is it a liquid or a solid?
