Solfège de l'objet sonore (Schaeffer 1967)

The Microsoft Sound composed by Brian Eno.

In 1994 Microsoft corporation designers Mark Malamud and Erik Gavriluk approached Brian Eno to compose music for the Windows 95 project. The result was the six-second start-up music-sound of the Windows 95 operating system, The Microsoft Sound (.wav). In the San Francisco Chronicle he said:

"The idea came up at the time when I was completely bereft of ideas. I'd been working on my own music for a while and was quite lost, actually. And I really appreciated someone coming along and saying, "Here's a specific problem — solve it."
The thing from the agency said, "We want a piece of music that is inspiring, universal, blah- blah, da-da-da, optimistic, futuristic, sentimental, emotional," this whole list of adjectives, and then at the bottom it said "and it must be 31/4 seconds long."

Talking about a proposal for a sound work which could be installed in an airport "when you're changing planes and you're and you've got an hour to spare and you don't want to spend more money on calculators."

Sound in the City

University of Warwick Professor Paul Jennings is leading a team researching how sound affects the perception of environments, which people have generally seen as full of unwanted noise. Professor Jennings suggests that the right sound has many positive aspects and should be considered in the design of urban soundscapes and buildings such as hospitals.

The Alchemists of Sound

The BBC's Radiophonic Workshop was set up in 1958, born out of a desire to create 'new kinds of sounds'. Alchemists of Sound looks at this creative group from its inception, through its golden age when it was supplying music and effects for cult classics like Doctor Who, Blake's Seven and Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, and charts its fading away in 1995 when, due to budget cuts, it was no longer able to survive.



For the full documentary click here...

There are interviews with composers from the Workshop, as well as musicians and writers who have been inspired by the output. Great archive footage of the Workshop and its machinery is accompanied by excerpts of the, now cult, TV programmes that featured these sounds.

The Sound Collector

Wildlife sound recording - a personal view from Alan Burbidge
Taken from the Wildlife Sound Recording Society homepage

Homemade Rotary Speaker

"This produces a sound a little like a Leslie speaker as used on Hammond Organs but in this case the whole speaker itself turns. I designed and built it myself and it cost me nothing!"

The Pendulum, the Pit and Hope

The Pendulum, the Pit and Hope (Czech: Kyvadlo, jáma a naděje) is a 1983 Czechoslovak animated short film directed by Jan Svankmajer, adapted from Edgar Allen Poe's 'The Pit and the Pendulum'

Pedal Powered Grain Mill

There is an artist in residence oppurtunity which is being offered by the Woodlands Community Trust and the criteria are that the artist uses the back alleys around woodlands in such a way as to engage the local community.

Now, for those of you who have ever been scouting out for a bit or furniture or pc then you will know that these back alleys are generally just a bit of a dumping ground really and all this rubbish tends to get mixed up with all the mud which gathers here.
SO, all in all they are what you might conisder to be a difficult place to do anything
with, they are not particularly nice places to spend much time and tend to have a funny smell about them.

I have been considering ideas for these spaces and was thinking along the lines of cooking, having remembered the Dalston Mill which was set up as part of Barbican's Radical Nature series of exhibitions and events. This was organised by a bunch of architects who set up a company called EXYZT in their year out and have never turned back (continued their education) since as they are so busy getting commission to make fantastic projects rather than imagining them on a drawing board.

Their idea was to recreate a small-scale version of Agnes Denes Wheatfield - A Confrontation, Battery Park Landfill, downtown Manhattan, 2 acres of wheat planted & harvested, summer 1982


They then managed to build a wind powered mill which powered a small electrical stone grinder into which they could put all the wheat which they had gathered. Making their own flour they brought the community together to make pizza and bread, for free. To view some images of the project, here is a link to a slideshow of Flickr images (alternatively click on one of the links above).

Taking this as my inspiration I would like to propose a mobile table and benches, which will be mounted on the frame of a trailer, upon which people will be able to make dough to bake their own pizza and bread. I will be importing a Country Living Grain Mill which I intend to connect up to an exercise bike, as demonstrated in the video below.



This can be installed in the back of the van which will be used to move the table so that the back doors can be opened up and the flour can be delivered directly onto the table so that people can make their dough instantly!

Richard (SEA4) has very kindly offered to donate his pizza oven with which we will be able to make fantastic pizzas, as we discovered last year.

The deadline for applications is this friday so wish me luck and I am very excited about the implications of this project, both short and long term. Although this may seem to be quite different to my usual practice (sound art) I am equally interested in this aspect of community work and wouldn't want to be labelled a sound artist. There are also various aspects of this work which relate to my public art project last year in which I installed a stile over the gate at the Kelvingrove Bandstand as a passive protest installation about the neglect of such an important historical and social space.

Parabolic Reflector

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 the fundamental 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.

Beshkan! (1991)

Here is a pretty great video that I found on this blog 'Belog' which I discovered through the website of a magazine called Bidoun which is about Art & Culture from the Middle East.

Heavy Metal Drummer- Short film 2005 England/Morocco

Synopsis:
The film tells the story of a 15 year's old Moroccan who is the only heavy metal fan in his town Essaouira. He spends his weekends playing traditional ballads in a wedding band with his two cousins but dreams of playing thrash metal and headlining Monsters of Rock.

Year of Production: 2005 Momac film Ltd
Director, Screenwriter and producer : Luke Morris, Toby MacDonald, Amanda Boyle
Principal Cast: Yassine Jari

Musical credits Morocco/Maroc:
Music on headphones/ Musique sur walkman:
Clear Crisis Act
Closing Music/ Musique fin de film:
(In) The Nightmare

Old Videos of Kelvingrove Bandstand

Footage from SCRAN



Edited video from youtube

Cabaret Voltaire & DADA

Cabaret Voltaire was the name of a nightclub in Zürich, Switzerland. It was founded by Hugo Ball, with his companion Emmy Hennings on February 5, 1916 as a cabaret for artistic and political purposes.

The cabaret featured spoken word, dance and music. The soirees were often raucous events with artists experimenting with new forms of performance, such as sound poetry and simultaneous poetry. Mirroring the maelstrom of World War I raging around it, the art it exhibited was often chaotic and brutal. On at least one occasion, the audience attacked the Cabaret's stage. Though the Cabaret was to be the birthplace of the Dadaist movement, it featured artists from every sector of the avant-garde, including Futurism's Marinetti. The Cabaret exhibited radically experimental artists, many of whom went on to change the face of their artistic disciplines; featured artists included Kandinsky, Paul Klee, de Chirico and Max Ernst.

Dada Manifesto (1916, Hugo Ball)
Read at the first public DADA soiree, Zurich, July 14th (1916)