Self Organizing Still-Life

I’m intrigued by this Self Organizing Still-Life created by David Fried. Once in a while I find out about a project that is so simple, yet so ingenious, I wish I’d come up with it myself. 

These perfectly round spheres are set in motion by sound waves, through the level object they rest upon. The movement of each sphere can never be predicted, and they al move around in some sort of random choreography. There are more examples to be found on David’s website. 

Architecture like frozen music

What does sound look like? It’s a question we have seen answered by quite some artists, creating sculptures of sounds, frozen at one moment in time. Like Yes/No by Carsten Nicolai or the Rolex Tower soundwave sculpture. Never have I seen something like this Orproject design though. 

Christoph Klemmt, working for London based architecture and design firm Orproject, made this design for the Busan Opera House in South Korea, titled Anisotropia. The design is based on a twelve tone composition created by Klemmt, and while it remains unknown how exactly the composition is translated to the building, it is quite a remarkable sight, and I can only imagine the acoustic properties of a place like that. 

Thanks to Richard van Tol

Harmonic Fields

When I visited Ameland this summer I was surprised by the sounds I heard on the beach. Wind was blowing hard and played the ropes of the sailboats’ masts. I love to encounter those sounds, it’s like the elements are playing rhythms too complex for me to understand. 

But you can also help the wind a little by building some instruments. That’s what Pierre Sauvageot did with his Harmonic Fields sound installation. Wouldn’t it be magical to suddenly hear these wonderful sounds while walking in the dunes?

Door Augmented

Door Augmented is a ‘telematic sound sculpture’ created by Kathrin Stumreich whom we know from one of her previous projects: Fabric Machine. Door Augmented enables visitors to ‘remote control’ a door placed somewhere in an Austrian field, by opening and closing a door in the exhibition space. 

Sound and movement of the old barn door opening and closing are directly send back to the participant, thus ‘making the door an instrument’. 

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:

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Rainlith 2.0

Rainlith 2.0 captures the movement of the audience and reacts to this by moving it’s large rain-stick around. The sound of the stick is processed in real-time and fed back to the room via speakers. The nice thing about this kinetic sound installation is how it combines the acoustic sound of the rain-stick with electronic sounds, blending together both sound worlds.

The installation, created by Rui Gato, is located in an old grain silo, which seems to be like a perfect situation for a piece like this, as the sounds blend together perfectly, due to the acoustic properties of the silo.

Pendulum Sound Machine

Pendulum Sound Machine is a sound installation created by Kouichi Okamoto as part of an exhibition curated by Designboom, called Yakitate, which is Japanese for ‘freshly baked’. This nice set of pendulums hanging over a record player should sound as good as it looks, but does it? 

It really is one of those cases in which the form is well thought out, but the function is neglected. A plate just doesn’t sound as well as a lot of other objects could. 

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Behind The Wall

A series of sound installations called Behind The Wall was set up in Stockholm, in May. A ten spots passers-by could plug-in their headphones in what seem to be mirror-less mirror frames, to listen ‘behind the wall’. What they would hear was a selection of binaural recordings.

A binaural recording is experienced best on headphones, it will really make you feel like you’re the one listening to the (recorded) world around you, you’ll hear sounds coming from all sides, including front and back. Behind The Wall is a nice promotion of sound-awareness, even though it was commissioned by a headphones brand (JAYS). 

The Definition of a Good Ringtone

It’s happened many times: I sit in a train, as all of a sudden a loud noise wakes up all the passengers. It’s a phone, as loud as can be. Thin, harsh music. Many faces turn to the source of the sound, watching it’s owner dig in his/her pocket to pick it up as soon as he/she can.

But it’s already too late. I don’t know the person, but now I know his/her love for German schlagers (and probably lots of beer and sausages, right?). Apart from the fact the sound annoys other people, what does it say about a person? What kind of prejudice does he/she leave?

This is a random example of a situation in which unwanted sound disturbs our living space, and there are many more. I cannot think of any good reason to use music as a ringtone anyway. It’s like wearing a button showing a tiny fragment of a painting by your favorite artist.

The music I like might not be the music you prefer (and I like to listen to a song from beginning to end, preferably on a quality sound system or headphones), and the sound of your three-year-old yelling might make you feel all warm inside, do you think it has the same effect on your colleagues? That being said, let’s look at the positive side of things. Is there such a thing as a good ringtone?

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The Transfinite

I have seen Ryoji Ikeda perform live once, and while his clean beeps and glitches might be best experienced on headphones (at least that’s my opinion), the combination with his video work synchronized to the sound definitely creates a kind of hypnotic experience. 

Ikeda was asked by the Park Avenue Armory, New York to expose his work in the huge Wade Thompson Drill Hall. So if you’re in the neighborhood, you can visit The Transfinite, and if you do, I would love to hear about the experience!

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