MIT sound creations @mitsoundcreations-blog - Tumblr Blog

Posts

The Kinetic Speakers and Sound Creations (4.320/1) course designed and constructed a large circular kinetic speaker, a wheel whose center incorporates two 12” loud speakers that play back sound. Collective and individual audio works made by the students were wirelessly projected from these speakers. The circular speaker wheel functions as an object, activated during a collective, multimedia choreography. The project was derived from our kinetic speaker studies that combined collective efforts to design, build, and play objects with historical and theoretical depth to perform and diffuse sound in completely new ways. A performance was staged in MIT’s the Cube on March 15, 2017 which, incorporated drummer, John Colpitts (Laurie Anderson, Man Forever), who played the wheel like a giant metal drum together with the students. The collective drumming performance activated the space as a deconstructed percussion instrument, and provided a dynamically embodied experience for both performers and listeners. Jon Whitney (Brainwashed.com) joined the performance as a guest sleeper. The group then moved on to MIT’s main building and merged with Ian Condry’s Dialogue Disco.

Kinetik Speaker Wheel built by Kinetik Speakers And Experimental Sound Creations class, March 2017

Students explore and sound record the Mars Lab in e14 and the exterior of MIT. Each student is free to meander as he or she pleases, creating a dynamic listening and multiperspectival arrangement when the recordings are edited together.

MIT Sound Creations presents a dynamic lecture and performance featuring student audio works, class experiments, a kinetic speaker and multichannel diffusion, and collective choreographies.

More +

#mit #art culture and technology #sound #experimental music #jan st. werner #mitsoundcreations #kinetic speakrs #performance

Measured drawings of the kinetic speaker the class has been working through. Included in this sketch document is the inspiration sketch/image Nicolas uploaded a week prior.

These drawings are meant to visualize the design as of now, as well as point out design flaws, and locations where more consideration is needed before fabrication.

#kineticspeaker #sketch #drawing #axonometric #elevation

On Saturday, February 25th, a good deal of progress was made in the conceptualization of the kinetic speaker. Briefly, we determined that the speaker would best be structured so as to resemble an hourglass or diabolo toy, its body composed of two conical speakers oriented in opposite directions and linked by a cylindrical axel in which could be housed the speaker’s “guts” (an amplifier, a battery, and, possibly, an Arduino board); these three component parts, we decided, would best be seated within a welded-steel framework—a raw, formally spare structure suited to optimal stability and acoustic performance.

Though much remains to be decided as to the physical construction of the wheel, several conceptual aspects have been neatly resolved, and one of the biggest breakthroughs in this regard concerns the choreographic/performative dimension of the work. Through discussion of feedback and relationships of circulation between the wheel and its environment(s), we arrived at the idea of placing contact microphones along the edges of the wheel, thus amplifying and sounding the course of its rolling.

There are several precedents for this sort of tautological or self-referential structuring (Robert Morris’s 1961 sculpture Box with the Sound of its Own Making comes to mind), but the most radical potential for this dynamic lies in possible approaches to environmental design. José had initially recommended the incorporation of interactive objects (e.g. ramps and boxes) into the wheel’s “performance,” and the above illustration indicates how, conceiving of the Cube as a grid, we might position such objects alongside textured panels or strips (bubble wrap, ridged metal), which would produce interesting sounds when rolled over. The true benefit of the “gridded” environment is that it allows for the graphical notation of space itself (see diagram “B” above); it remains to be determined how we might visualize duration using such a model (if in fact we want to), but on the most basic register, these notational diagrams would help to establish static or dynamic parameters in which our performances could unfold.

“When a sound is put before us what do we do with it? It is not a question of just listening. We hear, yes, but we wish to make it relevant to our perception. If there is an unfamiliar sound our ears prick up. We investigate. Maybe this response originates from life preserving faculties. Familiar sounds, on the other hand, become part of the backdrop of everyday life. We ignore them until they cease to exist. (We might then notice their telling absence.)”

Edwin Prévost (AMM), No Sound Is Innocent, 1995

The following strings of words, here presented as pseudo-“poems,” were parsed from Diana Deutsch’s auditory-illusion project “Phantom Words,” in which looped syllables are (falsely) perceived as fragments of language by listeners.

No way / Nutmeg / No bag / Mane / Sniffling / Anthill / Tuesday

Ambien / Junkyard / Show Up / Terrapin / Campaign

The very rudimentary sketch at top illustrates how we might design our kinetic speaker to allow for both a centralized placement (i.e., a positioning of the speaker at the wheel’s axis) and an alternative peripheral placement. Whereas a central positioning of the speaker would facilitate an evenness and consistency of sound transmission even in the course of movement, the peripheral position I have indicated (labeled number “2″ in the sketch) would cause generated sound to move in elliptical sweeps with each rotation of the wheel. So placed, the speaker would trace out a coiled—as opposed to level or horizontal—path as the wheel is rolled. This conceit is informed, in part, by musician Stephen Cornford’s “Air Guitar” installation of 2008—a piece in which an amplifier and guitar were articulated in wide, airborne rotations by a wheelchair motor. Cornford himself describes the sounds he produced as unfolding in an aeolian loop (referencing, one imagines, not the aeolian mode, but rather the aeolian harp). Video documentation of the piece, perhaps necessary to an understanding of its structure, can be seen here.

Alex mentioned during the last class potential stability issues if the speaker-wheel ended up being too thin, proportionally. It made me think of how we could build the moving speaker, also with limited resources. An extension of the driver with a light structure is an option, it reminded me of class inspiration Manuel Casanueva’s Edros Vs. Oidos game experiment in Valparaíso. Choreographic potential, economy of resources, sound amplification and a fast construction.

Maybe two speakers, each facing opposite sides. Rims can be metallic, sticks can be wooden. If it’s big, it’s also proportional to a group of ~10 handling it and a large space like the ACT cube.

#nicolask

Jose Rivera demonstrates SPEAR and transforms a sound recording by Jan St. Werner into a granular sound piece reminiscent to Iannis Xenakis' UPIC system. SPEAR is an application for audio analysis, editing and synthesis. The analysis procedure represents a sound with many individual sinusoidal tracks (partials), each corresponding to a single sinusoidal wave with time varying frequency and amplitude. The analyzed sound can be manipulated and restructured with a graphical user interface similar to Metasynth or HighC.

#SoundCloud #music #MIT sound creations

MIT ACT Course led by German composer and electronic musician Jan St. Werner. TA: José Rivera

Students: Christina Chen, Langston Fitts, Liang Hai, Dohyun Lee, Nicole L’Huillier, So Yeon Lim, Xinyi Ma, MyDung Thi Nguyen, Adam M Pere, Sean Phillips, Andy Kelleher Stuhl, Brian Tice

There is a profound relationship between sound, body, and space. To explore these concepts, this class connects traditional and theoretical knowledge with hands-on experimentation to experience sound as an unstable yet sculptural art form. We reject the notion that recorded or acousmatic music is best reproduced on traditional mono or stereo speaker systems. We diffuse and listen to sound in relation to a variety of spatial properties and learn that sound and space react with one other in complex ways. Thus we gain new perspectives on sound production and performance, exploring their potential for artistic creation with critical curiosity. The class actively takes part by learning and inventing production techniques, understanding basic principles of acousmatic & experimental music, and inventing new strategies for sound perception.

This video is documentation the Kinetic Speaker Performance at MIT on May 4th, 2016.

edited by adam m pere

https://issuu.com/mitsoundcreations/docs/kinetic_booklet_02-9-9-16_final_spr

the electrosonic imaginary

From Friedrich Jurgenson’s electronic voice phenomena in 1959 through to contemporary art, electricity and sound together hold a strong and eerie claim on the imagination.

Jurgenson left recorders running for days on end and claimed they captured voices from the spirit world, brief cryptic messages from departed souls. EVP believers do the same today, circulating their recordings online.

Decades later, artist Christina Kubisch conscripted the world of electromagnetic vibrations in her work by giving visitors special headphones that transduced them into audible sound. She would string cables through galleries and fill them with vibrations for the roaming listeners to discover — a kind of worldbuilding through electrical sound. But then something changed.

With the electrical walks Kubisch stopped manufacturing her own electrosonic worlds and started weaving them as paths through the urban electromagnetiscape. Her special headphones gave access to a secret ecosystem of communication and surveillance that hides behind a thin acoustic veil.

Microphones and speakers become like the sunglasses in John Carpenter’s They Live, transducing the subliminal, revealing the world within the world, whether supernatural or industrial. We experienced that phenomenon through our field recorders when we explored the subterranean tunnels of MIT and the Kendall station - taking up electrical ears, stepping into the electrosonic imaginary where the whispers of spirits and machines intermingle.

sound & listening

a reading of an excerpt from Listening to Noise and Silence by Salomé Voegelin

for the best aural experience listen with headphones

#sound art #listening #hearing #Salomé Voegelin

Objects in your head, made out of sound

Acousmatic experiences via acoustic sensory stimulation such as ASMR, Binaural Beats, Intrusive Intimimate Storytelling, etc

Robert Ashley: Automatic Writing, Pillars, for David Moodey

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rh_TC8j_JkE

https://ubusound.memoryoftheworld.org/ashley_robert/Ashley-Robert_Pillars-For-David_Moodey_2007.mp3

http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00219#.VyZKX6vg9d0

Andy Graydon: Fig.1 (these things we know)

http://andygraydon.tumblr.com

“The MP3 saga boils down to the question of how to make a profit from the insufficiency of the human ear or the distracted state of most listeners.” Sound theorist Jonathan Sterne interviewed by Geert Lovink http://computationalculture.net/article/reflections-on-the-mp3-format

Trending Blogs

Recently Viewed Blogs

MIT sound creations