AntiVJ sent me this awesome footage of some work done with projecting onto 3D surfaces. The results are really beautiful and makes you wonder what this technique would look like if it was applied to the side of a building or some other large scale outdoor construction. With technologies like LCD paper beginning to emerge you also have to wonder what ideas like this will mean when instead of projecting, we can just cover surfaces with image design like this.
This installation also reminds me of the design of Storey Hall: RMIT where we have done some of the Liquid Architecture concerts in the years gone by. Liquid Architecture 8 is just around the corner BTW. Check out this years line up!
Tracking drums at Audrey Studios today for All India Radio. Recording drums seems to be the holy grail for lots of audio types and it’s a fair call. Lots of mics in a small area equals trouble, and it takes some time to figure out how to make it work for you. One of the things that is hard to get around is a good sounding drum kit. You must have this or else all your labour will come to naught. You can make any kit sound OK if you know what you’re doing as far as tuning, re-skinning and general maintenance go. But if that’s not your bag, you got to hire yourself a fine sounding kit.
Enter Travis Demsey. Aside from being a renaissance man (…he’s a busy guy), Travis has racked up a mighty collection of drums in his time. I think he told me once that when he was on tour instead of partying on, he’d get an early night after playing a show so that the next day he and his drum tech could head out into whatever town they were in to track down another set of vintage drums. That’s how you end up with 80+ odd kits I guess…! Travis puts his large collection to good use by hiring them and himself out to recording sessions. Travis appears with whatever kit you need, a few snare options and hangs about to set them and tune them to taste for your session.
Anyhow, Travis has this a’67 blue sparkle Ludwig set that is similar to this, - it’s a great sounding set of drums. I’ve used it once before with All India Radio. You can hear the (low resolution) results here on a track called ‘Four Three’. It has a great big old bass drum that sounds larger than it looks and has this great bottom octave - by bottom octave, I’m talking about the low down sub frequencies that you feel as much as hear. When you’ve got all the mics in place and have messed about with the options, it’s always a good feeling when you sit down to start doing the first bunch of takes and the kit sounds great. It makes the drummer happy to play and the band happy that their music is going to have a good solid foundation.
I get to hear and work on lots of records where people will track their own drum-kits themselves at home (or wherever they can). Usually the reason for doing this is money. Hiring a big room in a decent studio is not cheap if you’re an independent musician/band, and the idea of hiring a drum-kit on top of this (when the drummer usually has one) seems outlandish. At the same time however most everybody wants their records to sound as good as they can. There is a false economy here, because when you hear a lot of these self recorded drums they don’t sound so great. Usually the money saved on the DIY approach goes to paying a guy to sit down in front of a computer and replace all the sounds to get a better, but still not great result.
I think that it is possible to get a good drum recording with the equipment and resources that most people at home have access to. One important factor is the amount of experience the person recording has at recording generally (experience is a subject that I like to bang on about at length, but won’t here), and the other is the sound of the kit and the room it’s being played in. Instead of paying a studio nerd save yourself some money, and either get a guy to make your kit sound good (new skins, a good tune and all that) or hire a top sounding kit in for your session. This will get you much closer to a good drum recording than any amount of expensive mics and fancy recorders will.
This is similar to the technique that my good friend and partner in art crime, Daniel Crooks uses to generate much of his work. Dan has taken this technique in a bunch of different directions - from shooting off moving vehicles with one camera to shooting with up to 7 cameras at the same time. All use a post-production technique similar to the one mentioned above, which Dan likes to call “time-slicing”. One of his multi-camera shoots was blown out to the same number of plasma screens (all set in profile orientation) to make a gorgeous shifting and morphing 360º panorama of downtown Sydney. Dan has just completed a major exhibition of a whole range of these works (which he also renders as landscape style photo prints) at Sherman Galleries in Sydney.
Dan pretending to be busy at Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
I’m lucky enough to get to work with Dan on sound for these pieces and it’s always interesting to sit and talk with him about the ways we can render this technique in sound in a way that is as aesthetically and conceptually interesting as the visuals. Over the years we’ve tried a bunch of techniques and a mixed bag of results. One of our earlier attempts was for a train piece which you can see here.
If you ever get the chance to go and see these works, I’d recommend it. Not as a self-serving recommendation due to my involvement, but because I think Dan’s work is truly interesting and involving. His ability to envision a different way to see the environment around us and then render his ideas with such interest and detail is rare in video art. Too much video art requires high concept - reading a bunch of supporting text (usually bullshit), or being up to speed with the post-modern justifications (usually bullshit with flashing lights). The great thing about Dan’s work, is that you can walk right up to it and appreciate entirely on it’s own terms - no art school education required. However, if you wanna go and box it in with a bunch of words, then there is plenty there for you to get verbal about.
1. LISTEN TO THE BIRDS That’s where all the music comes from. Birds know everything about how it should sound and where that sound should come from. And watch hummingbirds. They fly really fast, but a lot of times they aren’t going anywhere. 2. YOUR GUITAR IS NOT REALLY A GUITAR Your guitar is a divining rod. Use it to find spirits in the other world and bring them over. A guitar is also a fishing rod. If you’re good, you’ll land a big one. 3. PRACTICE IN FRONT OF A BUSH Wait until the moon is out, then go outside, eat a multi-grained bread and play your guitar to a bush. If the bush doesn’t shake, eat another piece of bread. 4. WALK WITH THE DEVIL Old delta blues players referred to amplifiers as the ‘devil box.’ And they were right. You have to be an equal opportunity employer in terms of who you’re bringing over from the other side. Electricity attracts demons and devils. Other instruments attract other spirits. An acoustic guitar attracts Casper. A mandolin attracts Wendy. But an electric guitar attracts Beelzebub. 5. IF YOU’RE GUILTY OF THINKING, YOU’RE OUT If your brain is part of the process, you’re missing it. You should play like a drowning man, struggling to reach shore. If you can trap that feeling, then you have something that is fur bearing. 6. NEVER POINT YOUR GUITAR AT ANYONE Your instrument has more power than lightning. Just hit a big chord, then run outside to hear it. But make sure you are not standing in an open field. 7. ALWAYS CARRY YOUR CHURCH KEY You must carry your key and use it when called upon. That’s your part of the bargain. Like One String Sam. He was a Detroit street musician in the fifties who played a homemade instrument. His song ‘I Need A Hundred Dollars’ is warm pie. Another church key holder is Hubert Sumlin, Howlin’ Wolf’s guitar player. He just stands there like the Statue of Liberty making you want to look up her dress to see how he’s doing it. 8. DON’T WIPE THE SWEAT OFF YOUR INSTRUMENT You need that stink on there. Then you have to get that stink onto your music. 9. KEEP YOUR GUITAR IN A DARK PLACE When you’re not playing your guitar, cover it and keep it in a dark place. If you don’t play your guitar for more than a day, be sure to put a saucer of water in with it. 10. YOU GOTTA HAVE A HOOD FOR YOUR ENGINE Wear a hat when you play and keep that hat on. A hat is a pressure cooker. If you have a roof on your house the hot air can’t escape. Even a lima bean has to have a wet paper towel around it to make it grow.
So just now 2 people that I have not laid eyes on for some time, one who lives down in Tassie and another that lives in the UK, both happen upon this blog here pretty much simultaneously and let me know. The universe is totally awesome like that. Get into it while you still can people.
A team of doctoral students led by University of Utah physicist Orest Symko have constructed a device that ‘converts heat into sound and then into electricity.’ They believe it could work as an alternative to photovoltaic cells and be in production in two years.
The project was funded by the US military as a way to harness the waste heat produced by radar systems and power electronics in the field.
When heat is applied — with matches, a blowtorch or a heating element — the heat builds to a threshold. Then the hot, moving air produces sound at a single frequency, similar to air blown into a flute.
‘You have heat, which is so disorderly and chaotic, and all of a sudden you have sound coming out at one frequency,’ Symko says.
Then the sound waves squeeze the piezoelectric device, producing an electrical voltage. Symko says it’s similar to what happens if you hit a nerve in your elbow, producing a painful electrical nerve impulse.
Longer resonator cylinders produce lower tones, while shorter tubes produce higher-pitched tones.
Devices that convert heat to sound and then to electricity lack moving parts, so such devices will require little maintenance and last a long time. They do not need to be built as precisely as, say, pistons in an engine, which loses efficiency as the pistons wear.
In this article from The Age today. David Hockney, “Britain’s best-loved living painter” reckons that iPods are to blame for us not living “..in a very visual age.”
“I think it’s all about sound. People plug in their ears and don’t look much, whereas for me my eyes are the biggest pleasure.
“You notice that on buses. People don’t look out of the window; they are plugged in and listening to something.
“I think we are not in a very visual age and it’s producing badly dressed people. They have no interest in mass or line or things like that.”
I think people are wearing their iPod’s for a number of different reasons, some of them complex, some not:
we like music
we like to listen to podcasts & we like to feel as if we’re learning or getting something done when we’re in transit
we like not having to occupy ourselves with our own thoughts when we are in transit, or waiting for something/someone
we like to pretend we’re in a movie with our own custom soundtrack
we like to feel like we’re not jammed into some form of public transport next to lots of other people who are in our personal space
we like the way it can help us retreat into our internal world
we like to get away from the sound of the city
we like people to know that we own a neat gadget
we like people to know what we are not interested in talking to them without having to be rude and say so
we like the advertised images of iPod people, we we’d like to see ourselves as one of them
we make decisions about wether we want to be overloaded with visual information or not
I’m sure there are more reasons, but one thing that seems pretty clear to me is that aside from our personal valuing of music, the iPod is more symptomatic our anti-social tendencies and the aural ugliness of our cities. I think we’re nowhere near an “aural age” as Hockney is implying.Unplug the iPod and just have a listen to what’s happening on any major street corner and I’d say that you’ll pretty quickly come to the realization that David didn’t really think too hard about what he was saying.
Our cities sound terrible. If we we’re living in some kind of aural age then wouldn’t we be living in a better, or at least different aural environment? Our cities develop and change visually far more rapidly that they do aurally. It’s a commonly held piece of folk wisdom amongst many sound practitioners that if we could see the sounds that our cities make, most of us would be pretty horrified how full of aural clutter the urban sound world is. Hence the need to retreat into the sonic eco-bubble of the iPod. One huge and massive benefit of us heading into an era with less and less petrol driven machines will be that our urban soundscape will become quieter. What we live with now is the aural equivalent of the airborne pollution 1800’s London. The effect that this will have upon people that live in cities will be enormous. Subjected to the constant high sound levels that our cities currently generate is more than enough to make people stressed and anxious. Can you imagine trying to get to sleep listening to a recording of a city street corner at midday? Is it no surprise that the most sought out areas of our suburbs are ones that have quiet streets? How many of you have had at some time in your life a visit from the police due to a noise complaint? Sound may not be the first thing we think about, but it’s among the first we perceive. It’s not the only factor that makes us city people anxious by any means, but we can’t underestimate it’s subconscious effect.
Much of what I’m saying here doesn’t go to a response regarding the vast amount of visual clutter that also covers our urban environment. One thing that is clear is that we consider how something looks as a higher priority that how it sounds (or affects sound) in it’s design and creation - opinions about particular architecture, urban planning models and advertising aside. The design of the iPod itself should indicate that how something looks is still very important to us, more important than the fact that most of us are listening to highly un-dynamic low resolution audio on them. If anything however the iPod is a retreat from both the considered visual cutter and unconsidered aural soundscape that our urban environments create.
When heat is applied — with matches, a blowtorch or a heating element — the heat builds to a threshold. Then the hot, moving air produces sound at a single frequency, similar to air blown into a flute.
