Appropriate for the hurricane tropical storm: Pierre Sauvageot’s Harmonic Fields. Instruments/installation pieces played by the wind.

(via Everyday Listening)

This installation looks fantastic:

Five modified toy pianos circulate the gallery on five elevated wooden tracks. Each piano is equipped with small speakers to play amplified sounds picked up from conductive tape on the tracks. Each piano also contains small motors which intermittently spin to strike the toy pianos’ tone bars, adding acoustic elements to the overall soundtrack of the work.

Needless to say, the idea of toy pianos riding atop magnetic tape and picking up samples as they go is a brain-tickler.

Fantasie no. 1 for Mobile Pianos (by Joe Winter)

[p.s. I disappeared again, due to the curse of saying “I’ll be back” on one’s blog. Turns out the 1st year of a PhD program is work-intensive. No promises, but I will try to squeeze in the funs here as much as possible.]

I was lucky enough to visit artist Craig Colorusso’s installation piece Sun Boxes today. I’ve blogged it before, with the video of a windy test run that was making the rounds, but with slightly better conditions (and my new iPhone) I put together a minute of new video. Nothing can really match the spatial feeling of walking through the speakers, trying to identify and follow the notes, but for those of us who sat in front of the field, trying to not get baked by the sun, this is pretty close! Apologies for the trembly camera work—apparently I need to practice that with the new phone.

I got a chance to talk with Craig about the installation. First, some practical details: each box (there are 20, but plans for 100 in the future) plays a single note, stored as a sample on a chip (they’re recordings of him playing guitar, although they sound like they could be synthesized tones), and the sample lengths are varied so that patterns emerge and repeat rarely, Discreet Music-style. Craig made a great point in line with what Eno has said about Discreet Music: faint music makes you listen, and you begin to notice the sounds that are not part of the music. Although not terribly quiet (in a good way—it really created a sense of aural exterior space), I found that Sun Boxes made me notice the other sounds of the outdoors and try to incorporate them into the “music”—birdsong, mowers, golfers (we were next to a golf course). The whole thing is a B flat 6 chord, separated out spatially, and it’s the kind of thing you wish you could hear faintly all the time.

The economy of parts in the installation is very pleasant: each box is self-contained, with a solar panel on top and no way to store power, they just stop when the sun goes away. I will say that I kind of wish the tones were synthesized in each box; they didn’t need to be recordings, and there is something elegant about the idea of solar-powered oscillators producing tones, as if the photons blow through the circuit, stopping only with nightfall or a passing cloud.

[and then, to complete my “boxes of the north shore tour,” we had lunch at the clam box. also recommended.]

OrganOOn is a great site-specific sound installation. 

For Electrified02, [Roberta Gigante] decided to ‘hack’ the harbour of Ghent with a sound installation that turned twelve rusty, gigantic metal pipes stored there into didgeridoo-like sound cylinders.

I’m big fan of turning environmental features into musical instruments. This reminds me a bit of those public organs that make sound from tidal motion.

(via we make money not art)

British artist Marcus Coates made videos of people singing along to slowed-down birdsong in ordinary human habitats. Then he sped the videos back up to pitch.

The result is pretty fantastic. The method reminds me of the backwards singing on Radiohead’s “Like Spinning Plates” or this backwards-filmed high school video set to Hall & Oates.

You can hear slowed down birdsong here (linked via Boing Boing).

The installation of Coates’ videos, “Dawn Chorus,” puts them scattered around a room, creating a weird morning songbird sonic environment.

And the birds tag just keeps getting better and better.

 (via Daniel Stephen Johnson)

Sun Boxes are an environment to enter and exit. It’s comprised of twenty speakers operating independently each powered by solar panels. There is a different guitar sample in each box all playing together making the composition. The guitar samples are all of different lengths so the whole piece keeps evolving. Participants are encouraged to walk amongst the speakers. It sounds different inside of the array. There is a different sense of space inside. Certain speakers will be closer and louder therefore the piece will sound different to different people in different positions throughout the array. Creating a unique experience for everyone. There are no batteries involved. The Sun Boxes are reliant on the sun. When the sun sets the music stops. The piece changes as the length of the day changes. Making the participants aware of the cycle of the day.

(via Super Bon!)

Yessss, more media related to this exhibit! More birds here.

[I’m still in the thesis trenches, to emerge…eventually]

(via Networked Music Review)

From he of the guitar-playing finches:

In Harmonichaos, which was on view at Paula Cooper Gallery until this weekend, [Céleste] Boursier-Mougenot affixes the grooves of harmonicas to the mouths of vacuum cleaners, and the staggered grid of thirteen pairs produces an undulating, reedy drone.

Like Pauline Oliveros meets Jeff  Koons.

[I’ve been MIA from the blog so I can get some work done on my thesis. I’ll try to pop in occasionally to post some little things like this, but it will sadly be sparse for a while.]

(via Rhizome)

A video taken by Alex Ross, because I still love this installation so much.

(via Unquiet Thoughts)

p.s. a friend of mine made this mashup

update: Tumblr isn’t playing nice with the embed code (keeps working and then suddenly just displaying the raw html), so you’ll have to click to the link to see it!

Tristan Perich’s Interval Studies are a set of speaker arrays that play with microtonal systems. These arrays take a conventional musical interval (like the perfect 4th from D1 to G1) and divide it up into very small intervals (so 99 steps from D to G instead of 4). Then (and this is the best part), the speakers play all of these steps simultaneously, allowing you to hear the space between the notes in a dense cloud.

Imagine banging your fist on the piano, except that instead of hitting 4 adjacent notes, you can hit 99 in the same tonal space. Awesome, right?

The work fits well into the rest of Tristan’s oeuvre: the tones emitted by the speakers are 1-bit pulse waves, and the economy of a simple array of bare speakers is quite aesthetically pleasing.

Here is a little documentary+interview with Tristan about the project (it only plays the sound for a moment, but I bet it’s better to hear in person anyway. Also, this embed won’t work for RSS or dashboard readers):

(via Networked Music Review)