Vibrations and how they get to your ears.
Noise for airports is a blog about culture, sound, music, and technology.
You can filter the posts to see just things I wrote or made.
Updated (sometimes) by Nick Seaver.
A lego tribute to Jean Tinguely. I wish they made those lego kits for things like this.
(by roman gerold)
From zedequalszee, a very fun-looking public sculpture:
Erwin Stache, “87,3 Kilo Ohm”
My favourite thing about this sound sculpture is that it encourages people to play together in public.
Untitled (for William Tager) (2006) - Dave Dyment
A radio for every available frequency in a given space, all tuned to their lowest possible volume.
Beautiful concept, though the Tager reference is a little morbid.
(via Rhizome)
Jinsheng Wang’s turntable sculptures:
The products in this line use three salvaged turntables two that have been converted to gardens and the third that plays vinyl. I accidentally became a collector of old radios and turntables because in the 1990s it was expensive and difficult to buy parts, so I decided to buy old turntables for parts. Moreover, I have always liked the physical appearance of them. Now, I understand that I was attracted to their basic geometry: the circle, the line or arm and the cube.
(via PSFK)
As usual, a fantastic sculptural kinetic sound work from Zimoun. When I’m done with my thesis, I think I’m just going to collect large groups of small things for a few months.
(via today and tomorrow)
This is a pretty sculpture, although I wish there was a way to make the strings more immediately responsive. (Would be tough though, given that they have to spin up first.) The description, from YouTube, from Rhizome:
“Visions of the Amen” is an interactive kinetic sculpture by Mitchell F Chan. The piece is brought to life by the voice of talented young soprano Ashleigh Semkiw, performing in this video Messiaen’s Poemes Pour Mi. The primary elements of the sculpture are 16 strings, weighed down on one end by brass bars and attached at the other end to motors, spin at various speeds to sweep out those ghostly sine-wave forms, and pull up and down on the brass rods. The resultant visual effect, overall, looks something like 16 brass rods dancing, bobbing up and down in a forest of ghostly columns.
Each string in the arrangement is activated by a different note, and spins with a velocity dependent on the volume of that note. So each song and unique delivery creates a different ballet. The microphone feeds into a software that I wrote in Processing, which does some pitch and volume analysis, and then exports PWM values for all the motors via serial protocol to a set of microcontrollers.
(via Rhizome)
Over at Weird Vibrations, Ben blogged about an art project that uses the same principle of acoustic levitation as this video I blogged a few days ago. He comes to a similar conclusion as I did about the impact of these demonstrations on one’s ideas about “sound”:
Sonolevitation “wows” us because we imagine sound as propagating in an autonomous and indescribable channel – a channel that isn’t quite physical.
I would add that it is this kind of conception is what allows someone like Pierre Schaeffer to say that “sonorous objects” are not physical things, but perceptual ones. He doesn’t mean that the objects are relative or subjective, but that they reside in their perception by an ear (and he assumes that all ears hear more or less the same). This is a defensible position, but there is no sense of the physical embodiment of sound in his definition of musique concrète, as he discounts the tapes and instruments that produce sounds as “not the sonorous object,” and certainly does not consider it in the air. Projects like Sonolevitation do the good work of reminding us that sounds are physical things, even when not fixed in a medium or produced by a machine.
(via THIS IS WEIRD VIBRATIONS)
‘Tippoo’s Tiger’ is an awesome, life-size beast of carved and painted wood, seen in the act of devouring a prostrate European in the costume of the 1790s.
This sculpture/organ is in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, originally owned by Tipu Sultan, the “Tiger of Mysore” and avowed enemy of the British in the late 18th century.
Concealed in the bodywork is a mechanical pipe-organ with several parts, all operated simultaneously by a crank-handle emerging from the tiger’s shoulder. Inside the tiger and the man are weighted bellows with pipes attached. Turning the handle pumps the bellows and controls the air-flow to simulate the growls of the tiger and cries of the victim. The cries are varied by the approach of the hand towards the mouth and away, as the left arm - the only moving part - is raised and lowered.
Another pair of bellows, linked to the same handle, supplies wind for a miniature organ of 18 pipes built into the tiger, with stops under the tail.
Now that’s what I call a sculpture.
In some charming transmedia work, you can get a Tipu’s iTiger iPhone app, which includes a 3d model of the beast, or watch a half hour video about the history of the piece.
Siiiick.
(via Christina)
Another sculpture from Kitty Clark (I’m really enjoying the sonic sculptures these days, it seems).
This one uses eight of those dippy bird toys to complete circuits at uncontrolled intervals, resulting in some happy aleatoric bird music.
[FYI, the birds tag on this blog is used surprisingly often.]
