I am so charmed by these new muppets online bits (esp. Statler and Waldorf webcam-style at the end).
And another (you may need to go to the actual blog page to see it):
(via Joana Monteiro)
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)
I don’t know much about this piece, “Voice” for solo flute by Toru Takemitsu, but I love how it uses the mouth for vocalizing and flute-playing
(via New Musiology)
This video is racing around the blogosphere right now, and for good reason.
Basically, a guy took a voice recording and analyzed the frequency spectrum, mapped that spectrum to a piano-playing device, and used the piano like an 88-band vocoder, playing the keys to recreate the frequencies of the sampled speech. If that doesn’t make any sense, watch the video. Whoa.
(via SynthGear)
And a Yodeling Meter, for measuring your yodels. (Just the pitch, apparently.)
(via LIFE)
The “Laryngaphone” from 1929 transmitted sounds STRAIGHT FROM THE VOCAL CHORDS.
(it’s a good thing we don’t use our mouths for anything speech-related, huh?)
(via LIFE)
A lovely video of sound poet Jaap Blonk and friend drawing pictures with their voices. (There are a couple more videos worth watching at the via link below.)
(via diapsalmata)
The Pre-History of Recorded Sound
In the various histories of the events leading up to Edison’s invention of the phonograph, Édouard-Léon Scott is a standard figure. His contribution to the process is the phonautograph—a machine that used a stylus to record sounds not to be heard, but to be seen. The idea was that with some development, these recordings (basically wavy lines in sooty paper) could be “read” and deciphered. (You can read Léon-Scott’s description of his device here [pdf link])
These early experiments introduced some of the basic features of the early phonograph, but were not actually legible. What had been encoded on these papers was not able to be decoded. Excitingly, in 2008, the First Sounds collaborative was able to read a phonautogram into (quite noisy) sound, discovering the first recording of the human voice, predating Edison’s first recording by 17 years!
What is really interesting about all of this to me (aside from faintly hearing the voice of someone from 1860) is how Léon-Scott, the sooty paper, and the First Sounds collaborative present an example of encoding and decoding. Stuart Hall’s model suggests that in any kind of communication, messages sent between people are first encoded by the sender, and then decoded by the recipient. This encoding can happen technologically, like the conversion of sound to electricity and back in a telephone, or culturally, like the use of in-group language. What is interesting about Hall’s model is that the sender and receiver do not need to be using the same code to encode and decode; for example, when Dick Cheney says “enhanced interrogation,” he is referring to a particular practice from a particular angle. Some people might understand that to mean “a tough but necessary kind of interrogation,” while others decode it as “unacceptable torture.”
With this phonautogram, encoding and decoding happen according to different codes in a more literal way. Léon-Scott encoded these lines to be interpreted visually, but in the video above, this trace of the human voice is interpreted sonically.
(via Dust-to-Digital)
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