Accumulation

It's quite terrifying how much text I've compiled/research/written for my Masters research. It's all becoming all too apparent as I slash, burn and revegitate this tome.

Quiet at last

What a peaceful couple of days it's been! The last two weeks preceding this balm of a weekend have been hectic, stressful and mind-numbingly boring in periods of downtime. My 'real-job''s to blame for this, though for the sake of avoiding a rant that topic stops here. There's been so much on my mind art-wise as well.

The EAF (Experimental Art Foundation) show for next year Private Invocations has been readied for the 2009 program following some editing and refinement to the original proposal and solidifying the roster of contributing visual artists. The incoming EAF director (replacing the long serving Melentie Pandalovski in April 09) seems like an ideal candidate for the role.

The new release Tiefurt has inevitably been held up as well, after listening to the track sequence in various scenarios (at home, ipod, good speakers/bad speakers) I'm still having some quibbles over the quality of the sound in parts and whether I should pare down the extensive sleevenotes which will accompany the album.

It's been a refeshing (albeit guilty) coule of weeks away from the thesis and general research as well, the Xmas break from work will allow for some time on these things.

My various tinkerings in the early hours have been productive and revelatory in some cases. I've become converted and a bit obsessive over the creative and compositional potential of wireless interfacing via my iPod Touch using OSC controllers (Open Sound Control), which has been evident in a couple of posts documenting the Touch OSC application. I'm currently exploring the Sonic Life application which uses Conway's Game of Life algorithm, which is useful for triggering toggles in Max/MSP. I've been promising video documentation of these activities for a while, so I hope to post something soon.

Oh yes, the Xmas single will be recorded in the next couple of days and posted here for download forthwith.

Teapot Work, Sumi and Interior/Exterior updates

For the past week on bus trips to work my blackbook has been periodically filled with notes and diagrams for the creative works portfolio of the research project. It's common knowledge that when you spend an extended amount of time on a couple of works, they'll inevitably evolve, suiting a new idea or repair themselves after a stunning failure. Both the Teapot Work and Sumi_ have been in this situation for awhile.

Teapot Work:



In the case of the Teapot Work the main issue was presentation - the original idea was for a performance/installation situation that closely resembled the work that inspired it, Alvin Lucier's I Am Sitting In A Room. And that was the problem really. On Saturday morning I recorded a handful of iterations for both the red and white teapots, capturing the sound of teapot and playing the recording back into the teapot four times. As an experiment I left the window open as I recorded the first and successive captures. The sound of street traffic and birdcalls found their way into the teapot, which in turn subtly articulated the resonances at play. The drone of a vacuum cleaner in the room next door created an interesting effect whilst I was recording the white teapot.

During the week when I was thinking of ways I could define this work better, I reminded myself of the association between the teapot and its cultural connotations - as a ceremonial and domestic object. I thought about its domestic meaning and decided it should be better incorporated into this context. After listening to the recordings I made on Saturday morning the action of leaving the window open to the world outside seemed like a good idea. Along with this and other sounds of the house (vacuum cleaner, conversations, radio, music) the teapot is posited in a domestic and identifiable context. I'm still to make recordings of the green (big) teapot and Lauren's heavy metal teapot, further updates soon.

Sumi:



This work has been troublesome for most of the year. Since exhibiting it in an early form about a year ago, I immediately identified some problems with it shortly after seeing it in the gallery context. The main issue was the fact that the two elements in operation (sound and image) were physically distant to each other and thus didn't make the intended perceptual relationship between the two convincing. During a discussion with Robin Minard back in April, he suggested some ways of bringing these elements closer together, but nothing seemed to stick.

In Germany last month, whilst exploring a sprawling exhibition in the Hamburger Bahnhof I settled on the best way of presenting this work. Where in the early version of the work, the loudspeaker would sit on the ground facing up towards the observer, the loudspeaker would instead be suspended and brought up to face the observer at waist height. A second loudspeaker of a smaller size would be suspended at eye level, albeit behind the print. As the work is observed the sound element would oscillate slowly between the two speakers, from the visible loudspeaker the upper hidden one. This would in the first instance, direct the observers attention to the source of the sound and a visible symbol for listening (i.e. the loudspeaker), then as the sound moved to the hidden loudspeaker, this would assimilate the sound with the detail of the print. I tested this a couple of nights ago and despite some niggles it seems to be on the right track.

Interior/Exterior:

The idea for the third and final work came rather belatedly whilst I was in Europe. Expanding on some ink drawings I've had sitting around for awhile, I decided I would use this image as a blueprint for a sculptural sound object that operates on two independent and unified states. It's difficult to explain succinctly at the moment (it is 3AM after all) but I will say it's similar to the process of Sumi_, the exception being that it's more ambitious.

Breaking the blog silencio

Since I got back from Melbourne last Saturday I've had barely any time to sit still, let alone post something here. The week has been consumed with work drudgery and my evenings have been spent with mental recovery. No matter though, today has been a nice change of pace allowing me to work on the research project, revisiting the tpot work of yore and contemplating the adding some final touches to sumi_. Since I've got a family thing to run off to shortly the details on this morning's activities will be posted shortly.

Day 28 Adendum - a report on research

Whilst this vacation has been an excuse to eschew more real-world responsibilities for a short while, I though I'd take some time to cover some ground that night have been left out in previous posts. In some cases intentionally for the sake of 'thought purity'. Namely....

Research:

Since Robin became sick a couple of weeks ago, I've had to persevere on the art practice/research front. Whilst I was in Weimar I made some attempts to organise a meeting with the sound artist Rolf Julius, as anybody familiar with my line of work will know is an important influence. Unfortunately he was one his way to a routine visit to Finland for the week so I lost out there, Robin also informed me he was just diagnosed with terminal cancer which is pretty awful news. On a better note, I caught some inspiring sound art in Berlin and gathered enough initiative to start thinking about the research again. Since we've arrived in Dresden, my notebook has become a repository for coherent thoughts and ideas whilst the finishing touches to the creative works are becoming more concrete and foreseeable once I return.

Thesis a-go......oh.

Yesterday's progress on the thesis did not go entirely according to plan, as I gave up in the office around noon, trudged home and decided to rehearse for the upcoming EMU show on Friday. I'm taking a sick day from work today, currently holed up in the Unley Library giving it another shot. I think the next two weeks are going to be a rough journey.

Reports from the busy body

Thesis a-go go:

Sitting up in my castle room at uni I'm going to attempt to thrash the elusive fourth chapter of my thesis into some kind of layman sense.  Two-and-a-half months ago I set myself a deadline to get this instalment finished by the time I set off for Germany.  Now that my departure is only two weeks and a few days away, the realisation has come that I'm going to have to get cracking on this post haste.

Website a-go-go:

I also foolishly set myself another deadline a month ago to get the personally anticipated website launched before I leave.  It's coming along well which is good.

At last!

After three years of hunting:

Updates

Research:

As I was watching some gymnastics on TV last night I had a flashback to late 2005 when I was writing what would be my Honours thesis.  I don't know if it was the human bodies flinging themselves into the air with precision or the horrific accident one girl from Russia suffered that struck a synapse in my head and reminded me that writing a thesis is a feat of great concentration and pain.  At this point I switched the TV off and rewrote the introduction for chapter four. 

Kamera:

I just bought myself a new digital camera which I'm very pleased with.  I decided I should upgrade from my battered Olympus 3.2 mp and invest in something more 08 for the impending trip to Germany.  At $150, it's a steal for a Sony Cybershot and a fortunate coincidence that Harris Scarfes is discontinuing its camera department due to competitive market forces and flogging off everything for cheap.  I suspect the rapid improvement of camera integration in mobile phones may be the main reason for such department stores to be discontinuing stock.

Performance:

The show with Panpotique Electrical (Jason Sweeney) is coming up next Friday at EMU.  I'm currently putting together some new material as well as rehearsing sections of mimi for the show.

Baking patterns

Over the long weekend I spent some time revisiting some experiments I first set about two years ago. Directly referencing Alvin Lucier's Queen Of The South (1972), the process involves activating a responsive surface and strewn materials with sine waves. In the case of the 2006 experiments, I used a keyboard, Marshall amp (with detached 60W loudspeaker), baking tray and strewn materials including cous cous, flour, sugar and nutmeg grains. These experiments led to some interesting results, but they felt ill-suited to my research at the time and were put to the side.





I came back to this idea for two reasons - firstly, because the most recent installment of the research[1] had included references to Rolf Julius' warum grau, warum gelb, warum grun (2002) which uses the process of activating a responsive surface as one element of the work. Secondly, as I am struggling to realise the original concept for my third and final creative work[2], I decided to return to a previously explored idea that is a) easier to realise, and b) more suited to the scope of the research.

For the new experiments I retained the previous materials with the exception that I decided to use two small matching loudspeakers for broadcasting the sine waves and a very simple Max/MSP patch as a means of generating the sine waves. The benefit of using this simple sine wave generator opposed to the keyboard is it can accurately sweep through the resonant frequency range of the baking tray, finding its key areas of resonance and vibration.



At first I positioned the loudspeakers at various points beneath the baking tray in an attempt to activate different points of the surface at closely tuned resonant frequencies. This was successful, though I found a better and more visually interesting result was achieved by positioning the loudspeakers close together beneath a resonant area of the baking tray. Using a slight difference in resonant frequencies (i.e. 161 Hz and 163.3 Hz) an interference pattern is created, thus causing amplitude modulation and a pulse-like vibration. This causes the strewn material to start and stop its propagation across the surface of the baking tray in regular timed pulses. The rate of pulses can be adjusted by either tuning the resonant frequencies further or closer to each other.

The two embedded videos document this process with cous cous, black peppercorns and crushed leaves as strewn materials.







The first experiment with cous cous and black peppercorns was good as it was able to evoke an reasonably accurate phenomena of wave propagation across the responsive surface. The cous cous is used as homogenous material (textural and specific to the wave movement), whilst the peppercorns serve as more individual markers which illustrate how individual grains are caused to propagate - sometimes very chaotically - across the responsive surface.



The second experiment is similar with the exception that crushed leaves are used in the place of cous cous grains. The array of subtle colours and shapes of the crushed leaves make the process a little more visually stimulating, but lack the phenomenological accuracy of the cous cous as a strewn material.

Additional findings for further investigation relate to how the resonant frequency of the baking tray changes when different materials in different quantities are put on the surface. The explanations for this are relatively easy to explain, but are curious nonetheless.

***

I'm making plans over the week to expand on what I've done so far - in aesthetical/conceptual terms as well as some technical considerations - to give the work more relevance to the research, some identity and distance it from directly referencing Lucier and Julius' work.

More soon.

_________________

[1] http://tristanlouthrobins.blogspot.com/2008/05/research-progress-report-presentation.html

[2] http://www.stillandmovinglines.blogspot.com/

Research progress report (presentation)

I delivered a belated progress report yesterday afternoon. It went down suprisingly well - I think for the fact it wasn't overly sweet and starchy and kept to relative consistency was a good thing. There was a bit of integestion in parts but thankfully nobody became Ill. I think the combination of garlic and chilli might have saved my skin around the end of the main course.

A pity the projector didn't work though.

All clear for thesis party fun time.

Research presentation postphoned

Too much work.

Presentation postphoned until further notice.

A weekend productive

After watching Blade Runner for the first time in eons last night, I feel inspired to clear the decks of a scurvy afflicted lot of work. How a quasi-Blade Runner reference and pirate metaphor is relevant isn't really important, what matters is an impending post-graduate presentation this coming Wednesday, sound pieces for Linda Lou Murphy, preparing a tutorial and networking in Germany. So far so sporadic, as I get distracted by Elvis Costello's new album, a splendid vista from my ninth floor uni office and a torrent of emails requesting my thoughts on life the universe and everything. Good thing I had some coffee, and why do I have a DVD of The Mighty Boosh in my bag? Oh well, I'll probably head down to Mapo on Gouger Street for a drink later and forget about my priorites.

:/

Update on Research Paper

Slowly turning corner. Robin's fixed the steering a bit - better handling.

ETA: Thursday...possibly Friday, no later.

Updates

Of late there hasn't been much posted on the blog for reasons outlined very briefly in the previous 'Blog Hiatus' post. So I've decided to take some time to plug the gaps on what has been an eventful and mildly productive month of March.

Arts and Music:

Adelaide Fringe Festival round-up

The Adelaide Fringe festival was a crippling disappointment for me this year, with an uninspired vis arts/performance program and a few saving graces in the music programme. Apparently this was a very financially successful festival with attendances up from last year's festival, but the 'safe' middle of the road fare that has dominated the programme in the past couple of years (primarily comedy) is threatening to turn the Fringe into a literal joke.

Adelaide Festival of Arts round-up:

By contrast, what I saw of the more upmarket (and better realised) Adelaide Festival of Arts was consistently excellent. Highlights include the Speed of Light exhibition, the Adelaide Biennial, Hossien Valamanesh's in-conversation artist talk, The Imaginary Menagerie and Michael Riley's 'Cloud' photo montage that stretched along North Terrace.


One image from Michael Riley's 'Cloud'

Graffiti Research Lab:

Unfortunately, I haven't had much of a chance to keep abreast of the Graffiti Research Lab's movements in Adelaide, though I did get a chance to have a chat with one of the visiting members who encouraged me to check out New York sometime soon. Lauren and I had some fun with a bright blue throwie on the way home that night.


GRL opening at Artspace


The throwie finds a home on a gutter

Miscellaneous exhibitions:

A couple of exhibitions around the first half of the month were good too. The SASA gallery and Liverpool street art space offered up some inspiring and creative works including this shredded assemblage of vinyl records (below).


Shredded records

Womad:

This year's Womad was by far the best I've attended in several years. Musical highlights included the suave Mariachi Victor Valdez and his pimping white harp, the Jazz Fusion of Billy Cobham, a Japanese Drumming trio and some enormous fire murals around the festival site. It was a hot and dry Sunday - a little too much cider was consumed and the dustbowl conditions were inhospitable. I'm very glad I don't have a respiratory condition.


Victor Valdez at Womad


A suspended fire mural

Some live music:

Cat Power gave a splendid performance at the Governer Hindmarsh, prowling the stage with a hot shit rhythm and blues band backing her up. It was a distinctly contrasting performance to the depressing spectacle I witnessed in 2003 when she tearfully exited the stage mid way through her set.


Cat Power

The following night Ron Sexsmith delivered the goods at Fowler's Live in a mercurial set with a bassist and drummer forming a tightly knit trio. It was perhaps not the most appropriate venue for Ron's stuff (questionable acoustics and PA), but this couldn't take anything away from a brilliant performance.


Ron Sexsmith

Research and extracurricular:

Sick:

The dust at Womad and a heavy schedule took hold upon my returning home from Ron Sexsmith with a mid-tempo cough and two weeks illness commenced in the midst of Adelaide's record breaking heat wave. In other words, I became sick as a puppy. Thankfully, antibiotics are pop-rocking my world.


Ink sketch "Continuum Fruit": 1st March 08


Masters research:

The research stalled dangerously at the start of the month and I've since tried to get things running again with measured success over the past week. In May I'll be delivering a research update (ostensibly an amended version of my previous research paper), so this is providing some much needed impetus to get things done.

Robin Minard Mentorship:

Lauren and I met up with Robin and his partner Susan on a psuedo-wintery night about a month ago as Sonic Youth played downstairs from a friend's studio. It was good to see Robin and Susan after about two years, and although still heavily jet-lagged, Robin was his usual erudite self, offering some helpful advice on my research as well as making some preliminary plans for when Lauren and I get over to Germany in September. The following day, Robin and Susan headed south to the Coorong on a research gathering mission with 20,000 Euros worth of audio/video gear. Robin's expected back in Adelaide over the next couple of days, it will be good to catch up and see what he's been up to on his travels. We might even be able to figure out what exactly we'll be doing together as well.


Robin Minard's 'Sounds On Paper'

Rolf Julius:

I managed to establish contact with German sound artist (and good friend of Robin's) Rolf Julius, whose been mentioned in this blog a few times. Since he's based in Berlin I'm hoping to drop by his studio during the Germany trip. Cheers to his daughter Maija for her prompt reply to my queries and her Dad's email!




EAF 2009:

The belated EAF proposal for 2009 is virtually finished, taking up the stack from my Shoot collaborators and knocking it into some coherent sense. Once it's been submitted I'll post some info on it. Lauren's on board too as a Shoot member which is nice.

ACMC Sound:Space:

I'll be attending ACMC (Australasian Computer Music Conference) this year, I just have to write a paper and put a work together. Since the conference theme is right up my alley, it would be a shame to miss this opportunity to get my work amongst a broader realm of peers.

So all in all, it's been a frenetic and frustratingly busy (and sick) month - here's hoping April is a bit better adjusted and free flowing. There's plenty to get done.

Mentorship with Robin Minard commences proper

After a few months of e-mail correspondance, my Helpmann Academy/Optus sponsored mentorship with German/Canadian sound artist Robin Minard is about to commence. Robin arrives in Australia today to start work on a radio commision project in Adelaide for the next month. I have half a notebook of research-centric concepts to flight with him as well as a few ideas relating to the eventual project that I will develop under his guidance throughout the year.

Meanwhile I'm a slave to the wage processing government rebates, slowly building a pile of gold to fuel a flight to Europe in September. With that in mind, posting on the blog will a bit sporadic for the next couple of weeks I think.

Research updates

THESIS:

Writing a thesis (or thinking you are writing a thesis) is a peculiar thing. During the first half of January steady immaculate progress was being made with the cheerful assumption that a draft of one or two chapters would be finished by month's end. That doesn't seem to be the case now. I have had 7000 words of strangeness before me for the past two weeks that I have taken to periodically scribbling over, cursing at and setting fire to every second day.

A melodramatic and artistic approach to thesis writing, but despite the relative angst this approach seems to be working! I now have 2000 words of sensible prose to pour over.

Violent refinement can be a useful thing occasionally.

WORKS:

Currently working on the installation component of the portfolio with equally measured success and backpedaling, I've recently discovered the merits of open-source software such as Audacity. Mainly because it's free and has a spectral analysis tool.

OTHER:

German/Canadian sound artist Robin Minard arrives in Adelaide next week, as we'll be commencing a working relationship with each other this should provide some serious impetus for the research.

There'll be some good things posted soon.

Research updates - tea break

Work continues on drafts of the first two thesis chapters, though I'm taking a couple of days off this weekend to visit my hometown of Normanville with my partner Lauren.

The first chapter on Listening is shaping up nicely with references to Rolf Julius, Felix Hess and Toshiya Tsunoda. I've been recently absorbing some of Tsunoda's field recordings, you can find a small post on him at the research blog here:

http://stillandmovinglines.blogspot.com/2008/01/toshiya-tsunodas-microscopic-field.html

Exploration of purpose and form

Over the past week I've been playing around with various way to present and formailse ideas which revolve around the fusion of visual and sound aesthetics. The following examples are ideas that have been largely influenced by the work of sound artists Felix Hess, Rolf julius and Robin Minard.


Music for a stone: an ink stone weighing down a piezo transducer with cardboard resonator.

This is essentially an idea I've borrowed in part from sound artist Felix Hess where he uses a stone to weigh down a piezo transducer on a thin cardboard or balsa wood resonator. The contact between the transducer and resonator causes a signal to be amplified. By elevativing the resonator with a matchstick - creating a tiny pocket of air - this causes the signal to be amplified a bit more. I've had some inky stones lying about for a month or so, and I thought it would be interesting to incorporate this into Hess' idea as it adds another element of detail.


Music for a garden: position loudspeakers in a plum tree

This is relatively self-explanetory I suppose in that it is a cute sound sculpture for a garden environment, in this case my backyard. Rolf Julius' work in this field examines the relationship between constructed sound objects and natural surrounding sound objects, in many cases the constructed sounds mimic the natural sounds so they are barely perceptible from each other. A lopsided plum tree seemed liked an appropriate and visually attractive place to position some baby loudspeakers.


Music for a room: loudspeakers attached to a door

This serves a similar functional purpose to that of Music for a garden. Borrowing from Robin Minard's aesthetic of sound to condition and articulate spaces, I played a recent piece Music For Tidy Spaces at a low volume to explore this idea. The loudspeaker arrangement on the door also mirrors Minard's work strongly.

I've also posted this entry at the research blog.

Research: Thesis is go

I took a break from all things research over the past couple weeks, instead writing music for loved ones in the interim. It was a very theraputic and healthy descision as now I feel primed enough to write the thesis and have a draft done by mid year before I jettison of to Europe for a month. I'm working and intellectualising like a blue blooded 26 year old Eno (what?!?) ... in other words being a reclusive knowitall, though not going bald (yet).  

I'm currently working on an introductory section and the first chapter.

Research Paper

I have completed my Masters Research paper Still and Moving Lines: The Act of Listening in Electronic Music and Sound Art. It encapsulates the general thrust of the research project and covers Alvin Lucier's I am sitting in a room(1970), my own Tpot_(x)(2007), amongst other things. It's not a definitive study, but it's been posted for posterity.

Download/view: here.