The heat in Adelaide town...

...is turning my house into a place where a sound, studious mind cannot dwell. The kilowatts and black baloons of air conditioned respite temper only so much. I open a teapot to transfuse some sound into it, it coughs hot air up into my face. I place it back on the mantle piece to stew, something palatable has come on the television.

O great Sun King, give this weather to Perth! They have it too easy, what with ocean breezes from the seas of the sub-continent.

More studio views

Recording iterations for Infuser



Menage a T


Lauren

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.

Simple sample and hold

Today I made a very simple sample and hold emulation using Max/MSP. It uses three record~ and groove~ objects to record the sound and subsequently loop it, it also features variable playback speed as well. Once running, new sounds can be recorded and looped. It's clunky at best, but fun to use.

The YouTube example is a duex for two teapots. My apologies for the video quality, a mobile phone is lo-fi at best.

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.

[10.5.07] Masters presentation

So today I gave a presentation of my Masters research to the Music Technology forum at EMU. I think it went down reasonably well with everybody in the room - undergrad students, a couple of the teaching staff and one of the 'EMU groupies'. Whilst there was a temptation to rely upon my Masters proposal as the sole content, this would have bored a majority of the newbies to tears, so instead I decided to dedicate the first half to the research outline and elaborate on some areas of the research methodology; specifically that of examining 'focused listening' and the aesthetic of Alvin Lucier. The second half I think was more fun for all concerned as I compared Lucier's I Am Sitting In A Room with my own creative work-in-progress Tpot_(x) (formerly Tpot_1, but these kind of things always undergo changes.) All up it was about a hour or so with about fifteen minutes tacked on top of that for general questions, queries and observations.

I will update the research blog in the next week or so.

[29.3.07] Back to Lucier and teapots

In the past couple of weeks I have re-acitivated my status as a post-graduate student at Adelaide University. Though I had considered my life as a student to be officially over after last year's debacle, a handful of people managed to coerce me back into the fold. The research on Alvin Lucier re-commences!, complete with rocks, teapots, stairwells and the University's resources at my disposal. The provisa is of course I am undertaking my study as a part-timer and I won't complete my degree until around December 2008. This means plenty of research centric posts over the next 18 months. Hooray for you dear reader!