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.

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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 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!

[31.7.06] Research Progress: Sine Tests

Today I spent most of the day in my room atop the Shultz building on level 9 reading books on Alvin Lucier and playing with sine waves. Recently I've constructed a portable loudspeaker frame built out of a guitar stand, some twine and bubblewrap. The loudspeaker is the surviving Kenwood beauty from the June sine tone test disaster (see archive.) The frame is a handy little apparatus that allows me to direct sound towards things.

I.

In my room I did a couple of experiments with feedback modulation of a fundamental sine wave - a process of fixing a microphone close to a speaker cone, raising the mic input to the feedback threshold and tweaking the EQ on a mixer. Through the speaker I played a sequence of single sine waves, starting with 110Hz then shifting 0.5Hz every thirty seconds. As it played back I wasn't necessarily interested in tweaking the EQ all over the place, I was more content with setting the EQ to a fixed position (so that feedback signal was consistent) and letting the periodic shift of frequency of the sine waves do the modulating. There were some very interesting results - pulse patterns and harmonics shifted in and out of phase with each other as the fundemental frequency shifted away from the EQ presets. I'll be doing more tests tomorrow as there are some acoustic phenomena that remain unclear (the room's resonant frequency may be playing a part as well - I'm not sure.)

II.

I then moved my gear out into the Shultz staircase and played some sine and square waves into the space. It was really just a bit of fooling around. In such a resonant area as a stairwell, high-ish frequencies such as 880 - 1200 Hz are suited best as they are reasonably directional and capable of being reflected through the staircase, opposed to a lower frequency which just oozes all over the place. Tomorrow I may explore the prospect of using two sine waves, seperated by a couple of floors and tuned slightly apart from each other - say 1100 and 1123 Hz.

III.

I took the latter idea into the EMU performance space next, pairing a fundamental frequency of 880 Hz with a modulating frequency of 881Hz which shifts by 1 Hz every thirty seconds. As these waves were played into the space, I went over to the Steinway piano and played A5, B5 and C6 notes, observing how the richness of the piano's harmonics caused the sine waves to heterodyne and spin off in various directions. This is a method explored by Alvin Lucier in many of his works, specifically Still and Moving Lines In Families Of Hyperbolas (1973-4) and Wind Shadows (1994).

So, an exiciting day of practical activity, more tomorrow (and some pictures.)