TUNED CITY

Over five days, July 1-5, the symposium will approach the topic architecture and sound from five different theoretical and spatial perspectives. The chosen venues - spaces built for the production or reception of sound, acoustically flawed or impossible spaces, public and semi-public urban spaces, finished and planned spaces, wasteland or cultivated spaces, indoor and outdoor locations - each serve to illustrate the topics of that day, and offer a mixture of lectures, artistic presentation, performances and examples of working architectural practice.

Below you will find a rough overview of the themes, places and times. For information on the single slots of these blocks and to the participants please visit our website: http://www.tunedcity.de Continue reading

Karen Van Lengen is the Edward E. Elson Professor of Architecture and Dean of the School of Architecture at the University of Virginia. She is also the former Chair of Architecture at the Parsons School of Design.

Van Lengen’s current work focuses on the use of sound as a significant design component. Her designs mix environmental sounds into public and private space, often taking sounds from one space and playing or mixing them into another. Her most recent project is a collaboration with Joel Sanders Architects to create a sound installation within the newly renovated Campbell Hall, home to the UVA School of Architecture.

Peter Traub: Your 2003 paper co-authored with Ted Sheridan, “Hearing Architecture: Exploring and Designing the Aural Environment”, argues for a greater emphasis on sound and aurality as elements of modern architectural design. When and how did you become interested in sound and “designing the aural environment”? Continue reading

Ben Neill and Bill Jones:: a new set of music and interactive video for mutantrumpet :: Saturday, May 31, 2008 :: 8 p.m. :: Monkey Town :: 58 N 3rd St (btw. Kent & Wythe), Williamsburg, Brooklyn 11211 :: subway: L train, Bedford stop :: Admission: $5, $10 minimum :: reservations are recommended: 718-384-1369

Ben Neill and Bill Jones will present a new set of music and interactive video for Neill’s newly created mutantrumpet. Dubbed “the mad scientist of dancefloor jazz” (CMJ Magazine), Neill’s music “masterfully blurs the lines between electronic dance music and jazz sounds” (Billboard). This new set of future dub jazz is the most recent chapter in Neill’s musical evolution which has included the CDs Green Machine (Astralwerks), Triptycal and Goldbug (Verve) and Automotive (Six Degrees). Neill has also recently created a new version of his unique electro-acoustic instrument, the mutantrumpet, thanks to a residency at the STEIM studios in Amsterdam. Continue reading

Jason Freeman’s Flock at the Zero1 Festival :: June 5 @ 8 pm :: June 6 @ 8 pm :: June 7 @ 4 pm and 6 pm :: MACLA :: 510 South First Street, San Jose.

In Flock, music notation, electronic sound, and video animation are all generated in real time based on the locations of musicians, dancers, and audience members as they move and interact with each other. Computer vision software analyzes video from an overhead camera to determine the location of each participant, and this data is used to create music notation for four jazz saxophonists, to render a video animation, and to generate an electronic soundtrack. By inviting the audience to help create the unique music and visuals for each performance, Flock seeks to reconcile concert performance with the dynamics of collaborative creation, multi-player games, and social networks to create an engaging live event. Continue reading

This past spring at the University of Virginia, a first-time joint class was offered that brought graduate students from the Virginia Center for Computer Music (VCCM) together with undergraduates in the School of Architecture.The undergraduate Robotic Ecologies class merged with the Emergent Systems in Music graduate class, and was co-taught by professors Jason Johnson (architecture) and Matthew Burtner (music), with assistance from music graduate student Troy Rogers. I had the opportunity to participate in this exciting new venture between our departments. The goal of this year’s class was for students to create and fabricate “performative spatial and acoustic instruments that sense, compute and interact to/with emergent atmospheric inputs.” The class’s group collaborations resulted in three new robotic sonic-spatial instruments. Movies and descriptions of the instruments are provided below. Descriptions were provided by the groups and video footage was provided by Jason Johnson. Continue reading

Association Of Independents In Radio (AIR) and Harvestworks present “Sounds Elemental” producer intensives!
Sounds Elemental: Water August 18-22, 2008 - 10am to 6pm
Sounds Elemental: Fire December 15-19, 2008 - 10am to 6pm
Deadline for applying: Friday, June 20th, 2008

The Association Of Independents In Radio (AIR), in conjunction with Harvestworks Digital Media Arts Center in New York City, offers two week-long, 40-hour intensives for twenty mid to advance level audio producers. You do not have to be a member of AIR to apply. This opportunity may be especially appealing to those working primarily in traditional narrative and documentary formats eager to experiment with unconventional approaches to assembling sound and telling story. Continue reading

INNER NATURE (2008):Bavarian Forest Triptych, A Sound Installation by Jeff Talman :: May 28 – June 29, 2008 :: in Gibacht, Bavarian Forest, Germany.

Located near the mountain’s summit, INNER NATURE (2008) completes a trilogy of forest installations close to sites of previous work, SENTINEL TO THE WIND (2006) and WHITE SOUND DOWN (2007). The new sound installation, an expressive sonic field shaped from principle frequencies extracted from a recording of wind rustling through the trees, is complemented by the programs from the previous installations to form a three-part work, a sixty-minute cycle of sound presented for the first time in its entirety. Continue reading

OptoSonic Tea:: Friday May 30th,2–8 :: 8:30 pm :: Live sets by: Pamela Z, Daniel Vatsky and Chris Jordan (video) and John Cohrs (audio):: Invited respondent/moderator: Miya Masaoka :: Suggested donation: $ 7 :: Experimental Intermedia :: 224 Centre Street at Grand, Third Floor, NY 10013 :: 212 431 5127, 212 431 6430

OptoSonic Tea is a regular series of meetings dedicated to the convergence of live visuals with live sound which focuses on the visual component. These presentation-and-discussion meetings aim to explore different forms of live visuals (live video, live film, live slide projection and their variations and combinations) and the different ways they can come into interaction with live audio. Each evening features two different live visual artists or groups of artists who each perform a set with the live sound artists of their choice. The presentations are followed by an informal discussion about the artists’ practices over a cup of green tea. A third artist, from previous generations of visualists or related fields, is invited specifically to participate in this discussion so as to create a dialogue between current and past practices and provide different perspectives on the present and the future. Continue reading

Plink Jet, developed by Lesley Flanigan and Andrew Doro, is a robotic musical instrument made from scavenged ink jet printers. The mechanical parts of four printers are diverted from their original function, re-contextualizing the relatively high-tech mechanisms of this typically banal appliance into a ludic musical performance. Motorized, sliding ink cartridges and plucking mechanisms play four guitar strings by manipulating both pitch and strumming patterns like human hands fingering, fretting, and strumming a guitar. Plink Jet is designed to play itself, be played, or both. The result is an optionally collaborative performance between both the user and Plink Jet, with the user choosing varying levels of manual control over the different cartridges (fretting) and string plucking speeds (strumming). Continue reading

Exploring Sonic Interaction with Artefacts in Everyday Contexts — a hands-on workshop on June 23, 2008 at IRCAM (Paris, France):: Part of the 14th International Conference on Auditory Display :: June 24-27, 2008 :: Organizers: Karmen Franinovic, Lalya Gaye, Frauke Behrendt :: Workshop : website :: Deadline: June 6, 2008.

This workshop introduces participants to the use of creative interaction design methods when exploring the design of sonic interactions with computational artefacts. Specifically, focus will be on physical interactions that rely on continuous sonic feedback. Participants will generate future scenarios and concepts for such interactions, and everyday sounding objects in context will be taken as a starting point. By taking part in the workshop activities, participants will get an embodied understanding of the challenges of designing for meaningful and engaging physical interaction with computational sonic artefacts. Methods employed in the workshop will thus be good complements to the cognition or technology-based approaches to designing sounding objects that are mainstream within the ICAD community. Continue reading