Carrie Bodle: Sewing Sonifications Performance :: October 10, 2009; 2:00 - 6:00 pm :: Westlake Park, Seattle, WA.

Visual and sound artist Carrie Bodle will create a five-channel sound installation and sewing performance sonifying data from an ecosystem model developed by UW oceanographic scientist Dr. Neil Banas. Sound is translated from data, then visualized and made tactile by the artist embroidering the combined waveform into a continuous sound wave.

This computer model simulates the growth and consumption of plankton in the ocean ecosystem along the Washington coast during summer 2005. The five sound channels broadcast five dimensions in this data: Continue reading

Skin Instrument by Daan Brinkmann, is a musical instrument which works using skin resistance as a parameter to generate sound. It can be played by two players simultaneously. When players touch one of the semi spheres they become part of an electronic circuit consisting of a tiny, imperceptible current. When the players now start to touch each other on the skin this circuit starts to generate sound. The intensity of the touch determines the modulation of the sound.

Thanks to Random Magazine.

Neural 15th Anniversary: Issue #31: Neural magazine celebrates 15 years of publishing with Issue #31 and joining S.W.A.M.P. group (Doug Easterly and Matt Kenyon) for a collective micro-printing action.

Subscribers will receive a numbered / limited edition of S.W.A.M.P.’s “Notepad” sheet of paper with an envelope. It looks like an everyday yellow legal paper, but each line is constructed of micro-printed text and contains the personal details of Iraqi civilian casualties. Subscribers are triggered to write a letter or memo or draw a picture on it and send it to the White House, then signing up for a free replacement sheet on the S.W.A.M.P. website, if they want. Once in circulation each sheet then acts as a “Trojan horse” - slipping the unwanted and unacknowledged civilian body count data into official governmental archives. This is a joint action that proves how paper and pixel together can make the difference.

Babbling / Sounding / Noising Cubes by Catherine Béchard and Sabin Hudon :: November 8 - December 13, 2008 :: November 8; 5:00 pm :: OBORO, 4001 Berri, 3rd floor, Montreal, QC, CA.

The Cubes à sons / bruits / babils (Sonic Cubes) are pleasant-to-touch wooden objects containing a multitude of sounds and composing together an acoustic vocabulary. By holding them in your hand and turning them in all directions, you discover their contents and, in the course of manipulating them, unexpected and unpredictable associations and entanglements occur that you can model as you wish. Sighing, coughing, sneezing, leaves rustling, thunder, car humming, water gurgling in metal pipes, door banging — brief and fleeting stories thus unfold and fold, each time reinvented, starting from a tactile, visual and sound object. Continue reading

Sculpt: An interactive sound/image work for sensor gloves - MEME Thesis Performance by Robert Griffin Byron :: April 1, 2008; 8:00 pm :: Grant Recital Hall (behind Orwig Music Bldg., corner of Hope Street and Young Orchard Avenue), Brown University.

Sculpt is work for sensor gloves, interactive electronics and interactive projected image that explores the relationship between synthetic sound and synthetic image through the tactile nuance of human gesture.

Robert Griffin Byron won the A.B.C. Young Composer’s Award in 1995. Since then, Byron’s chamber music and orchestral works have been heard all across Australia, the United States, and Asia. His work has been performed by the most of Australia’s state orchestras. Continue reading

Bioluster is a collaboration of the Accelerator Group. Participants in this project include artists Jite Agbro & Meghan Trainor, programmer Stephen Koch and carpenter Patrick Kerr.

Bioluster is a large-scale tactile interface that offers simple, yet not immediately obvious, methods of triggering different series of sound samples. This unique interface, created with RFID & Flash technology, is paired with materials and shapes that leave the audience with a tugging sense of unwarranted nostalgia for a system that has never existed. This project has grown out of Trainor’s long use and exploration of RFID as an artistic medium to examine our changing physical relationship to computing. Continue reading

“Standing in Shawn Decker’s sound installation A small migration is like being inside an exploded piano, or more precisely it is like standing inside the moment of explosion. The component parts of the work are suspended around me as though frozen in time. Still, yet full of potential movement; they generate a physical sense of imminence. At either end of the gallery large wooden frames support scaffolding bars rigged by chains from the ceiling. Piano wires are stretched across the gallery between the frames. At one end small striker motors are positioned alongside each wire; the installation responds to a series of computer-generated algorithms which trigger the motors that strike the wires.” - From A deep vibration: A small migration by Lizzie Muller Continue reading

Echologue, by Orkan Telhan, is a public interface for sensing and displaying socio-cultural characteristics of a place based on its sonic features. The goal is to build a medium that can reflect its surroundings like a smart mirror, highlight the salient details and patterns in the environment and contribute to our understanding of the perception of social places. The interface senses ambient sound, records deliberate user input and displays a visualization of the activity in that space as its output.

The design explores the utility of sound for envisioning new social, cultural and entertainment uses of public places and help us shape our relationships with each other with new social interfaces embedded in urban settings. Continue reading

The Ghost Station :: Kristen Roos :: September 29, 2007 :: Lower Bay TTC Station: Installation entrance at Cumberland St.

Lower Bay Station, Toronto’s ghost station, is used as a vessel to contain sounds that are within and below the threshold of human hearing - infrasound and tactile sound - where sound is felt rather than heard. Low frequencies created by cars and subways are contributors to the cacophony of infrasonic noise that exists deep below the rumbling of the city. These tactile sounds have also been associated with paranormal activity and ghost sightings. Kristen Roos’ audio art is informed by aspects of acoustic ecology, radio art and phonography.

Touch is a research project that investigates Near Field Communication (NFC), a technology that enables connections between mobile phones and physical things. Touch is not about music or anything musical at this point. Based at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design in Norway, this project is developing applications and services that enable people to interact with everyday objects and situations through their mobile devices. There are musical potentials here.

Touch consists of an inter-disciplinary team involved in social and cultural inquiry, interaction/industrial design, rapid prototyping, software, testing and exhibitions.
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