The New Museum for Contemporary Art presents Voice & Light Systems by Nick Hallett :: four Thursdays in May, 2009 :: 235 Bowery, New York, NY.

Nick Hallett — singer, composer, and downtown impresario — creates a four-part series at the New Museum theater connecting the human voice to multimedia ritual. In collaboration with a rotating cast of performers and artists, Hallett presents original music and performance alongside new interpretations of celebrated vocal works by Meredith Monk and Karlheinz Stockhausen. The singing voice is seen here in its rawest state, stripped of its language-based sensibilities, and more as a flexible sound instrument, capable of producing protosemantic, acoustic phenomena. As such, concepts of drone, repetition, and improvisation prevail over the tropes of traditional song. Continue reading

Bicycle Built for Two Thousand from Aaron on Vimeo.

Bicycle Built For Two Thousand is comprised of 2,088 voice recordings collected via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk web service. Workers were prompted to listen to a short sound clip, then record themselves imitating what they heard. MTurk official website here. More by Aaron Koblin >>

Electronic Music Foundation and the NYU Interactive Arts Series presents The Human Voice in a New World — Three exceptional concerts that explore new levels of meaning and expressivity for the human voice through technology.

Messa di Voce by Joan La Barbara, Jaap Blonk, Tmema (Golan Levin and Zachary Lieberman) — a state-of-the-art multimedia event combining extreme vocalizations with dynamically-generated visualizations and audio processing :: February 23, 2009; 8:00 pm :: Frederick Loewe Theater, 35 West 4th Street, New York City.

Vocalise Globalalia by Trevor Wishart — Virtuoso vocalist/composer Trevor Wishart reaches the outer limits of sound with the human voice AND Continue reading

PAMELA Z (Solo works for voice and electronics;performance: a set of new and existing works for voice, samples, and live processing) :: February 1, 2009; 8:00pm :: The Issue Project Room, 232 3rd Street, 3rd Floor, Brooklyn.

PAMELA Z Is a composer/performer and audio artist who works with voice, live electronic processing and sampling technology. Processing her voice through “MAX MSP” software on a PowerBook, she creates performance works combining bel canto and experimental extended vocal techniques with found objects, text, and sampled concrète sounds. Continue reading

Table Talk by Brandon LaBelle :: January 25, 2009; 5:00 pm (CET) :: Sound Installation: Tonspur-Passage, MuseumsQuartier, Vienna :: On Air: Ö1 Kunstradio in 5.1, January 25, 2009; 11:03 -11:45 pm (CET) :: Introduction by Georg Weckwerth and Elisabeth Zimmermann.

The dinner party acts as a performative event putting into play social difference, collective sharing, and embodied expressions all shaped and contoured by the flow of food and drink. The time of the meal then is a point of contact weaving individuality into a fluctuating mesh finding form in the presentation of the table, and the meetings taking place there. The table then is a kind of stage, and the passing of words and actions a loose script enacted amidst the ingestion of food and the subtle frictions that place the body in particular roles. Continue reading

ALESSANDRO BOSETTI: MASK/MIRROR:: January 26, 2009; 7:00 pm :: Harvestworks Digital Media Arts Center :: 596 Broadway #602, New York City.

Mask/Mirror (M/M) is a sampler-based software tool created using Max/MSP that processes recordings of spoken language in real time. In performance, the composer uses samples of his own voice to create an ambiguous situation of being interrupted by himself all the time and of having to resort to all possible resources to keep making sense. The sampler follows both sound and meaning criteria in sorting, organizing and processing samples and formulating utterances. Continue reading

javoice: See with sound – see with your ears! Free soundscape synthesizer and sequencer! This fully interactive page allows you to draw your own 64 × 64, 16 grey-tone image and immediately hear the corresponding 64-voice polyphonic visual sound being synthesized on the fly! See and hear how The vOICe mapping works for your input. The 64-channel sound synthesis maps the image into an exponentially distributed frequency interval for a one second visual sound.

Furthermore, you can view sound waves, sonify existing images, train for audiovisual synesthesia, perform on-line composing, make visual sound animations and create spectrograms (sonograms, sonagrams). Continue reading

Diapason gallery for sound and intermedia presents Dead Violets (Jeff Surak, Bethany Moore, Thomas Ekelund) and dub/ber/vie, a voice & multichannel composition / concert performance by Jennifer Walshe & Bernhard Gal :: September 26, 2008; 8:00 pm :: 882 Third Avenue, 10th floor, Brooklyn (Sunset Park).

dub/ber/vie explores different points of intersection between the voice and the space in which it exists. Using two sets of binaural headphones, a series of four-channel recordings were made by Jennifer Walshe and Bernhard Gal within a variety of spaces – a pet shop, the Turkish market in Kreuzberg, a farm for children, a supermarket and an apartment. Continue reading

Another Protest Song :: CALLING ALL ARTISTS, SONGWRITERS, MUSICIANS… What does a 21st Century Protest Song sound like? Given the continuing political climate, we feel it is time for another protest song to be sung. Upload and share your jam today!

Politically engaged music is not only a consequence of history or nostalgia, but can be timely and pertinent commentary on our contemporary world. Another Protest Song is a collaborative project which uses the social networking space of the internet to archive and debate contemporary protest music. The project went public in late May and has become a daily/weekly growing archive with a number of original protest songs uploaded and shared by you the user, and other ideological persuaders. Fine tune your power chords, generate new lyrics and poetry, and set your protest to song. To upload, listen, and comment, check out >> Continue reading

Origami is the ancient Japanese art of paper folding. Its goal is to represent an object using only one piece of square paper, which is then folded and creased in intricate ways. American artist Joo Youn Paek has recently combined this traditional art form with contemporary digital sound mixing processes, via an interactive installation called Fold Loud. The installation consists of three square pieces of paper with opened circuits made out of conductive fabrics, which are stitched in place. The sheets are creased according to three origami bases: the balloon, the kite and the dog.

When the papers are folded along the crease lines, a circuit is closed and a sound is emitted. Each fold is assigned to a different human vocal sound so that combinations of folds create harmonies. Users have to bend multiple Fold Loud sheets together to produce a chorus of voices. But in order to generate a harmonic sound, users need to carefully fold and repeat their gestures, focusing on a slow and patient process. Continue reading