Group items tagged

This installation plays the keys of a piano based on the movements and shapes of the clouds. A camera pointed at the sky captures video of the clouds. Custom software uses the video of the clouds in real-time to articulate a robotic device that presses the corresponding keys on the piano. The system is set in motion to function as if the clouds are pressing the keys on the piano as they move across the sky and change shape. The resulting sound is generated from the unique key patterns created by ethereal forms that build, sweep, fluctuate and dissipate in the sky. This installation was commissioned by L'assaut de la Menuiserie, Saint-Etienne, France and completed with support from the Visualization and Digital Imagining Lab and Weber Music Hall, University of Minnesota.

"From 1976 to 1982, Tony Conrad (1940-2016) created "Music and the Mind of the World," a piano composition comprising over 200 hours of recorded music. During this time everything Conrad played on the piano was recorded (with the incidental exception of perhaps three or four hours). In this endeavor - which includes the sounds of practicing, banging on the keys, formal exercises, experiments with the harmonic sonority of the piano itself, and even "On Top of Old Smokey" - we witness what might in essence be described as the total encounter between an improvising performer and the central instrument of Western musical culture. Now, for the first time, this influential yet largely unknown work has been published and is now available online for free at the domain musicandthemindofthe.world."

"Percussion is also a discipline that is overwhelmingly considered to be "for boys." I recently began asking myself why I chose drums as a nine-year-old, when I showed an aptitude for just about any kind of instrument. I had wanted to play piano when I was five, but was never given lessons. Why drums, then ? Why not still piano four years later ? Even as I write this, I have some regret that I never became a pianist."

"In the spring of 2011, Wanda L. Diaz Merced spent time at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, doing research for her doctoral dissertation at Glasgow University, Scotland. Wanda, who is blind, has been interested in sonification as a data analysis tool: how sonification might help scientists, even those who can see, detect patterns in large amounts of seemingly random astrophysical data. She used sonified x-ray data from EX Hydrae that have been collected by the Chandra X-Ray Observatory. One day Gerhard Sonnert gave Wanda some advice on her research and, on the way out of her office, he noticed a ream of sheets on which sonified x-ray data were printed out in musical notation. Being a bass player, he immediately recognized that the data showed a particular Afro-Cuban rhythm called clave. It occurred to him that, in addition to being a scientific tool, sonification might have an artistic application. Gerhard asked his cousin Volkmar Studtrucker, a musician and composer, to write songs from the EX Hydrae material. Volkmar created nine musical pieces, in a variety of musical styles, which they played and recorded in a trio (Volkmar Studtrucker, piano; Gerhard Sonnert, bass; and Hans-Peter Albrecht, drums)."

"This essay was written for the catalog of the exhibition "John Cage and Experimental Art: The Anarchy of Silence" at the Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona. "

"In the spring of 2011, Wanda L. Diaz Merced spent time at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, doing research for her doctoral dissertation at Glasgow University, Scotland. Wanda, who is blind, has been interested in sonification as a data analysis tool: how sonification might help scientists, even those who can see, detect patterns in large amounts of seemingly random astrophysical data. She used sonified x-ray data from EX Hydrae that have been collected by the Chandra X-Ray Observatory. One day Gerhard Sonnert gave Wanda some advice on her research and, on the way out of her office, he noticed a ream of sheets on which sonified x-ray data were printed out in musical notation. Being a bass player, he immediately recognized that the data showed a particular Afro-Cuban rhythm called clave. It occurred to him that, in addition to being a scientific tool, sonification might have an artistic application. Gerhard asked his cousin Volkmar Studtrucker, a musician and composer, to write songs from the EX Hydrae material. Volkmar created nine musical pieces, in a variety of musical styles, which they played and recorded in a trio (Volkmar Studtrucker, piano; Gerhard Sonnert, bass; and Hans-Peter Albrecht, drums)."

"A tree's year rings are analysed for their strength, thickness and rate of growth. This data serves as basis for a generative process that outputs piano music. It is mapped to a scale which is again defined by the overall appearance of the wood (ranging from dark to light and from strong texture to light texture). The foundation for the music is certainly found in the defined ruleset of programming and hardware setup, but the data acquired from every tree interprets this ruleset very differently."

"If the Universe is born and no one is present to hear it, does it still make a sound? Well, theoretically, yes. As this video from the US filmmaker John D Boswell (also known as Melodysheep) explores, where a 'thick soup of atoms' is present, sound is possible. Made in collaboration with the podcast Twenty Thousand Hertz, this short documentary deploys dramatic CGI visuals, a pulsing score and the voices of prominent scientists to explore the sounds of space - from those humanity has recorded to those we can only speculate about. While ostensibly an interplanetary journey, The Sounds of Space is perhaps most intriguing when viewed as an exploration of the physics of sound, and the science of how we've evolved to receive soundwaves right here on Earth. "

The Song Books by the sound artist Rolf Julius (born in 1939) consist of several bound sheets of Japanese paper, of which each sheet is marked by a different kind of spot.[1] These red or black spots are prints of the processed photographs of color pigment clusters. Julius had already used these types of pigment clusters in earlier sound art installations, combining them with different sounds. There were similar sheets in his Piano Piece No. 1 (1998), whose title indicates that they can be performed musically.[2] It would hardly be possible to detect this solely on the basis of their visual form. According to Erhard Karkoschka, Julius's musical graphics can therefore be classified as pure musical graphics, that is, as musical graphics without a staff.[3] It must above all be stressed that musical graphics constitute individual solutions to problems with notation as perceived by an artist, and therefore stand out due to their different relationship to conventional notation. When interpreting musical graphics with so few parameters, which is the case for the Song Books, the performers have to develop a convincing translation for the ambiguous parameters. In the Song Books, the repetition of a similar form-in this case, the various spots-directs the performer's gaze toward minimal differences, such as the different sizes or fraying of the spots,[4] which are then translated into sound.

"This essay was written for the catalog of the exhibition "John Cage and Experimental Art: The Anarchy of Silence" at the Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona."

"In theoretical physics, 'Bosonic' refers to the original version of 'string theory', developed in the 1960s. Although the initial hypotheses behind Bosonic String Theory have since been expanded and modified, the underlying principle remains intact; that the various properties of matter and force can be a reflection of the ways in which a string vibrates. The oscillating properties of these hypothetical strings determine the properties of particles and all forms of energy. As such, the theory proposes that the entire world may be composed of these infinitely small vibrating 'strings'. Bosonica is a sonic exploration of the concepts behind this theory. The sound material which underpins the work is predominantly sourced from stringed instruments, in particular piano, guitar (acoustic and electric) and cello. At times the original properties of these vibrating strings are very present and recognisable, however the work explores increasing blurring and abstraction, creating new constructions from the original material and presenting to the listener dense and abstract dimensions. Despite this, the untreated instrumental material consistently returns as a reminder that it serves as the building block from which all other material is derived. The use of 5.1 spatialisation magnifies the perceived kinetic energy of material. Small gestural fragments are scattered over the 5.1 array to form accumulative trajectories of sound, and the listener becomes immersed in the dark abstract landscapes generated by the sounds of strings. The work was composed in 2009 in the Electroacoustic Music Studios of the University of Manchester, UK. With thanks to Emilie Girard-Charest (cello) and Camilo Salazar (guitar)."

"Andante" was created by MIT's Tangible Media Group as a way to promote an understanding of the way that music is rooted in the body, an experience that transcends more than just the ears. The group, led by Professor Hiroshi Ishii, gives physical form to abstract digital information, providing delightful visuals to more complicated processes."