Whilst travelling down the east coast of Australia from Fraser Island to Sydney, I decided to take a trusty Sound Devices 722, a pair of DPA 4060’s and chucked them inside my Rode Blimp and wombat! Have a listen and let me know what you think. Most of these were made either at sun up or sun down and yes I suffered from being eaten alive by sand flies and mosquitos. All part of the fun… Listen carefully to spot the occasional ‘thong’ sound (flip flops).
Matthew Pountney A.K.A ‘D.J. Rubbish’ A.K.A ‘Leftwing Idiot’ a longtime musical collaborator and bringer of interesting ideas approached me with this one. He and the incredible Jess Thom A.K.A ‘Tourettes Hero‘ were planning on making a serious of horoscope readings using Jess’s incredible talent. Of course I’d be up for this one! I’ve worked with Matt and Jess over the years and once again we’d be brought together to share our ideas and skills and see what we could dream up.
This I guess I’d file under post-production work, I cleaned some rough set sounds, added some effects, mixed and edited as usual and it’s also my creepy airy voice reading out each star sign. I hope you enjoy and of course there’s 12 to choose from.
Once again I was working with Dee Isaacs on another uplifting yet challenging project. We were in Serrekunda in The Gambia working with local school kids and teachers using music as a means to teach. This is quite a new idea out there as it is in the UK and as ever our budgets were thin. This time I was the ‘audio guy’ with my trusty location gear making an audio documentary of the event.
Above are just a couple of samples of what came on a couple trips. One by foot and another by local taxi. Both of these are binaural recordings so if you can please listen using good headphones.
On Saturday the 6th of April Tam Treanor and I were lucky enough to be invited to perform ‘SkypeBack’ at the Edinburgh Science Festival 2013. The venue was the fantastically modular and somewhat THX inspired, in my opinion, Inspace. With their fantastic array of projectors and flexible routing matrix we were able to up the visual side of things and explore the use of light within this performance piece. To blend in with the colour palette of the space we also purchased and put on some neutral white outfits, which transformed us in to moving projection surfaces. Please have a look at the edited short version of the video.
Below is the full live audio recording taken from the concert.
Here is the short edited live audio recording taken from the concert.
The pictures below were kindly taken by our friend and colleague Tracy Foster:
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Firstly I offer the Windy.app. A wind sound thingymajigy made from filter, modulated white noise with a few user tweak-able parameters. It might just be me, but sometimes I like just leaving it on whilst I’m wandering around the house doing other things to make me feel like I’m on the top of a big ol’ mountain. Is that weird? Have a go and see what you think…
It’s Mac OS X (Intel only) I’m afraid not out of any real choice other than that’s where I work these days. Please let me know what you think… This little ditty was very much inspired by the master of Procedural Audio Andy Farnell.
PayPal donations in support of my work can be made here.
Recently I’ve been back in touch with the incredible crew working on the Touretteshero project. Both Left Wing Idiot and Touretteshero herself are very busy and hard to pin down these days due to all their superpower superhero work but isn’t that the way of those in the superhero business?
Clearly famous for it’s audible output, Tourettes is a condition that many have heard of and usually for the ‘wrong’ reasons, such as Coprolalia which is the rare sweary version of the condition. Should you want to read further about some frequently asked questions that relate to the condition then you can do so here. We’ve done some amazing sound work with Touretteshero although I can’t really say much more than that at this point. Please stay tuned to the their fabulous website which is full of amazing user generated artistic responses to documented tics in various multimedia formats. I’m so happy to be involved on the sound front. Think music, sound installations and parodies a plenty and you might be in the right area, might…
Stay tuned…
Here’s a very small sample of some Arduino fun in a workshop that was organised by the Sound Design team at The University of Edinburgh, in conjunction with The Amazing Rolo Yann Seznec.
We were using flexible sensors, light dependent resistors, LEDs and basic circuits built on ‘bread boards’. All of these were being controlled with an Arduino micro controller.
World Premiere of ‘Skypeback’. A feedback based networked performance instrument. Unfortunately only camera onboard audio was available for this video but you do get the gist of what the performance contained.
Here is the audio from the public World Premiere performance of ‘Skypeback’ which took place in Music & Sound research department within the Edinburgh College of Art, The University of Edinburgh at Alison House, Nicolson Square.
These pictures were taken by Colin Chipchase:
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Now, the decision to place this in Sound Design or Music is an interesting one that’s still up for debate… The below audio was the result of a 3month project based around the study of phase transitions of water, mainly solid ice to liquid and the sounds or music that this could offer. Relating to, and an extension of, feedback networks and temporary performance interfaces. I have a lot to add here and will do so in time, once I extract the useful details from the Daisy World project web site.
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Research:
Exploration & Research Audio:
These are snippets of the work which lead up to the final Feedback Study recordings, which then lead on to our own creation of the ‘Skypeback’ Feedback Networked performance instrument.
Two more experiments documenting performances in full. A revisit and use of the Stairwell, after having re-written the MaxMSP patches including new filter designs and an alternate setting of the ‘Glasshouse’.
The final audio from various performances which Tam and I thought would best illustrate what we were had achieved.
Feedback Study testing in the stairwell:
Tam Treanor & Kevin Hay
This was a project to realise and spring off of the works by Agostino Di Scipio. After Tam and I had ‘translated’ the score/DSP routine from Kyma code in to a MaxMSP objects mega-patch, we decided to give the thing a test in an interesting environment that we had access to. This was a fire escape stairwell, and yes we know, we really shouldn’t have done so, but we got clearance first and sonically, we just couldn’t resist the chance of using such a beautifully unique and reveberant space. The only source sound is purposefully induced feedback loops between speakers and microphones. With our DSP routine in between.