I am finally settled into The Auxiliary here in Stockton-on-Tees, UK. I flew back from NZ last week and traveled north on the Thursday. I am here working on some new modes of output for sonic works. Realising how I can install some of the glitch sound pieces and working on new processes at the same time. Anna and Liam who run The Auxiliary have been great hosts and offer heaps of support both with introducing me to the area and equipment. The next two months should prove to be fruitful and I am excited to see what I can accomplish in this time.
Tag Archives: sound
PNEM – SoundArt Festival Uden, Netherlands 14-15th November.
On Saturday 14 and Sunday 15 November 2015, the platform new experimental music the fifth international Pnem Sound Art Festival 2015 with live, video and audio performances by artists from home and abroad. The Pnem Sound Art Festival offers a stage for musicians and artists that are located on the cutting edge of sound, music and new media. The organisers hope through the festival an international platform for the development and implementation of new experimental music and graphic art.
To the public is also an active and participatory role. How’s your food? Take a walk in the woods with as a guide by yourself a soundscape selected or listen to the music via the app. In the context of 10 years klankenbos (be) and 5 YEARS PNEM FESTIVAL (NL) created a soundartist Bart Van Dongen in cooperation with app-Developer Yvan van der sanden an interactive GPS composition for two locations, the looppiste in Lubbock and The old velodrome of Belgian refugees in uden. The listen app gets a permanent nature, in Belgium as part of the world war I and in the Netherlands klankroute a luisterwandeling by the maashorst.
PNEM Sound Art Festival
14.11.15 | 19:30 h till 23:00 H | € 15, buy tickets
15.11.15 | 12:00 h till 17.00 h | FREE
Theater to peak
Pnemstraat 1
5406 xa uden
http://www.besteburen.eu/…/interactieve-klankkunst-op-pnem-…
PNEM Program
Saturday 14 Nov. LIVE
20:00 Official opening of the PNEM Sound Art Festival
20:15 PushPull (DE) – Balgerei
20:30 Ken Byers (UK) – Movement-Interactive
21:00 The Feedback Gents (DE) – Out Of The Wilds
21:30 Pause
22:00 Renzo Spiteri (MT) – Quintessence
22:30 PushPull (DE) – Balgerei
22:45 End
Sunday 15 Nov. LIVE
12:00 Official opening of PNEM Sound Art Maashorst
13:00 Stichting COM (NL) – Bezette Stad Revisited – theater
13:30 Bart van Dongen (NL) – Workshop – studio
14:00 PushPull (DE) – Balgerei – theater
14:30 Bart van Dongen (NL) – Live performance – studio
15:00 Renzo Spiteri (MT) – Quintessence – theater
15:30 Radio Approxim (NL) – Mother Flockers – studio
16:00 Studium:Stadt (DE) – To see with your ears and… – theater
16:30 End
Interactive installation
12:00-16:00 Lex Raijmakers (NL) – Roots – near the studio
12:00-16:00 Alan Dormer (IE) – Thishearbeast – outdoor theater
VideoWall
• La Cosa Preziosa (IE) – The edge of the world 1’44
• Julian Scordato (IT) – Vision II 7’00
• Dickie Webb (UK) – U DYS HET 7’19
• Matthew Schoen (CA) – Vehicles CA 9″30
• Osvaldo Cibils (IT) – N°1-5 installation on monitor 2’31
PNEM Sound Art Maashorst – WoodWalk Experience 2.0
• Alan Dunn (UK) – The Black Forest 2’30
• Barry O’Halloran (IE) – Triptych 6’22
• Bart van Dongen (NL) – Gelukzoekers, zo noemen ze ons
• David Prescott-Steed (AU) – Miscommunication Solo 9’05
• David Rogers (UK) – Dungeness Tower 3’32
• Katherine Trimble (USA) – We’re Not Gonna Make It 9’03
• Osvaldo Cibils (IT) – Soundart 29 april 2015h 3’30
• Sam Marshall (UK) – Caught In Transmission 6’53
• Sandrine Deumier + Alx P.op (FR) – Mdr_test508 2’38
•Simón Pérez (AR) – Las Cifras y Las Palabras 8’00
Nog enkele kaartjes voor zaterdagavond beschikbaar: https://soundartfestival.wordpress.com/…/…/kaartjes-tickets/
Max for Live: Granulator
Robert Henke aka Monolake delves into granular synthesis with his Max for Live Granulator.
Beyond Tinted – Exhibition Photos
Here are some recent photos from Beyond Tinted exhibition which took place between the 19th-23rd of November 2014 at the Modern Art Museum, Yerevan MAMY. These works I created after participating on the ACSL artist residency here in Yerevan. Through the support from the residency as well as ECF Labs which helped fund my time here in Yerevan.
Beyond Tinted consisted of four series of work incorporating past and present processes and mediums. The works developed on previous themes and new concepts researched whilst here in Yerevan.
U – DYS – HET
(Audio/Visual Digital Collage)
Watchers
(Digital Prints)
Folded Control
(Mixed Media)
Contained Spaces
(Mixed Media Sculptures)
THE SCHOOL OF SOUND INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM 2015
THE SCHOOL OF SOUND INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM 2015
Programme of the SOS 2015
A unique series of masterclasses exploring the art of sound in film, the arts and media
Wednesday – Saturday
8-11 April 2015
Purcell Room, Southbank Centre
London
What is the School of Sound?
The School of Sound is a symposium created to encourage a cross-disciplinary approach to using sound in the arts and media. We explore what sound does, how audiences listen.
It is a place where for 4 days you can raise your awareness of how audio production works, how it conveys information and emotion, how you can work with it.
But how do you think about something so ephemeral? And how do you teach it? Sound always seems to be occupying areas of ambiguity – the emotional, the subtext, the intuitive, the borders between reality and fantasy, the conscious and the subconscious. And by their very nature, academia and professional practice shy away from ambiguity and cross-fertilisation, staying within their own boundaries. But interesting things happen when you start mixing them up!
For four days, out of your usual routine, you’ll be immersed in a world of imagination, invention and innovation. Listening to presentations from a diversity of incredible talents, you will be able to disconnect from your day-to-day work, taken out of your comfort zone, to reflect on sound as something that is profoundly complex, entertaining and important.
Why attend the School of Sound?
It is not an academic conference it is not about getting a job and it is not about hardware or software. The SOS provides a rare opportunity to hear and meet 20 creatives working at the highest levels of the arts and media speaking in detail about how they think and work.
And the SOS is not about just one area of sound production. It covers film, theatre, dance, games, installation, music and radio that will expand your thinking and increase your ability to work in diverse areas of media and the arts.
At the SOS you will mix with hundreds of like-minded people – professional practitioners, educators, artists and students – with whom you can network, exchange ideas and create collaborations.
The SOS is delighted to announce the first details of the 2015 programme. Speakers include
Choreographer SIOBHAN DAVIES in conversation with composer/performer MATTEO FARGION
Opera and theatre director PETER SELLARS
Sound artist and Foley specialist NICOLAS BECKER
Artist, filmmaker and writer JOHN AKOMFRAH
Installation artist IMOGEN STIDWORTHY
Radio producer PIERS PLOWRIGHT
Performance artist DICKIE BEAU
Sound/music composer GERHARD ECKEL
Filmmaker and composer NADIM MISHLAWI
Sound designer RANA EID
Interactive games sound designers MARTIN STIG ANDERSEN, JOANNA ORLAND with composer, audio director and consultant JOHN BROOMHALL
and yoiker ÁNDE SOMBY …
with more participants to be announced in the coming weeks.
NICOLAS BECKER
The renowned Foley artist (Gravity, Wuthering Heights) who has now turned to more abstract, space-based sound work, describes his techniques and methods.
SIOBHAN DAVIES and MATTEO FARGION
Hearing Movement
The relationship between sound, movement and performance is the focus of this conversation between Davies, one of Europe’s leading choreographers, and collaborator Fargion, a composer and performer whose works have been performed around the world. Looking and listening to excerpts of their own work, they examine the process by which movement comes out of audio and, specifically, the differences between working with music and soundscapes. And following from that, they will question the varying effects of recorded or live music, analogue or synthesised, acoustics and the influence of an audience’s proximity to the performance.
JOHN AKOMFRAH
Director, writer and theorist, Akomfrah’s body of work embraces documentaries, feature films and exhibitions that have garnered international critical acclaim. In this presentation he explores how sound adapts to the requirements of different media and content.
JOHN BROOMHALL, composer and sound creative (Forza Motorsport 5, X-Com, Transport Tycoon) and founder of the Games Music Connect conference, brings together two leading sound designers in this session exploring the ways sound is evolving across the range of interactive entertainment. WithMARTIN STIG ANDERSEN
Sound designer for the acclaimed Limbo, by Playdead, Andersen analyses his techniques for creating soundtracks in the indie-game environment, looking forward to his next release, Inside.
JOANNA ORLAND
Having worked at EA Criterion (Black, Burnout) and currently Senior Sound Designer at Sony Computer Entertainment Europe with credits that include Wonderbook, Diggs Nightcrawler and Project Morpheus, Joanna describes the level of research and conceptualising required for AAA games.
PIERS PLOWRIGHT
The Tallatchie Bridge and Other Mysteries
Broadcaster and writer Piers Plowright explores the pictures that sound creates and considers the silence that surrounds the best music and words. His starting point is Bobby Gentry’s 1967 hit, Ode to Billie Joe.
GERHARD ECKEL
The Choreography of Sound
Eckel presents his work, Zeitraum (German for ‘timespan’, literally ‘time space’), a sound environment exposing the interrelation of time and space in acoustic communication. “A central finding of the project was, that sound can also be understood as a choreographic device. The project started out with the idea that sound would be the object of choreography, composers would move ‘bodies of sound’ around in space. Towards the end I discovered this other reading, where sound choreographs the audience, especially in installation situations.”
DICKIE BEAU
Memory and Lip-sync
Dickie has gained notoriety as a pioneer of “playback” performance: the uncanny embodiment (or “re-memberment”) of found sound – a style of performance that emerges from the drag tradition of lip synching. He positions the body as an archive, especially of the “missing” – re-visioning and playing back voices from the margins: voices of figures we might not normally hear in the mainstream, in ways that we might not be accustomed to hearing them.
RANA EID and NADIM MISHLAWI
The Soundscape of Conflict
Images of car bombs, assassinations, armed conflict, protests and fiery politicians are the world’s postcards from Beirut. And over time, these images have come to trigger hatred, superiority, racism and, most importantly – fear. It is through listening to Beirut, or any city for that matter, that one can overcome the prejudice of these images and create a subjective affinity. And it is through sounds that we can identify and empathize with events that at first seem strangely alien to us.
IMOGEN STIDWORTHY
Stidworthy will be discussing the voice at the borders of language through her most recent project, Balayer – A Map of Sweeping (2014) – a three-screen installation with ambisonic sound (see Speakers’ Biographies for more details), and a number of related works.
PETER SELLARS
Opera, theater, and festival director Peter Sellars has gained renown worldwide for his groundbreaking and transformative interpretations of artistic masterpieces and collaborative projects with an extraordinary range of creative artists across three decades. Whether it is Bach, Mozart, Handel, Shakespeare, Sophocles, or the 16th century Chinese playwright Tang Xianzu, Peter Sellars strikes a universal chord with audiences, engaging and illuminating contemporary social and political issues.
ÁNDE SONBY
The animals inside the man and the man outside the animals
Are we simply humans? Or are there animals inside of us? Plants? Landscapes?
This is the underlying question in Ánde Sombys preformance. During the performance there will be given “yoik-impersonations” of birds, insects and animals.
This is influenced by the idea of transformation in the pre-Christian Sámi religion – that a human could transform into an animal and back to a human again. And the inspiration is that in our modern day many birds and animals are threatened. How would they feel about pollution, for example?
The SOS 2015 programme is subject to change. The School of Sound reserves the right to make changes to the content, schedule, list of speakers, topics or venue. All updates will be listed on this website.
SOUNDS AS OBJECTS THAT HAVE TEXTURE AND SHAPE – Charlie McCanns’ Article ‘BEN FROST’S SONIC ARCHITECTURE’
BEN FROST’S SONIC ARCHITECTURE
~ Posted by Charlie McCann, November 6th 2014
Re-post from Intelligent Life- Original article click here
When the Australian composer and producer Ben Frost released his fifth album, “A U R O R A”, earlier this year the reviews were rapturous. Rolling Stone called it “unrelentingly menacing”, Drowned in Sound said it was a piece of “aural suffocation” (in a good way), and both picked it as “Best Album of the Year So Far”. Frost, though, is more low-key. His albums, he has said, are “over-glorified business cards”—adverts which get him well-paid commissions (he has written music for ballet, opera and film) and bring audiences to his live shows. He has been touring “A U R O R A” since April, and is playing six nights in Britain next week. It’s only live that you hear the album’s terrifying architecture. Listening to it on headphones is like reading a book about brutalism: it doesn’t do justice to its scale and weight.
An architect is certainly what Frost sounds like when you talk to him. When I spoke to him recently, he referred to sounds as “objects that have texture and shape”, and composing as “an arrangement of space”—which suggests his music is meant to be felt as much as heard. In August in a small south-London club, he played “A U R O R A” so loud and so deep that the audience couldn’t help but feel it. He has likened the pounding of the kick drum to “the externalisation of the human heart”. Shake your head all you like—as the drums thundered my heart hammered, and I began to wonder if it might leap out altogether. Some of the people pressed in close around me looked ecstatic, but plenty looked uneasy: the room cracked with the synthy snap of chain against metal; the air around us walloped with what felt like the weight of concrete slabs. On the small, dim stage, Frost was bent over his equipment, carefully adjusting knobs and dials—though he may as well have been operating a forklift.
In contrast to his previous albums, “A U R O R A” is more militant and synthetic-sounding: there are no guitars, piano or stringed instruments. Instead, he uses heavy percussion, synths and lots of distortion, and he processes the sounds through his computer. The result is a portentous mass of noise undergirded by simple rhythms and melodies that emerge occasionally from the aural chaos. These primarily recall the rhythms and melodies of techno, trance and industrial music, although, with a recurring bell motif and occasional brass burps, there are some classical flourishes. But this kind of music—the kind that hits you in the solar plexus—isn’t produced by simply turning up the volume. It also involves playing sub-bass sounds: frequencies so low they’re not so much sounds as they are thrums, of the kind you’ll feel if you place your hand on a subwoofer.
As PA systems grow in sophistication, musicians and sound designers are exploiting a wider range of sonic frequencies—ones that steal ever further into the realm of the physical. A range of artists—from the Seattle drone-metal band Sunn O))) to the Portland noise artist Pete Swanson and the London DJ duo Raime—have, in the last few years, been experimenting with low-end music that gets at the gut. The music magazine the Wire has called it “a live performance trend”.
But Frost thinks technology will take us further still. As absorbed as he is by music’s effects on the senses, whether aural or tactile, he’s intrigued by how advances in medical technology might improve upon our limitations. “Twenty years from now, I think we’re very likely to be able to have our ears upgraded so that we can perceive a wider range of frequencies—or by-pass the ear entirely,” he says. “I’m personally really excited about that. Every time the fucking jack cable rips out of my headphones when I stand up too quickly and I have to put it back in, there’s always this little moment where I want to jam it straight into my skull.”
Frost might be looking to the future, but he should just look at what’s right in front of him: the people at his gigs, forced to listen with their whole bodies, already have their skulls full of his music.
Ben Frost The Haunt, Brighton, Nov 10th; Thekla, Bristol, Nov 11th; Capsule, Birmingham, Nov 12th; St John at Hackney Church, London, Nov 13th; Gorilla, Manchester, Nov 14th; Howard Assembly Room at Opera North, Leeds, Nov 15th
Charlie McCann is editorial assistant at Intelligent Life
Passing Weeks..
These last few weeks have been spent exploring all parts of Yerevan some intentionally and others purely by accident. One day this week even was comparably to my days on my snowboard. Using the bus like a chairlift to take me to a point in the city with a line back to house which I walked capturing many elements that I had over the weeks hope to experience.
These random wanderings and planned excursions have allowed me to interact with architecture and accidental sculptural objects. They have created conversations within my practice that I am now exploring and will continue post residency here. I spend time photography and field recording the sounds I encounter not always for later work but to use the process of recording as a way to explore the moments that I have experienced. Some of these elements naturally appear in the work but sometimes it is me focusing on something that i see a metaphor amongst or pausing just so the brain absorbs and allows the senses to filter completely. Though the sounds and visual elements are important it is all senses that inform my thoughts. If only to have a machine to record the smells both pleasant and not so. The aromas here are strong and really striking.
Certain themes are constant within my travels such as looking through but seeing behind in reflective moments or the attraction to controlled and protected spaces. Here especially where traffic cones are not so common the ways in which people mark space is intriguing. One thought that is common with my travels here though is to do with vacancy as a positive. The building of vacancy, i.e. in the sense of building glass and marble buildings that seems to be for something that only they know about. With these buildings not necessarily fitting into the landscape rather standing alone amongst the tower blocks of Soviet era. I see these new buildings a positive in one sense and nod to a new era or at least optimism. This in comparison in other cities that I have lived recently where new construction has stopped.
As for work I am currently working on a new digital work, a step on from the Athens Arrival work I made in Greece last year and also some new photo and sculptural works. These are all due to be exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art here in a couple of weeks. So for now the walks and excursions are more precise and studio time has increased. I will update from the studio in a few days prior to the show.
How does our memory influence the imaging of reality? – Bildraum, an installation by Charlotte Bouckaert & Steve Salembier
Charlotte Bouckaert & Steve Salembier
Bildraum
© Charlotte Bouckaert & Steve Salembier
How does our memory influence the imaging of reality? Charlotte Bouckaert and Steve Salembier fathom it out for you in the Bildraum installation performance.
In an interplay of scale models, sound and live photography a living cartoon comes into being that positions imagination, the past and surroundings in an ever-changing dimension.
Bildraum is an architectural stroll through empty ‘intermediate spaces’ where only objects suggest a bygone activity. Bildraum is not so much an assemblage of memories but a choreography of their tracks and carriers that localizes our memory between image, space and audience. Like thumbing through a photo album of memories which have not yet taken place.
Charlotte Bouckaert, a visual artist by training, took her first steps on stage at the Beursschouwburg. In her theatrical work she examines the cornerstones of photography. For her latest creation she collaborates with architect Steve Salembier.
Language no problem
BE, 2014, 55min.
From and with: Charlotte Bouckaert & Steve Salembier
Sound: Duncan Speakman
Dramaturgy: Marnix Rummens
Production: Pianofabriek Kunstenwerkplaats
With the support of: Beursschouwburg and WPZimmer
If Your Name Is Not On The List Then You Are Not Coming In – New Sensations Shortlist
I am not one to normally care or even look at who has been nominated or won certain prizes. To be honest I am not sure how I ended up looking at the shortlist for this years New Sensations. However I am glad I did as there are some works that really interested me. Here is the link to the 25 artists who have been shortlisted. I have posted a few photos of those that I liked their process or output.
Click here: New Sensations 25
Sarah Roberts
Roderick Laperdrix
Felicity Hammond
Collette Egan
Understanding Some Of My Process.
Here is a post by The Creators Project which outlines some of the techniques that I am employed to make my recent digital works.
Here’s What Happens When You Edit Photos Like Music

What’s known is that all digital files are made up of raw data: open any image, sound, application, or otherwise in a program like TextEdit, and you’ll see the Unicode alphabet representation of your chosen file. What’s unknown are the results of opening, say, a .txt file in a video program, a sound file in a word document, or playing an image file in a sound editor… More often than not, importing files into applications they’re foreign to will produce an error message and possibly crash your open application. Sometimes, however, using applications to manipulate non-native files results in beautiful art.
Masuma Ahuja and Denise Lu, of the Washington Post, put these ideas to the test by editing images in Audacity as if they were sound files. It’s called databending— the process, according to Ahuja and Lu, “of manipulating data in an editor traditionally used to edit media of another format,”— and the simple results are as colorful and sublime as they are inspiring.
Seen with an echo effect, the Eiffel Tower lives up to Paris’ name as “The City of Lights.” With fades and a reverse effect, the bleak southwest Iceland seaside becomes awash with cotton-candy waves. With a little reverb, the Brooklyn Bridge gets a throwback to the color stylings of Do The Right Thing. Below, Ahuja and Lu’s results are as mind-bending as they are data:
Ready to try databending your own image files? Check out Jamie Boulton’s tutorial on using effects in Audacity, andAntonio Roberts’ beginners tutorial on importing image files into the free sound editing software. Share your artworks with us in the comments section below! h/t FlowingData