Scorescapes » Events

Satellite Sounders on fire in Frankfurt

admin — Wed, 20 May 2009 13:52:42 +0000

After the first day of exhibiting the Satellite Sounders during sound walks at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt during the Playing the City exhibition, I took the batteries back to the hotel to charge them, and at 2.30 in the morning one exploded, causing a small fire in the room. I put the fire out using the hotel pillows and called the front desk. The firemen and police came, I shook fiercely, and the hotel offered no first aid and are now in an aggressive process of intimidating me for insurance money for damage to their furniture. What a strange ending to the Satellite Sounders.

experiments in underwater sound 2

admin — Wed, 20 May 2009 13:51:10 +0000

Musical experiments into underwater creatures and the aqueous properties of the contra-bass flute. Part of Scorescapes. New sound works with electronics and contrabass flute played by Ned McGowan Karnatic Lab evening, Muziekcentrum De Badkuyp, Amsterdam.
The second in the series of experiments into underwater sounds, this introduces a live musician to the electronic and environmental soundworld of the first performance. The musical negotiations between two musicians using such different processes of sound production and variety of timbral possibilities became a focus. I introduced Ned to the material we would be using and the ideas behind the work including sounds outside of the human hearing range, and we worked with these ideas in an unstructured way, to create a really unusual performance.

Sound and Science symposium UCLA

admin — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 13:09:55 +0000

A fascinating collection of presentations by scientists and artists working with sound and sonification. Video streams of the lectures at Sound and Science

Prof Peter Narins presented research discoveries on the ultrasonic calls and hearing of certain frogs to adapt to environmental noise. The spectograms of the sound recordings clearly show how limited our own hearing range is in the total sound scape we inhabit. He implied that ultrasound is a relatively new and unexplored area of science, and put the recent interest down to now available field technology, such as the Sound Devices 722 that he used on a field trip in China.

Laura Peticola presented work using sound to communicate data about solar winds. As a space scientist she described the need and difficulties of making the concepts of solar storms, magnetic fields and even plasma to a general public. The team decided to use sound, rather than visualisation, to create sonifications of live solar wind data received by two satellites orbiting the sun. The project clearly showed the difficulties of how to choose which sounds to use, what decisions to make in the translation of the data, and the ramifications of these decisions in the final apprehension of the sounds. It became very apparent to me from this talk that musical techniques known by composers about timing and the need for space in sound textures are invaluable to this kind of sonification work. It also showed the uncomfortable situation of presenting scientific data through “interpretation”, a discussion usually only found amongst musicians.

Lecture and Performance at KVNM Royal Society of Dutch Musicology

admin — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 12:49:05 +0000

31 January 2009 at the Royal Society for Netherlands Musicology KVNM, during a congress on the future of dutch musicology – international, interdisciplinary and practice based research. Aula of the University of Utrecht.

“Scorescapes: Between the Map and the Music” - Yolande Harris will present her recent work on sonic navigations, describing a musical journey that lies somewhere between the map and the music. Questions brought up by her project Sun Run Sun, that researched historical and modern techniques of navigation and their relationship to sound, ask us to rethink musical ideas of form, audience, instrument and stage. The Satellite Sounders, portable instruments designed to transform live satellite navigation data directly into electronic sounds as one walks, introduces issues of the composers choice in the sonification of data and the participants experiences and reactions. How do these elements re-map music, and what traditions from composers and visual artists can be drawn on to ground these works? Yolande will also introduce her current research towards an ‘environment composer’ addressing human and non-human sound ecologies and concepts such as techno-intuition. By (re-)situating our ecology and (re-)sounding the inaudible, the composer uses sound to articulate relationship with environment.

Walled Garden: working conference on networks

admin — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 11:13:28 +0000

Walled Garden is an international working conference that approaches the development and future challenges of the current Web 2.0 through exploration, experimentation and exchange of knowledge. It will address issues of identity, mobile communities and networks by focussing on the tendency towards online gated and closed communities.

20 & 21 November 2008, Lloyd Hotel, Amsterdam, Organised by Virtueel Platform

further with the score

admin — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 16:18:55 +0000

the question is to extend the ideas of navigation landscape and environment to explore musical issues pertaining to expanded consciousness and communications where the score is the central figure. the (musical) score is not just notation but an entity or process where the communications between people through sound and site are catalyzed and channeled.