LinerNotes

I will be collaborating with director Valentina Ceschi next week at Barbican Pit Lab on development of Brave New Worlds 1 – a primarily design-led performance exploring notions of utopia. Thomas Eccleshare and myself will respond to the work of Valentina Ceschi, Kate Lane and Guoda Jaruseviciute. Open rehearsal and informal discussion 4pm, Friday 24th May 2013, The Pit, Barbican Silk St.

My composition, Dopplerspace, has been selected for the Audiograft Jukebox, part of the excellent Audiograft Festival curated by the Sonic Art Research Unit at Oxford Brookes University. Audiograft starts on Wednesday and runs until Saturday. More information available here.

SPACE HAM featured on Radio 4’s Pick of the Week on Sunday.
Space Ham is available to listen again on the BBC iplayer until the new episode of Between the Ears airs this Saturday.
Review by David Crawford in the Radio Times

The image of amateur radio enthusiasts is indelibly linked in my mind to that of Tony Hancock. But it seems they’re a much more inspiring bunch than that, as this fascinating feature shows.

“Found space-sound” artist Caroline Devine weaves these transmissions into her own composition, combining them with ethereal sounds of space to hypnotic effect. It’s a space oddity, but entrancing and magical.

SPACE HAM, an episode of Between the Ears celebrating the relationship between amateur radio and space exploration will be broadcast on BBC Radio 3 at 9.30pm this evening. SPACE HAM is a collaboration between myself and Producer, Rose de Larrabeiti of Whistledown Productions. SPACE HAM includes the recordings of many amateurs, including VLF recordings from Paul Nicholson and Wolf Buescher and Ham recordings of ISS contacts from Matthias DD1US Sounds of Space collection. Thanks to all those who provided material and to Roy W0SL for his wonderful recording of the first Sputnik signals from 1957. I synthesised many of the other sounds from scratch using sine waves to explore heterodyning, the Doppler effect and other acoustic phenomena.

From the BBC website:

Since the dawn of the Space Age, amateur “ham” radio has eavesdropped on our exploration of the cosmos. From Sputnik to the International Space Station, radio enthusiasts with homemade kit have been able tune into the distant sounds of space and talk to those exploring it. Caroline Devine, found space-sound artist, creates a composition from the ethereal sounds of space and the space hams and sends Between the Ears into orbit.

5 Minute Oscillations of the Sun was installed to coincide with the 2012 summer solstice and played in a dome in Milton Keynes Theatre District for six weeks over the summer. This excerpt drifts between a live recording in the Dome and the original composition. The project was made possible with funding from Arts Council England and support from MK Gallery.

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Original data are courtesy of the Birmingham Solar Oscillations Network (BiSON) research team, School of Physics and Astronomy, Birmingham University. VLF recording courtesy of Paul Nicholson and Wolf Buescher.

Station X has been installed in Hut 8 at Bletchley Park. Originally shown at MK Gallery Project Space, the installation feels completely different now that it is sited where all of the material was gathered. My piece, “Carrier Waves, left and right channels” alternates between acoustic and electromagnetic modes, traversing the boundary between audible and inaudible signals collected from Blocks C and D at Bletchley Park. As you walk into Hut 8, the thin walls provide a relationship of osmosis – blurring inside and outside acoustic space.

Station X is part of Arthertz Ghost Stations until 6th October.

Photo: Rachael Marshall

There is one more week to catch Captain Ko and the Planet of Rice at Edinburgh Festival. I collaborated with Dancing Brick Theatre Company (Thomas Eccleshare, Valentina Ceschi) to develop the work which is the culmination of 18 months research and development exploring neurodegenerative illness in consultation with Prof Sergio Della Sala from Edinburgh University’s Centre for Cognitive Ageing and Cognitive Epidemiology. Captain Ko and the Planet of Rice tells the story of three linked characters who are, for different reasons, outside of time.

“a poetic and beautiful work that taps into one of the most sensitive and unpredictable of human faculties – time and memory – in a way that is challenging, unusual and wonderfully inspiring. This is a pioneering work for our age that is a real privilege to witness.”

Read the full review by Katharine Wootton from A Younger Theatre here

My piece Oscillate is included in ICA Soundworks, an exhibition to coincide with Bruce Nauman’s work “Days” at the ICA, London. As part of its season on sound, the ICA commissioned more than a hundred artists to make a work that takes its stimulus from the themes evoked in “Days”. The works are available online and within the gallery at the ICA until September 16th. Oscillate is made from the BiSON data that I used for my recent sound installation, 5 Minute Oscillations of the Sun. The piece is a study of sine waves that relate to the natural resonances within the sun. A sine wave can be thought of as a mathematical description of time and the patterns brought about by combining different sine waves can produce a hovering, non-teleological sense of time that I seek to explore.

The image below is a spectrogram of the piece with time along the x axis and frequency along the y axis. All the frequencies used in Oscillate are direct transpositions of acoustic waves that manifest as gentle oscillations of the solar surface and have been measured by the BiSON research team at Birmingham University. The data has been sped up a million times to bring it within the frequency range of human hearing.

At midday today, 21st June – the longest day of the year, my new sound installation, 5 Minute Oscillations of the Sun, begins playing in a dome in the theatre district, Milton Keynes.

The piece is an exploration of naturally occurring radio signal and solar activity and alternates every five minutes between acoustic and electromagnetic “listening modes” that provide new ways to “listen” to the sun.

For the acoustic listening modes, I used data courtesy of the BiSON research team at Birmingham University and translated it into a composition. I calculated the frequencies “sped up” one million times so that they corresponded with human hearing frequency range and made tones at those frequencies with a tone generator. All the “overtones” that can be heard within these passages relate to natural resonances present within the sun’s interior.

During the electromagnetic listening modes, naturally occurring radio signals are sent toward the roof of the dome and though these signals are tiny, they can be clearly heard. The dome is used like a giant instrument to amplify and focus the delicate sounds.

The installation runs daily from 12 noon to 9pm and can be heard by walking through the dome anytime between those hours. More information about the process involved in making the work will be available to read in the new MK Gallery Reading Space from 28 June along with an audio file of the entire composition.

5 Minute Oscillations of the Sun has been made possible with public funding from Arts Council England and has received additional support from MK Gallery. Many thanks to radio enthusiasts Paul Nicholson and Wolf Buescher from whose live stream, I recorded the VLF radio sounds.

Everyone is welcome to come to a listening event to hear the piece in the dome on the evening of 27 June at 7.45pm.

More information available on MK Gallery website.

Zubeida Malik interviewed Maya Ramsay and myself about the Station X project for Radio 4 Today programme. The interview was broadcast on Monday 30th May. A clip of it is available to listen to here…

and the BBC online gallery with photos of the project is here