LinerNotes

A piece of mine has been selected for the Sonic Arts Jukebox at Sonic Art Oxford 2010 that takes place this weekend. Docile Choir is one of thirty four tracks that will play on a jukebox that forms the central part of the sound installations in the Richard Hamilton Building.
Link to an online version of the jukebox here

Docile Choir – composition developed from interaction between the human voice and sympathetic resonance of piano strings

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Sonic Art Oxford 2010 – Three days of Sonic Art, Electroacoustic Music and Live Electronics hosted by the Sonic Art Research Unit at Oxford Brookes University.

More info at: http://ah.brookes.ac.uk/conference/sonicartoxford/

from press release –

An exciting and eclectic mix of contemporary and experimental music, including performances from ensembles Okeanos & [rout], pianist Catherine Laws, Dutch composer and flute virtuoso Jos Zwaanenburg, Diego Garro and improvising duo exquisite corpse. The event also features installation work from Stephen Cornford, alongside a sonic tuck shop and disfunctional disco.

Speaking Out, The spoken word in artistic practice – symposium at Tate Modern on Saturday 6th Feb featured performance and presentations from Tomomi Adachi, Dani Gal, Caroline Bergvall, Nye Parry, Trevor Wishart, David Toop, Imogen Stidworthy, Brandon LaBelle, Inua ‘phaze’ Ellams and Oswaldo Macia.
Cathy Lane (of CRiSAP) presented the work of selected artists that feature in her book ‘Playing with Words, the spoken word in artistic practice’ (2009).

Tomomi Adachi performed a piece for voice and infra-red sensor shirt whereby the gesture acts as a “kind of modulator for the voice”. Sampling his own voice in real-time and modulating it via his movements within the shirt, he built up a complex and captivating cacophony. The putting on and removing of the shirt (including the resultant soundscape) formed part of a performance that, concluding with the neat folding of the shirt, provided aural humour that transcended linguistic boundaries.

Caroline Bergvall’s ‘Say Parsley’ discussed issues surrounding the 1937 linguistic ’shibboleth’ in Haiti where the pronunciation of the Spanish word for Parsley: ‘perejil’ became a matter of life and death. Her work on ‘identity, gatekeeping, mishearing and imposed meaning’ made for an informative and thought provoking presentation.

It is said that prior to drowning, one’s life flashes before the eyes. Trevor Wishart’s ‘Globalalia’ put me in mind of how those last moments might be if the recollection was purely aural and what was flashing before the ears was every human vocal utterance ever made – a monumental piece.

Perhaps the most compelling work, Brandon La Belle’s ‘The Sound at the back of the mouth, almost’, was presented largely without sound. Questions such as ‘Where does my voice reside?’ and ‘What sounds does it make within the space of thought?’ were projected as white text on a black background and engendered an introspection that sought to ‘follow the voice in and outside the body’, aiming for the ‘inner voice as the paradoxical coupling of sound and silence’.

It struck me that contemplation of this inner voice seems prescient as the global communications network continues to grow and real aural arenas are replaced by virtual ones to which we, as a species, are (arguably) unsuited.

In Spaces speak, Are You Listening? (Blesser, B., Salter, L. MIT Press, 2007) Barry Blesser argues that humans are not designed for our current auditory environment. He quotes Robin Fox, from Conjectures and Confrontations, Science, Evolution, and Social Concern (Fox, R, New Brunswick, 1997)

“In some sense, (spaces) are human because they are human inventions. It is one of the paradoxes of an animal endowed with intelligence, foresight and language that it can become its own animal trainer: it can invent conditions for itself that it cannot handle because it was not evolved to handle them. ”

According to Blesser, “The aural architecture of our modern spaces trains those of us who occupy or inhabit them.”

I am working on an eight channel composition using a number of found texts that I have collected over the past couple of years. The texts seem to have been translated into English by means of translation software. The authors of the texts purport to be from Russia. Today I ran the texts back through Yahoo’s translation site, Babel Fish to obtain Russian text. I had hoped to use the computer voice to read back the Russian. Unfortunately, Vicky, (my preferred binary reader) does not speak Russian. The only text that the computer speech technique would recognise was those words that had escaped the Russian translating software and had managed to slip through in English. So I got Vicky to read that anyway and recorded it using Wire Tap. Apparently Apple do not provide any voices other than the American English ones that ship with the computer… Third parties provide languages for download but Russian is not among them… I continue my recordings of those words that manage to slip through the Russian – English / English – Russian net.

BBC Radio 4 played my Upstairs Downstairs musical box on their Upshares Downshares slot last night just after the 5.30pm news bulletin on the PM programme.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

link to details on the PM blog here:

Trailer for the audiobook of “Eclipse Chasing”, a short story by Hari Kunzru

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

I have produced a full audio realisation of the short story “Eclipse Chasing” read by Mercedes Grower, please contact me if you would like more information. 

Today I sampled a musical box that plays the Godfather love theme with the idea of manipulating the fragments to create a new piece for the “meta-musical box” to play.

Once I had the fragments, however, I decided to put together a version of Upstairs Downstairs as PM on Radio 4 has been playing listeners’ versions for the past few months on the Upshares Downshares slot.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Oral History interview 

Madeleine McDonald 1942

Madeleine McDonald worked on the Bombe machines in Hut 11 at Bletchley Park between 1942 and 1945. 

All those involved in the intelligence gathering and codebreaking work that took place at Bletchley Park signed the Official Secrets Act and maintained secrecy about their wartime activity for thirty years. 

The work carried out at Bletchley Park is credited with shortening the war by two years. In addition, Bletchley Park is now regarded as the birthplace of the world’s first electronic computer. 

Recording made on 29th October 2009 in Hadley Wood, Hertfordshire.

Listen to excerpts here:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.