they will form part of a series of sound and image installations around the school next term. The workshops were led by myself with Jess Baker who brought her Ukelele collection along to some of the sessions. Some of the pieces are a combination of field recordings collected from round the school.recording the railings

recording the sound of the bricks being scraped………..

Here are some of the pieces we made

Weird things

Whale songs

Dinner Hall music

Trumpy B (it really is the sound of a Bee !)

Shimmery Bells

Sams Piece

Alien Harmony

Uke piece

SPEAKS

– Free, downloadable sonic guides

It’s time to throw out the guide book and open your ears as we invite you to take a guided tour of the East End, through the experiences and imaginations of local people with compelling stories to share.

Working with artists Marcia Farquhar and Duncan Chapman, five very different local residents have created sonic guides, providing unique perspectives into the area, revealing the connections and locations that matter to them. Simply explore each individual’s piece online, print out the map and download the mp3s, then come to the area and listen through your headphones to the sounds of the East End, as heard by the people who live here.

Download the PDF maps and audio here

spitalfieldsfestivaladmin.new.mindunit.co.uk/images/resource/Spitalfi.pdf

Madge

Sharif

Miss Beryl

Jez Self

Mike Myers

]]> http://www.duncanchapman.org/present/spitalfields-festival-walks-project-work-in-progress-roi/feed/ 0 http://www.duncanchapman.org/past/time-dance/ http://www.duncanchapman.org/past/time-dance/#comments Sun, 28 Mar 2010 22:28:33 +0000 duncan http://www.duncanchapman.org/?p=540

Time Dance was a collaboration in 1997 between choreographer Catherine Seymour, artist Tatsuo Miyajima with Duncan Chapman (Composer) and what was described as “an extraordinary cast”.

The performance took place on the roof of the Royal Festival Hall with a sound installation (recording below) and projections onto the sides of the building. This co-incided with an exhibition of Miyajimas work at the Hayward Gallery.

http://www.tatsuomiyajima.com/en/index.html

Here is a recording of the sound installation that was installed in the roof garden on top of the Festival Hall, the Latin Names are the names of the fossils that are in the marble that clads the building and are spoken by Sarah Goldfarb other sounds include signal horns, sounds made from Oyster Shells and environmental recordings.

Some of the installation sound

Starting points: (conceptual)

Acoustic Ecology: Acoustic ecology (sometimes called soundscape ecology), is the relationship, mediated through sound, between living beings and their environment.

Audio-geography: The mapping of sounds onto locations

Anamnesis: an effect of reminiscence in which a past situation or atmosphere is brought back to the listeners consciousness, provoked by a particular signal or sonic context.

In the project we will be making work that explores the soundscape of where we are in Lambeth. We will think about how that has changed over time and project some sounds forward in time into the future. The final piece we will be making will form the basis of an interactive installation that will be placed in the new CLC building in Clapham.

Some questions that we can address during the process.

• What are the unique sounds of your school / locality ?

• What were they in the past ?

• What do imagine they will be in 100 years time ?

• What sounds would you like to preserve for the future and how can we preserve them in a way that the people in the future will be able to hear them ?

• Can we picture sounds in ways that other people will be able to “see” how they sound ?

Some of the work , all of these are in the form of Past/Present/Future sequences and this material will be used in the final installed piece in the new building.

Here are some of the pieces

http://www.makingnewwaves.hu/mnw2009/about_en.html

The workshops had participants from Brussels, Aberdeen, Preston, London and Budapest working using a free online whiteboard and chat environment to create 2 pieces. The audio was streamed back to the remote participants using Tinychat and Skype so that the people involved could hear the results.

We made 2 pieces

The first used a text to sound method (with two of us in the hall at Trafo turning the text instructions into sound using Coagula)

Here’s the result of this process

The second uses a shared online whiteboard so that we could grab the images and render these as audio in the hall

here’s the sound

A film of the performance is coming soon

Working with two groups of students to make an installation/performance in response to the exhibition “raw material” which features work by the artist Tim Head

http://www.hcmf.co.uk/event/show/76

What is the sound of electricity ? ……….

What is the smallest unit of audio information?; and image or sound – can we use fragments of image to generate sound material?
The results will be presented at a public performance during HCMF on Thursday 26 November and can also be explored as the project progresses through this on-line installation http://www.musicofelectricity.net/pixels/index.html (this on-line site has been designed and built by Sam Freeman http://sdfphd.net/)

here is the programme from the concert

Insects and the Abyss

An Homage to Rued Langgaard 

To many people, the music of the twentieth century avant-garde (which I so love) only exists as a soundtrack – to the strangeness of space (2001, A Space Odyssey) or to scenes of disturbed criminality (the shower scene in Psycho). Elizabeth Lutyens, one of the greats of English modernism, earned much of her day money writing soundtracks for Hammer House of Horror.

 Langgaard is at home in this b-movie horror scenario aspect of the avant-garde. His topics (insects, the abyss, the music of the spheres, the Antichrist) seem to relish the forbidden and perverse. His is no worked out system, in the vein of Scriabin; if a white-note chorale, which would not be out of place in the simplest of Victorian hymnals, suits his purposes, he will compose one; if an atonal melody of the most angular kind, then that is what he will use.

What is shockingly modern is his attitude to form, and to scale. Nothing ever develops in Langgaard’s music – ideas are either too short or, by the normative standards of the concert hall, continued too long without development. It is this combination – of an atmosphere of strangeness and spectacle with a sense of sound as continua of indeterminate length – which speaks to us at the beginning of the twenty-first century. It is an aesthetic which begs the use of new technology.

 Mike McInerney, Plymouth 2009.

 1. Real and Imaginary Insects

 Earwig(Langgaard 1917)

Chrysalis (Michael Neil 2009)

Locust/May Bug/Daddy Longlegs (Langgaard 1917)

Death’s Head Beetle, Feeding (Duncan Chapman 2009)

Dragonfly/Death-watch Beetle/Housefly (Langgaard 1917)

Flying Predator (Richard Douglas-Green/Mike McInerney 2009) 

Millipede/Mosquito(Langgaard 1917)

 2.  Into the Abyss (Michael Neil 2009)

 INTERVAL

 3.  Afgrundsmusik (Music of the Abyss) (Rued Langgaard 1921/24)

 4.  Abyss Transfigured (with Insects)(Michael Neil/Mike McInerney 2009)

 With thanks to Richard and Lucien Douglas-Green, of Green Studios, Plymouth, for endless technical support and advice.

Here are some of the things I made

Swarm

millions of little critters !!

A series of headphone pieces created with members of CoolTan Arts (http://www.cooltanarts.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/E-bulletin-August-20091.pdf) and Young Minds (http://www.youngminds.org.uk/videos-and-podcasts/podcasts/hayward-audio-bites/?searchterm=Hayward) made in response to the exhibition “Walking in My Mind” at the Hayward Gallery summer 2009.

The pieces played on headphones in the pavilion overlooking the river.

Here are a few excerpts

Young Minds Pieces

1….

2….

3….

4….

5….

9….

10….

CoolTan Pieces

you are not children

voices

Simons Piece

poems (Sharon)

please don’t touch the white dots !

a blind man on the beach

Here’s the score

more information on the festival can be found here

http://www.londonsinfonietta.org.uk/event/kx-collective-sound-stations

and

http://www.londonsinfonietta.org.uk/project/sonic-explorations

Here is a photo of the rehersal

the piece was called

o1: compose <play>

Here is the score for the Trio Instrumental version of the piece

Here are a couple of sounds from the first workshop with a group from Buxton Community school

(photos to follow)

On the last day of June …………….. playing a set of mixed instruments and starting to think about Fanfares

Squonky tube improvisation (from 1st session)

with a bit of fiddling about on the computer after the session

At the end of the project we will play the music here to the audience who have turned up for an evening at the opera !