Tag: collaboration

Rhubarb sounds and more

duncan

Some of the Rhubarb sounds I collected and made for a project many years ago seem to have gone a bit viral recently. So, here are some related things collected together in one place for those who are interested.

Rhubarb, Rhubarb, Rhubarb sounds collected on Soundcloud

Singing in the Dark with David Velez

Exhibition & Workshop/Talk/Concert | Singing in the Dark by David Velez, Ruchi Singh, Duncan Chapman

Tony Wade’s Rhubarb Shed at the Wakefield Rhubarb Festival

Rhubarb Shed

Article from Huddersfield Examiner

https://www.thefreelibrary.com/Sound+of+rhubarb+grows+on+you+….+Huddersfield+Contemporary+Music…-a0272713146

Next Ingredient Podcast

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/rhubarb/id1589832372?i=1000601354297

2011 HCMF festival (features the original project)

CD & Downloads

duncan

I have been far to slow in updating things and promise to do so properly soon.

BUT in the meantime here are some recent releases from projects with Supriya Nagarajan

LULLABY LIVE @ CCA

https://manasamitra1.bandcamp.com/track/lullaby-sonic-cradle-2022

Dusk Notes : Live in Leeds

https://manasamitra1.bandcamp.com/track/dusk-notes-live-at-howard-assembly-room

Koto Twilight (with Sumie Kent)

https://manasamitra1.bandcamp.com/track/koto-twilight

More soon ……. image from Lullaby: Sonic-Cradle live @ WOMAD festival July 2022

Lullaby : Sonic Cradle.. live @ WOMAD festival under the Museum of the Moon (Luke Jerram)

Cove

duncan

A new album (on cassette/download) to be released on the Linear Obsessional label this summer.

Cove is a series of four pieces created during a residency at Cove Park in February 2019 as part of an ongoing project with Articulate Cultural Trust.

Sonification of landscape, field recordings and live improvisation with the elements.

Cover artwork from time-lapse movie looking out from the converted shipping container where I was living.

      

 

Sneak preview:Calm pond bubbling stream excerpt

Linear Obsessional: Linear Obsessional

Cove Park: http://covepark.org

Articulate: https://www.articulatehub.com/articulate-cultural-trust

 

 

 

Verbier Festival 2014

duncan

mountain slice blue

2 pieces composed by participants at the 2014 Verbier festival and played by the VFO. A collaboration with Edward Nesbit and the Discovery programme. “C C C” (Colours, Chickpeas, Cowbells) : composed by Adèle Harding, Leandro Marques, Quentin Lehner, Noëlla & conducted by Duncan Chapman, “Mountain Animals and Snow”: composed by India Beibeder,Orane Furness-Pina,Pierre Mouton & conducted by Edward Nesbit

 

 

 

 

 

 

Decorated Echoes @ Spitalfields Summer Festival

duncan

Decorated Echoes was a project for Spitalfields music working with students from Phoenix school and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. The movie was made from drawings in response to sounds, our own playing and listening to live music played by Katie Heller (Violin / Viola) and Ruth Rosales (Bassoon / Contra-bassoon)

 

Re:Sound

duncan

Re:Sound

In preparation for this project at the Sound Festival in Aberdeen this weekend

“What is your favourite sound in the world that isn’t a musical instrument or piece of music?”

a couple of demo tracks containing

Dropping something heavy into water
Thunder
Pocra Quay (from Pete Stollery)
Birds
The wind at Malin Head
Children’s voices
Rain on a tent
Throwing stones onto a frozen lake
Walking in deep snow
Walking through a herd of cows in Switzerland

Chorus loops composed by Music and Communities students and played by synthesised sounds ……………
The Wind
Rain
Standing on Union Street
Child laughing
The sound you get when your head is underwater
glass smashing
walking in deep snow
falling leaves
the crackle of frying eggs
transferring liquids from a can into a glass

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Sounds from Rednote Ensembles “NoisyNoises” to be used in an installation on Sunday 4th

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more here

http://sound-scotland.co.uk/sound_events/resound/

Sound Spiral

duncan

 

SoundSpiral is a uniquely interactive audio playback environment, holding forty-eight speakers within a specially-designed inflatable venue.
The first work to be shown in the space will be Babel Spring, by Amie Slavin and Duncan Chapman.

The whole project is the brainchild of Amie Slavin who has made an extraordinary piece using multiple languages for it’s first incarnation. The music I have made takes fragments of these languages and using specially designed granular processing creates pitch based music out of them.

There’s much more about the whole thing here

http://www.soundspiral.net/?page=Home

My piece started off as 48 Midi files …….. here they are played by a Marimba sound

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and here (slightly rearranged) played by the granulated voices

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Dark Januaries

duncan

Isabel and I scanning the floor at Bretton Hall to find the creaky floorboards

 

Isabel and I scan the floor at Bretton Hall for interesting creaking sounds …………

 

Over the last 15 years Isabel Jones and Duncan Chapman have been collaborating with each other ,they have co-composed numerous films, recordings, installations and performances including their album ‘Corrosion’, the music for Salamanda Tandems performances and their eight year personal documentary project ‘8 Dark Januaries’

Since 1994 they have met every January to start the year with some sonic research that involves the creation of an original piece of music. This process has been partly one of self documentation as well as a way of reviewing the last 12 months in sound.

The works produced have therefore become a kind of snapshot of our individual and collective work and travels from the preceding year. By “documentising” ourselves we have sought to create an oasis of reflective practice that both looks back and forwards. On many occasions we have discovered connections in our sound palettes and worked these into the pieces.

Sonic materials have included field recordings from all over the world as well as voice, live acoustic instruments and electroacoustic processing.
January 2004

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January 2005

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January 2006

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January 2007

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January 2008

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January 2009

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January 2010

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January 2011

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Horn and Rabab

duncan

12 Years ago Isabel Jones and I made a recording of her playing a one string Rabab complete with creaking tuning pegs and me playing the horn through a harmoniser. Some of this became another piece but yesterday Isabel emailed me a version of the original recording for us to think about making something out of in the future. My breath control isn’t this good any more BUT it the horn is now out of the case and we are contemplating a whole new world of long notes and mysterious textures

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In response to Ruscha

duncan

Three short pieces made as the start of a project with Wolverhampton Art Gallery and Museum in response to their exhibition of work by Ed Ruscha. All played live using a mixture of field recordings. This will form part of a performance installation at the gallery in October.

Made and played by

Elisha Millard aka Electric Farmer

Odira Morewabone

Webster Siame

Duncan Chapman

1st piece

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2nd piece

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3rd piece

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More information on the exhibition here

http://www.wolverhamptonart.org.uk/wolves/exhibitions

From the River To the Sea at the Royal Opera House

duncan

On Monday 30th May Isabel Jones and myself will be performing a 4 hour installation performance. This forms part of the ROH Sounding Out For Families week of creative activities (more information on the Opera House Website (http://www.roh.org.uk/)

This short track was made today (Thursday 26th) as part of our preparations for Mondays event. It features field recordings we have recorded on our travels around the world , water sounds from Ireland, France, Australia, Switzerland, Japan, Derbyshire as well as live voice , synthesised layers and a very stretched version of a well know piece of Tchaikovsky Ballet music (a prize for spotting what it is).

From the River to the Sea (Duncan Chapman / Isabel Jones 26/5/2011)

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Titles and Questions

duncan

having just written a blog entry following on from a visit to Steim in Amsterdam last month (you can read it here http://steim.org/projectblog/?p=2549 ) i remembered the list of short articles i was going to write for this website……… so here are the titles (to be added to and written about as time permits)

Fair Isle (lots of time staring out of little aeroplane windows ! this is Fair Isle on the way back to Inverness from Shetland)

    1. indoctrinated imagination
    2. intrinsic forms
    3. owning and meaning
    4. 500 types of cheese (on diversity)
    5. provenance and meaning
    6. a repertoire of processes
    7. false histories of music
    8. distillation
    9. Microphony and Mikrophonie
    10. the myth of spontaneity in popular music
    11. what are the fundamental elements ?
    12. against “workshops” (with Alexi)
    13. what’s music for ? multiplicity of function , functional models (and their limits)
    14. “music technology” and the invention of the piano
    15. abusing tools
    16. the problem of R&B in participatory work (homogenisation and choice limitation)
    17. the tyranny of choice
    18. the essence of collaboration
    19. Gertie and Gus (how to teach people to fish)
    20. Imagining music (without sound or object)
    21. Curiosity as the primary motivation
    22. participation at all costs ?
    23. Content, context and accessibility
    24. the types of musical experience (a recording is not a performance , this is not a pipe !)
    25. glitch and “error” as sound objects
    26. Sound over pitch
    27. the difference between a note, pitch,frequency and the dangers of confusing these
    28. the conspiracy theory of contemporary music
    29. the familiar vs the strange
    30. unique opportunities , recognising them and building things from them.

Ambergate Sounds

duncan

Here are some sounds for a project i’ve been doing for Jessie”s Fund (http://www.jessiesfund.org.uk/)  at Ambergate sports college in Grantham

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 railingsrecording the railings

DSC03705recording the sound of the bricks being scraped………..

Here are some of the pieces we made

Weird things

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Whale songs

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Dinner Hall music

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

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Shimmery Bells

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Sams Piece

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Alien Harmony

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Uke piece

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Time Dance

duncan

Time dance postcard

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.

time dance horns.php

Some of the installation sound

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Lambeth CLC 2010 : Sounding It Out

duncan

A series of projects for the City Learning Centre in Lambeth, based at the BFI. These projects include a sound installation for the Young Vic special schools theatre festival, a series of sound art projects in primary schools exploring notions of time, place and sound and a sound installation for the new CLC Building in Clapham. Sounding It Out Primary Schools project some of the initial ideas

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

Draw-Send-Play (DSP)

duncan

DSP was a project for the 2009 Making New Waves festival in Budapest

dsp

dsp 2

 

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)

DSP Chat

Here’s the result of this process

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

DSP whitehere’s the sound

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A film of the performance is coming soon

Insects and the Abyss

duncan

For this concert of music by Rued Langgaard , I made an electronic insect interlude.

here is the programme from the concert

Insects and the Abyss

Mike McInerney – Piano

Michael Neil – Electronic Extensions

poster image 1webimage

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

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millions of little critters !!

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London Sinfonietta Sonic Explorations Festival

duncan

I’m making a series of pieces for this festival at Kings Place , London. My event is on Saturday October 3rd @ 4.30 and features a number of new works made in collaboration with a group of young people and three musicians from the ensemble. We will also be playing a piece which is entirely generated by imgage to sound software (using this http://hem.passagen.se/rasmuse/Coagula.htm) on 8 computers linked to 8 loudspeakers. I’m also writing an acoustic version for Bassoon (Adam Mackenzie), Trumpet (Bruce Nockles) and Viola (Bridget Carey) so that the same sequence of sound events happen in both pieces.

Here’s the score

Coagula Piece Green on Black

 

 

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>

Instrumental version Score

NewSound

duncan

NewSound was a project at Kings Place in London as part of the London Sinfonietta “ART OF NEWS” weekend.

I worked with Zoe Martlew and Bruce Nockles from the Sinfonietta, a group from the Copenhagen Youth project and Poet Kenny Baraka to create a sound installation that was presented on Talking Paper. This was made for the project by the extraordinary Patrick Furness and David Cranmer. 100 sheets were scattered about the foyer spaces which could be played by pressing the PLAY button.

Some examples of the pieces

Listen close

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Farmland

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Gutter

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Own zone

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Tales of a rebellion

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Talking paper made by Patrick and David for the project

newspaper8

newspaper62

Here’s a film of the space

David Cranmer

http://www.nervoussquirrel.com/

Patrick Furness

http://www.patrickfurness.com/

Zoe Martlew

http://www.zoemartlew.com/

Sinfonietta Project Website

http://www.londonsinfonietta.org.uk/project/art-news

Kenny Baraka

http://www.myspace.com/kennybaraka

Corrosion

duncan

Corrosion


img-d5

 Artistic Director of Salamanda Tandem, choreographer and composer Isabel Jones was commissioned by Opera North and The Bonington Gallery to embark on a new period of research and development exploring the question ‘What is Opera?’ . To conduct this research Isabel brought composer and sound artists Duncan Chapman, together with sculptor and visual artist Gerard Renvez.

‘Corrosion’ treats the body, voice and material to an accelerated state of change and flux, organic and manufactured chemical processes interact …sounds decay, pulp dries out, metal disintegrates, bone imprints, stone crumbles, clay cracks, water evaporates…. In the accumulation, distillation, and sedimentation a transformation occurs…. Traces remaining are left behind and out of the corrosive debris arises something beautiful.

Installation and Performance Research
Artistic Director / Co -Composer / Choreographer – Isabel Jones
Co – Composer / Sound Installation Artist – Duncan Chapman
Visual Artist / Sculptor – Gerard Renvez
Singer / Composer –  Moira Smiley
Poet – Tony Baker

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Performers

Singer – Moira Smiley
Singer / Dancer – Isabel Jones
Live electronics / composition – Duncan Chapman
Singers – Bryony Jones, Richard Lindsay, Naomi Line, Aric Prentice
Costume Designer – Helen Segal
Poet – Tony Baker

Corrosion installation was performed at the Studio Theatre, Leeds Metropolitan University, Leeds, and at The Bonington Gallery, Nottingham during March 2003.