Category: Past

Soundmarks of North East Lincolnshire

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This was a project where I explored what the district sounded like by speaking to and recording the sounds with various groups in the area. One of the most distinctive things was the sound of the testing of the emergency sirens at the Lindsey Oil Refinery near Immingham along with sounds recorded on Cleethorpes beach and on a tug in the Humber estuary….

A movie with the sounds and collected texts is here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozzrI9_s048&list=PLakVSBv7tz8IlHXWHS00nbZWqYkQ71JFm&index=3&t=20s

20 Years of Notebooks

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(from 2011)

20 Years of Notebooks

There are 20 years of notebooks on my shelf

I am gradually going through them and scanning interesting looking score fragments and graphics

The soundtrack is a mixture of field recordings, generated things and solo improvisations

 

Verbier Festival 2014

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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

 

 

 

 

 

 

2.5 Cycles Syst/Diast (unconfirmed interpretation)

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I recently had to have a 24hour blood pressure monitor, (everything is fine).

I ended up with 24 hours of data consisting of Systolic and Diastolic pressure as well as heart rate. The machine took these readings every 20 minutes for 24 hours (with a longer interval at night time).

This is a mapping of this into audio for 2.5 cycles of the data

Systolic and Diastolic pressures are mapped directly onto pitch and the heart rate is mapped onto tempo (using audiomulch). After one cycle of 24 hours there are harmonics added into the sound so that the sound becomes more complex.

Sys dia

The graph is of these two figures starting at 9:30 am

 

Its quite a long piece (32 minutes)

 

The Sound House

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The Sound House is an online project for the Wigmore Hall that draws on their extensive archive.

Over the last 9 Months I have been working in collaboration with Dotank studios (who made the excellent Isle of Dogs soundmap) and Rus Pearson (http://ruspearson.com/) to create a series of “rooms” that contain sounds and music relating to the Hall, its historical context and what happens there now.

The website is now online and is here (Opens in new tab)

http://www.wigmore-hall.org.uk/learning/resources/soundhouse

amongst the things to find on the site are

  • A timelapse film and audio of the auditorium during one day
  • A series of pieces created with students from Pimlico Academy taking archive programmes as the source
  • A piece composed from different applause in the hall
  • A series of recordings of the Heath Quartet in different acoustics
  • A piece composed from interviews with artists
  • A piece created from the sounds of tuning up

 

Found In Ladywood

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A project for the CBSO with EC Arts

(from EC arts website)

‘Found in Ladywood’ will involve the Leo String Quartet, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra.  The quartet will take its renowned classical repertoire out of traditional settings and into Ladywood Fire Station for an autumnal Shostakovich Quartet number 8 performance.  The project will also feature a unique commission in the form of an original composition for Ladywood.  The piece will be created and lead by Composer and Music Animateur Duncan Chapman collaborating with Ladywood residents in a series of artistic workshops and the Leo Quartet to produce the piece for the final event.

The project has been inspired by both the CBSO’s ethos to reach out and engage new audiences, and ‘Lost in Ladywood’ a 2007 project by artist Simon Whitehead, commissioned by MADE.  Found in Ladywood recognises that there is a large percentage of the community that have not experienced ‘live’ classical music – it aims to take classical music out of its traditional settings and into the heart of the community, making it accessible to everyone.

Event skills workshops.

The journey leading up to the performance will involve members of the community working with EC-Arts to identify a non traditional performance venue free of charge.  The aim of the project is to collaborate with members of the community to change perspectives of a non traditional performance venue by transforming it for an event.  A series of workshops will be implemented and delivered in Ladywood to teach a core group in the community event management skills.  The community group will plan and deliver the October event by participating within all aspects of planning leading up to including the event day.

Artistic workshops.

Simultaneously ’artistic workshops’ have been lead within Ladywood by Composer Duncan Chapman, renowned for his experimental approach and technologically advanced festivals.  A recent example of Duncan’s work was a Nintendo DS orchestra that took place on the beach at the Aldeburgh Festival. Duncan is working with members of Ladywood community to record the ‘sounds of Ladywood’.   The sounds will inspire and form part of an original composition specifically for Ladywood to be performed on the 10th October 2010.

The Leo Quartet (Byron Parish, Jane Wright, Mike Jenkinson and Kate Setterfield) is a quartet of leading players from the CBSO who formed in 2004 and have built a reputation for vibrant performances of diverse repertoire.

Here is a short film of the event (opens in a new window)

Found In Ladywood

Royal Opera House Fanfare Project

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Fanfarefinal.jpg

The Royal Opera house fanfare project is now in its second year, I have been participating in the judging as well as running workshops for the winners and orchestrating  the final pieces. Some great music last year

Heres a film about last year

Royal Opera House Fanfare project Documentary

Here’s a bit of Blurb from the ROH website about this years project.

Fanfare Competition 2011

Create your sound for the Royal Opera House

Can you create a piece of music which is catchy, powerful, attention grabbing, and only 30 seconds long?

We are looking for brand new musical fanfares to be broadcast before performances at the Royal Opera House to let the audience know it is time to take their seats.

If you are aged eleven to sixteen we want you, on your own or in groups, to create your own fanfare of no more than 30 seconds to win the chance to have your music arranged, recorded and played at the Royal Opera House.

THE PRIZE

The composers of the winning fanfares will attend a workshop with a professional composer to develop and arrange their fanfare for the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House. Winners will also attend the recording session, and will be invited to a performance at the Royal Opera House to hear a premier broadcast of the final fanfares.

The winning pieces from last year are available here to listen

http://www.roh.org.uk/discover/education/fanfare.aspx

(these are the Sibelius files , the full orchestral versions are currently unavailable)

Time Dance

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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

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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

Insects and the Abyss

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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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Creatures Lost In Time (Hayward Gallery 2009)

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Creatures Lost in Time Image JPG 

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….

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2….

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3….

4….

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5….

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9….

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10….

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CoolTan Pieces

you are not children

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voices

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Simons Piece

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poems (Sharon)

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please don’t touch the white dots !

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a blind man on the beach

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Buxton Festival 2009

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The start of a project to make instruments to play a fanfare from the balcony of the Opera house during the festival.

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

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Squonky tube improvisation (from 1st session)

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

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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 !

Buxton Opera House

NewSound

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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

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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.

Ambulatincula

duncan

A sound installation for Forbury Gardens in Reading.

I was one of 7 artists commissioned to make soundworks for the Gardens. For a year audiences could pick up a portable mp3 player and listen to specially created works for particular locations in the Victorian Gardens.

amb

Here is some information about my pieces from the catalogue

The sounds of bells and gongs signal significant events in our lives. Beginnings and endings, birth, death, and marriage are all marked by these sounds. Bells are a universal signifier of stopping, pausing and change. In the past, the days in the Abbey were structured around the sound of bells. A bell signalled the time for monks to rise at 2am to sing the Office of the Lauds, and other bells signalled the time for work, silent contemplation and meals. In the prison the bell marks the division of the day into work, mealtimes and sleeping.

A series of seven short works respond to the juxtaposition of the prison with the Abbey ruins. The sounds of bells and gongs correspond to different parts of the day, inviting the listener to pause, listen, contemplate, and move on, changed in some way. Combined with recordings of daily activities, and the crackling of candles at St James’s Church, the sounds of bells ultimately disappear into silence. Thanks to: Professor Brian Kemp and Tony Stokes

 The pieces

walk

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mother

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morning

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busy

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calm

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12 bells

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3am

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Scopic

duncan

elephantnose-fish-cells

Light from stars takes millions of years to reach our eyes on earth. What we see through the telescope is already history. Down a microscope we can look inside the here and now, at cells that are measured in millionths of millimetres and events that happened milliseconds ago. And yet our inner and outer worlds can look uncannily similar…

A joint project between Royal Albert Hall Learning & Participation, the Medical Research Council Clinical Sciences Centre and Durham University gave schools in both London and County Durham the chance to engage with these concepts and to illustrate their own interpretations through art and sound pieces. Choosing from a range of images, from stem cells to supernovas, students selected one that captured their imagination. They then created a partner for it: a drawing, painting or piece of 3D art. In response to images from outer space they created pictures showing the microscopic world. Other students depicted outer space in response to a microscope image in accordance with the Scopic theme.

Almost 300 pupils from 11 schools entered the Scopic competition. A selection of the most impressive artwork forms the basis of the final exhibition.  Their work was assessed by a panel of judges including Baroness Greenfield, Dr Brian May, Lord Robert Winston and Sir Patrick Moore.

Students from 3 of the schools then worked with Duncan Chapman, a sound artist and composer to produce sound pieces representing each of the pieces of artwork in the exhibition. Each panel in the exhibition had an individually created soundtrack.

The Scopic exhibition ran at the Hall from 9th – 29th May 2009 before moving to a permanent location at Durham University.

Much of the sound installation was created using the Coagula open source Sonification Software which enables you to create sound from drawn images or BMP files . (http://hem.passagen.se/rasmuse/Coagula.htm)

Some of the soundtrack pieces

Cell from the brain of catwoman

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Friendly Bacteria

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Red Hole

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Red Giant

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more on the project here

http://www.csc.mrc.ac.uk/PublicScience/Schools/Scopic/

http://www.myscopic.co.uk/index.html

and at the Albert Hall Website

http://www.royalalberthall.com/explore/projects/project.aspx?id=1778

Mikrophonie project @ RFH 2008

duncan

Working with Year 5 pupils from Heathbrook Primary School in Lambeth, London and with students from the Royal
Academy of Music to create new music inspired by Stockhausen’s
Mikrophonie I .

Mikrophonie I is for Tam Tam and Live electronics, the notation of the piece specifies precisely how the micophones should be moved, what materials sould be used to play the Tam Tam and how the electronics should interact. In our project we created scores for these kind of things concentrating on music gestures between the live instruments, microphonist and electronics.

Some of the scores

Microphone moving round the bell

Modulation score

Order of playing

rotation

Here is a film of the pieces

more information on the festival is here

http://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/assets/press/releases/KLANG_PR1.pdf