Rhubarb sounds and more

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

Tony Wade’s Rhubarb Shed at the Wakefield Rhubarb Festival

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)

Cove

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

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

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

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/

In response to Ruscha

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

Sonic Treasure Hunt

A project at Spitalfields City farm for the 2011 Spitalfields Festival

June 18th @ Spitalfields City Farm (http://www.spitalfieldscityfarm.org/)

Hidden about the farm will be a series of pieces of music, composed by the Young Farmers group (and others) and built into specially made MP3 devices (electronics by the ever wonderful and multi-talented Yann Seznec of Looper and MapMixer fame)………. here are the pieces

The Sea in a Tree

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World of Goats

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Stuck in a bin ?

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Leaves

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Goose Egg

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Bamboo igloo

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Pig Chillout

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Bike

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Underground fish

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Ambient Ducks

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more information here http://www.spitalfieldsfestival.org.uk/index.php?pfid=17&cid=0&eid=288

Titles and Questions

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.

Royal Opera House Fanfare Project

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)

Love Music Festival

Touring round Scotland and featuring an extraordinary line up of performers.

I’m curating the Electric Loops days as well as running workshops in schools and with teachers.

more here (including tracks on the online jukebox and blogs as well as free software )

http://lovemusicfestival.com/

Huun Huur Tu

Huun Huur Tu : One of the featured artists in Electric Loops

The Love Music Looper (created by Yann Seznec) available for free download from the website

loooprrrr

Online materials include ideas for working with loops and spectra

spectrum

Spectral tools

Overtones 1

and loops

drum loop

Sound from workshop sessions on Lewis , September 2010

Stornaway Chanter Remix

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Ambergate Sounds

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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Spitalfields Festival Walks project

SPITALFIELDS

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

PDF Grab

Madge

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Sharif

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Miss Beryl

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Jez Self

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Mike Myers

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Lambeth CLC 2010 : Sounding It Out

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)

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

The Music of Electricity HCMF 2009

A project for the 2009 Huddersfield Contemporary music festival

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/)

Music of electricity Pixels

Creatures Lost In Time (Hayward Gallery 2009)

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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London Sinfonietta Sonic Explorations Festival

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

Buxton Festival 2009

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

Scopic

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

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