John Roach

Jan 312014

This video responds to the theme of the exhibition — Earlids. What enables us to focus on listening? And when we DO focus, what do we hear? In this case the act of planting four mute speakers in the snow, a neutral ground, provides an opportunity to capture sound in three ways.

First, this simple gesture focused my own attention as an observer on these objects, connecting my senses to the world of noise around me: the melting snow, the birds, the drone of the exhaust fan from the Thai restaurant. In this case the object is irrelevant, it could have been a hair dryer or a rock, and it would have had the same effect: a narrowing of attention in one perceptual sense that then opened the door for a greater attention in another.

Second, the act of recording opens the senses as well. As Hildegard Westerkamp writes:

The microphone alters listening. The mere comparison between how our ears listen and how the microphone picks up sounds in the environment, brings alerted awareness to the soundscape.

Third, the resulting media — the video, leaves the final act of listening to the viewer/listentener. The questionable nature of the juxtaposition of these speaker-objects and the overlaid soundscape may seem to some unremarkable, it may provoke a series of assumptions about the source of the sound, or it may enliven an interest in a soundscape that was captured at that moment,

John Roach – Focus from John Roach on Vimeo.

Posted by John Roach at 1:16 pm Sound Showcase 2013 - The Conversation Comments Off

Sam Sebren

Jan 172014

Re: Search is the culmination of Sam Sebren’s 2013 Wave Farm Residency, which he spent researching the history of transmission arts, radio, noise, performance, and the politics of radio. Through an immersion into the Wave Farm Study Center library collection of books and recordings, Sebren created a quasi, “non” documentary, open-narrative, audio collage using a collection of quotes, his own field recordings and music, and excerpts from over 40 transmission artists, musicians, and various broadcast media archives. The title of the project, Re: Search refers both to Sebren’s process and to artists’ endless quest for a poetic “truth,” as well as the ongoing search for information in the vast material created using the medium of radio during the 20th and 21st centuries.

Sam Sebren

Sam Sebren is a multidisciplinary artist who began his career in the East Village New York arts scene in the 1980s. A prolific maker, Sebren’s visual works take form in installation, collage, painting, photography, video, and public works. His sound-based works have ties to noise and no-genre music (Menlo Park Recordings). More recently Sebren has delved deeply into the medium of radio. His radio works for Wave Farm/WGXC have been broadcast nationally and internationally on Pacifica stations and on the Radia Network. Sebren also uses the medium of radio to activate dialogue around ecological and social justice issues impacting New York’s upper Hudson Valley. His program “The Nothing Is Real Radio Hour” embraces FM broadcast as a creative medium and is part of Transmission Arts and Experimental Sounds Saturday programming on Wave Farm’s WGXC 90.7-FM. Previous radio projects include “nothingisrealradio” with neighborhood public radio (npr) at the ’08 Whitney Biennial, and “Dharma Bums” co-hosted with Christina Malisoff on WRPI, Troy, NY.

Sebren’s work has been exhibited in galleries and universities widely, as well as in film festivals, unsanctioned public interventions and non-profit spaces. Recent exhibition venues include Scope Art Fair, NYC; Collar City Film Festival, Troy/Brooklyn; Gallery Aferro, Newark, NJ; The University at Buffalo Art Gallery; John Davis Gallery, Hudson, NY; The College of Saint Elizabeth, Morristown, NJ; X-Initiative, NYC; The Center for Photography, Woodstock (CPW), CUNY Graduate Center, NYC; The College of Saint Rose, Albany, NY; TSL, Hudson, NY; Bard College; Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY; Siena College, Loudonville, NY; in the empty, former Ulster County Jail as part of The Kingston Sculpture Biennial; and in the traveling exhibition (and accompanying book) “Paper Politics” (PM Press).

Wave Farm

Wave Farm is a non-profit arts organization that celebrates creative and community use of media and the airwaves. Our programs provide access to transmission technologies and support artists and organizations that engage with media as an art form. Wave Farm’s major activities include:

Transmission Arts: programs that support artists who engage the transmission spectrum, on the airwaves and through public events. The Wave Farm Artist Residency Program is an international visiting artist program. The Transmission Arts Archive presents a living genealogy of artists’ experiments with broadcast media and the airwaves. Wave FarmRadio Art is a continuous online radio feed.

WGXC (90.7-FM): a creative community radio station based in New York’s Greene and Columbia counties. Hands-on access and participation activate WGXC as a public platform for information, experimentation, and engagement.

Media Arts Grants: a Regrant Partnership with NYSCA, Electronic Media and Film, The Media Arts Assistance Fund supports electronic media and film organizations, as well as individual artists, in all regions of New York State.

wavefarm.org

Posted by Josephine Holtzman at 12:00 pm Sound Showcase 2013 - The Conversation Comments Off

Tom Roe, Wavefarm

Jan 172014

Wave Farm Artistic Director, Tom Roe, and recent artist-in-residence, Sam Sebren, present during a special event on January 29, 2014, in conjunction with the exhibition Earlids.

Tom Roe

Tom Roe is the Artistic Director of Wave Farm and a transmission artist, who works frequently with radio and sound. He co-founded microradio station 87X in Tampa, Florida; and, with Greg Anderson and Violet Hopkins, founded free103point9 as a microradio collective in Brooklyn, New York in 1997. Roe performs with transmitters and receivers using multiple bands (FM, CB, walkie-talkie), as well as prepared CDs, vinyl records, and various electronics. He creates radio soundscapes using locally available frequencies, often to the beat of manipulated pop song samples. Roe has collaborated with Pierre Huyghe, Kristin Lucas, members of the Gold Sparkle Band, Matt Bua, Carrie Dashow, Tali Hinkis, Matt Mikas, and many others.

Roe has exhibited widely both in the United States and internationally. Performances have taken place at the Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh; White Box, New York free103point9 Wave Farm, Acra; Center for Contemporary Art in Warsaw, and at Laznia Centre for Contemporary Art in Gdansk, Poland; Gwangju Biennale, South Korea; Santa Fe Art Institute, New Mexico; Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT; The Kitchen, New York; and The Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art, Florida; among numerous others. In Sept., 2006 he served as a radio technician with The Wooster Group’s show “Who’s Your DADA?!” at the Museum of Modern Art.

Roe has also written about music for The Wire, Signal to Noise, and The New York Post, among others. Roe’s writing about free jazz in New York appeared in The Wire’s 20th Anniversary publication Undercurrents (Continuum).

Roe has led many of free103point9’s “Radio Lab” education lectures and workshops, speaking about how to perform with transmitters and the history of radio performance and microcasting at venues such as Columbia University, Brown University, Brooklyn College, Flux Factory, The Kitchen, NYU’s ITP Program, Kids Discover Radio in East Harlem, Grassroots Media Conference at The New School, RPI University in Troy, and other locations.

Wave Farm

wavefarm.org

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Diane Moser

Jan 102014

Sound In Time and Place: Music and Architecture

This is a class created by Diane Moser at the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music in the Fall of 2013

The class was put together for the sole purpose of composing music based on the elements of the New School University Center on Fifth Avenue in New York City. The first part of the semester was spent learning more about the connection between music and architecture: specifically how musical terms such as rhythm, texture, harmony, proportion, dynamics, and articulation refer both to architecture and to music.

The class also explored Pythagoras’s discovery of the mathematical ratios that make up the overtone series (circa 530 BC), and how architects such as Vitruvius, Palladio and Le Corbousier have used these ratios in their designs, and how composers, such as Iannis Xennakis, have in turn, used architectural design dimensions for their compositions.

About the Artists

Louis Cohen
Noise in the Library (to be performed in the library)

The library is usually associated with having your nose buried deep in their book, studying in solitary silence. It becomes a passive place. Nothing happens in the library. The New School’s new library has a different purpose. While it still encourages hard work and studying, it doesn’t mean to lock people up in a cell of books. Instead, it inspires activity, whether that be social or academic. This sound piece is meant to turn this passive space into an active one. A place of education, creativity and discussion. It is meant to be a recontextualization the library.

Musical Chairs (to be performed in the Event Cafe)

The Event Cafe is a lounging area equipped with a stage for performances. Students will be able to sit and enjoy performances, but without the formal occasion that the auditorium calls for. Because of this, there will be lots of motion in this space. Students can go there between classes, to eat their lunch, or just to enjoy the environment. This performance art piece is meant to emulate the hustle and bustle of the Event Cafe. The conductor gives the musicians cues to begin playing and walking around the tables. They are given specific instructions based on a system of visual directions. While it is chaotic, there is an order to the piece. Spectators can feel free to go down into the cafe to join in.

Mike Robinson
Climb That Mountain (to be performed on the 4th or 5th floor landing)

This piece is a three part representation of the movement in the building. The piece as a whole is an acceleration from a ballad to a fast ending movement with the second movement being “variable tempo.” The tempo is to be determined by passers by. The faster the passers-by walk, the faster this section is played. This represents the fast moving pace of the building and the culture of New York City that is represented by the building.

Itamar Shatz
Stairwell Conversations (to be performed on the 4th or 5th floor landing).

“Stairwell Conversations” is inspired by and dedicated to the University’s vibrant social life, written specifically to address the atmosphere of the new building’s interactive space located on the stairwell landing between the 4th and the 5th floors.

Where you are standing right now, dozens of students are about to be walking every day. They might just pass by, going from one class to another, or spend more time around the interactive space. Whatever the case may be, they are going to talk with each other. This blend of conversations will create a certain sound, combining all different languages, attitudes and content. This sound is represented through the first part of the piece. The trumpets and trombone represent laughter, while the saxophones bring a rather intellectual talk. The guitar and the bass provide intimate conversations; some tense and some calmer and warmer.

The interactive space is a junction that brings everybody together; designers, musicians, writers, professors, students and staff. To express the unity and joy brought by the presence of all these, comes the second part of the piece. That is an Afro-Beat and Brooklyn style influenced section that involves the entire band and includes written parts as well as improvisation. The transitions between the two sections reflect the various dynamics of the interactive space, considering moments of high traffic and diverse sounds versus the beauty and wholeness of conversations resonating perfectly within the space.

Quentin Tschofen and Joe Vilardi
Glass, 2013 (sound installation-location TBD)

Inspired by the façade of Kerrey Hall, Glass is an interactive sound installation, which at its core, is about movement. As visitors interact with and move through the space, an ambient sonic environment unfolds around them. Using recordings which explore the sonic properties of glass, Glass responds the visitor’s movement through the use of Kinects and a program written in Processing.

Quentin Tschofen
Brass (for Brass quintet-to be performed in the auditorium)

Brass is a composition in three sections that was written for the opening of Kerrey Hall.The first section symbolizes the construction of the building. One motive is explored here, slowly building up until it is finally heard as a fanfare in its completion: the completion of Kerrey Hall. The second section explores the concept of movement within the building, fragmenting the original theme and moving through the instruments. The third and final section is analogous to a benediction. Here, a condensed version of the initial harmonic language is featured, which finally evolves into the main theme and ultimately ends the composition.

8 minutes – 2 trumpets, trombone, french horn and tuba; 5 chairs & music stands (semi circle)

Joe Vilardi
Emerging (for brass quintet-to be performed in the auditorium)

Emerging was written with John Dewey’s words in mind: “Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.” Inspired by such lifelong study and growth, the spirit of collaboration, and the candid nature of Kerrey Hall’s façade, Emerging is a dedication to the students of all seven of our university’s divisions who will thrive in this intersectional haven of learning. The number seven is thus used often throughout the piece’s melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic content, each use appearing separately until their fusion at the end, representing a balanced coexistence within the university.

4 minutes – 2 trumpets, trombone, french horn and tuba; 5 chairs & music stands (semi circle)

Michael Beckett-Fedarko (to be performed in the auditorium)
The Building Suite

The Building Suite is a three part piece for Jazz Nonet designed to be a sonic immersion of a typical day at the University Center. In the first movement “Morning” we enter the building as light floods in through the windows and slowly we begin our ascent up the staircase as we pass by the quite clatter of people beginning their days. This moderate walk accelerates into the second movement “Noon” in which the building comes alive with the hustle and bustle of midday activity. The multi-colored corridors become vibrant as people pass through them rapidly on their way to and from class. The constant activity finally settles down into the third and final movement, “Night” a slow release of all of the energy built up throughout the day as the last of the lights are turned off and the people exit the building only to return another day,

Posted by Josephine Holtzman at 2:48 pm Sound Showcase 2013 - The Conversation Comments Off

Nerina Penzhorn

Jan 102014

This is a soundscape with accompanying video. The audio comprises field recordings in and around the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn, New York, one of the most polluted waterways in the US. The title comes from a conversation I had with Eymund Diegel, who took me out on the canal by canoe. Eymund is an Urban Planner with an encyclopedic knowledge of the Gowanus Canal. He talked about the natural streams that have been flowing into the canal for centuries and that will still be around long after we’re gone.

About the Artist

Nerina Penzhorn is a filmmaker and video producer with dual US/South African citizenship. Nerina has produced and edited segments for Current TV, PBS as well as for various nonprofit organizations. She is currently a Broadcast Specialist at UNICEF. Her first documentary feature ‘Waited for’ had a successful film festival run and is distributed by Wolfe Video.

Posted by Josephine Holtzman at 2:28 pm Sound Showcase 2013 - The Conversation Comments Off

Josephine Holtzman and Isaac Kestenbaum

Jan 102014

“The River” is part one of Winters Past, a transmedia storytelling project that grapples with a changing natural world through personal experience, memory and history. Through the medium of a Soundwalk, a form of site-specific storytelling that integrates oral history, sound design, field recordings and music into a narrative that unfolds in situ, Winters Past seeks to create an experience of “embodied history” that transforms the abstract ideas of environmental degradation and climate change into a physically tangible remembrance of this storied season.

The Hudson River is haunted by the memories and stories of how Wintertime once was – full of snow, ice, and consistent cold. It was also once full of Ice Yachts – meticulously crafted wooden sailboats on skates. In their heyday, at the turn of the 19th century, these boats were the fastest vehicles on the planet, reaching speeds of nearly 80 miles per hour. The sport regularly drew thousands of spectators to the frozen river to watch races. Today, in the absence of extensive ice, the sport is carried on by a hearty few.

This soundwalk is meant to be heard on the Walkway on the Hudson, a pedestrian bridge in Poughkeepsie that was once a railway over the river. (However, if you can’t travel to the Walkway, you can still enjoy the walk. We recommend listening while walking along the Hudson—or any river.) The Walkway—and the Soundwalk—begin at 64 Parker Ave, in Poughkeepsie.

http://www.winterspast.org/

About the Artists

Josephine Holtzman is a multimedia and radio producer, an MA candidate in the New School’s Media Studies program and a founding member of Sound@New School. Isaac Kestenbaum is a producer and production manager for StoryCorps, a national oral history project.

Posted by Josephine Holtzman at 12:27 pm Sound Showcase 2013 - The Conversation Comments Off

Sound Matters

Jan 102014

The Reduced Listening Player is a sample bank that represents many audio clips collected by the students of the course Sound Matters from 2012 and 2013. After reading the Michel Chion text The Three Listening Modes, each student is asked to record 20 sound samples between 1 and 10 seconds in length that can be experienced in the mode describes as “reduced listening.” As Chion describes:

“Pierre Schaeffer gave the name reduced listening to the listening mode that focuses on the traits of the sound itself, independent of its cause and of its meaning.3 Reduced listening takes the sound—verbal, played on an instrument, noises, or whatever—as itself the object to be observed instead of as a vehicle for something else.”

In Sound Matters, students used these reduced listening clips to build audio compositions, but they were presented in the 2013 exhibition Earlids as an interactive player that visitors could use to mix sounds and blend textures. Here is another variation using an automated Max patch, the Gravitas Phrase Generator, to launch the reduced listening samples.

Artist Bio

Sound Matters is a course led by John Roach, a sound artist and full time faculty at Parsons the new School for Design.

Posted by John Roach at 10:14 am Sound Showcase 2013 - The Conversation Comments Off

Tessie Word

Jan 102014

This four part sound piece explores the theme of control in relation to the history of Columbia river and its tributaries, each separate movement introduced by a siren chorus.
In 7 and half minutes you will hear: the story of a pioneer woman who commits murder at Willamette Falls to escape the violence in her world; the sounds Bonneville Dam’s electricity surging in all directions near the ancient site of the Bridge of the Gods; a woman singing an old folk song about the death of a goose, her mouth gagged with plastic; Coast Guard bar requests, asking boaters to collect plastic, interrupted with a fisherman’s memories of sailing different oceans.

About the Artist

Tessie Word is a multimedia artist, curator and educator based in Portland, Oregon near where she was born and raised on the Oregon Coast.

Her work has been exhibited domestically at venues such as The Women Composer’s Festival in Hartford, Connecticut, and The Strange Beauty Festival in Durham, North Carolina as well as internationally at The Harrisburg Museum in Lancashire, England and MMX Gallery in Berlin, Germany.

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Rory Solomon

Jan 102014

Presentation

Function Time presents an ‘auralization’ of the computer program as a means to create deeper understanding of the timescales at which software operates. Many projects have created software visualizations, but where the visual emphasizes the objectivity of distance, sound is visceral: we hear inside our skulls, a song can “get in our head”. The function call stack is a structure at the core of the computer program. This stack will be recorded and charted for one millisecond for 12 popular open source software systems. These charts will be converted into musical scores and played. The millisecond will be expanded to a 15 second duration and looped, getting shorter and shorter each play, until finally the individual notes meld into one steady hum. Algorithmic program time will be auralized on a human scale, then will gradually draw the viewer in to the speed at which computational objects actually function. Project will be shown here July 2013: http://instrument.someprojects.info
Artist Bio

Rory Solomon is an artist and software developer. He is Tech Lead for the Urban Research Tool: a mapping platform for geo-spatial research in use by several projects at the New School. As a media artist he has collaborated with Marek Walczak, Ken Goldberg and others on projects featured in the Whitney Biennial, the Berkeley Art Museum, and the National Art Museum of China. He currently teaches programming to art and design students at Parsons, and is pursuing his Masters in Media Studies at the New School, where his thesis focusses on media archaeology and
software.

Posted by Josephine Holtzman at 1:30 am Sound Showcase 2013 - The Conversation Comments Off

Barbara Siegel

Jan 102014

This installation, a tribute to Hector Wallace, Coney Island’s great sign painter and raconteur, is also a memory piece about the pre-gentrified Coney Island I loved when I was a child. The audio interview with Wally was done on the boardwalk in 2005 for SIDE SHOW, an exhibition of my biographical installations inspired by the lives of iconic members of Coney Island’s unique culture. This new installation incorporates the original audio with visual images of Wally’s work and my own pieces inspired by him and his wonderful food paintings. A short documentary film of the same title incorporating the audio interview with many of these same images was another fortuitous result of the Sound Showcase call for projects.

About the Artist

Barbara Siegel is an installation artist whose multimedia installations are biographically based. She is a member of A.I.R. Gallery, NYC and has had solo exhibitions throughout the United States including Marilyn Pearl Gallery, NYC, and Nina Freudenheim Gallery, Buffalo. Her work is in many public and private collections including the Albright Knox Art Gallery, The National Gallery of Art, Brown University, University of Chicago, and Yale University. Her work has been reviewed in The New York Times, Art in America, Art News, Art on Paper, and the Village Voice. Barbara Siegel is an adjunct Associate Professor at Parsons, the New School for Design, NYC.

Posted by Josephine Holtzman at 1:25 am Sound Showcase 2013 - The Conversation Comments Off

Lauren Kelly

Jan 102014

This project was produced as a part of Suzanne Snider’s course Experiments in Oral History in the fall of 2012. It is an audio essay about a young man Brandon, and his parents’ experience following a bike accident, coma, and an evacuation from Bellevue hospital during hurricane Sandy. The piece is made from two long-form group interviews I conducted with Brandon and his parents who had been in New York since early September following the accident. I included music by Brandon and experimented with an abstract visual representation of voices. I was inspired by Brandon, his family and friends and the process of people gathering to visit. I thought about silences and pauses; communication interrupted, and wondered what he was hearing for weeks as people came in and out. I wanted to create an audio essay with their voices that mimics the rhythms of these interruptions and pauses. I think the Sandy evacuation is another interruption in their process of getting life ‘back to normal’.

Interrupted: Smith Family Meeting from Lauren Elizabeth Kelly on Vimeo.

About the Artist

Lauren Elizabeth Kelly is a dancer and filmmaker working with memory, sound, and communication. (Documentary Certificate 2011, M.A. Media Studies winter 2013)

Posted by Josephine Holtzman at 1:17 am Sound Showcase 2013 - The Conversation Comments Off

Themistoklis Pellas

Jan 102014

Generally, an audio podcast refers to a recorded sound file made available for download through a digital broadcasting medium, while its process is commonly approached as a mere technical matter or an information and communication technologies affordance following the co-evolution of the internet, personal computers, portable audio players and Rich Site Summary (RSS) feed.

More than this though, audio podcasting crystallizes today transformations to the everyday auditory experience of more and more urbanites, from mobility, appropriation of time and the spatio-temporal division of labor to the ways data, information and knowledge are curated and valued.

The objective of the workshop series at Parsons The New School for Design has been to explore how podcasting can be used as a critical urban technique and tool. Emphasis has been given on how the process of podcasting can amplify local-relevant urban practices, while providing a sensible understanding on the broader ecological dimensions of places.

To achieve this, the podcasting process is approached both as a way of knowing and through its produced output, while technical assistance in recording, sound engineering and broadcasting has been combined with inquiries in listening, bodily awareness, qualitative description of sound events and mapping, psychoacoustics, voice qualities, narrative modes, politics.

About the Artists

Themistoklis Pellas, Urban & Regional Planner

Posted by Josephine Holtzman at 1:12 am Sound Showcase 2013 - The Conversation Comments Off

Christoffer Laursen Hald

Jan 102014

Adonis and Aphrodite

This sound documentary is about the repetition and monotony that is the life of the gym – you go 3-5 times a
week, you have 10-15 repetitions of 3 sets which you do with several weights, then you might go for a run for 20 minutes all while staying in one place. The gym which starts out as a recreational outlet from the everyday life turns into just another routine that you have to get through. But out of this monotony arises a melody or a beat that you follow as you go through the motions – my doc tries to capture the repetitive and monotonous lives of people who go to the gym as well as the rhythmic quality that can be found in a gym.

About the Artist

Danish Parsons student (Class of 2016) studying Communication design. Constantly moving and traveling around, New York is just one of many stamps in my passport. Aspires to become all of the following : rich, handsome, married to Natalie Portman and work as a graphic/concept designer.

Posted by Josephine Holtzman at 1:09 am Sound Showcase 2013 - The Conversation Comments Off

Andrea Kannes

Jan 102014

“Deepest Taco Bell” is a sonic exploration into an experience very often looked down upon by the large part of society. Taco Bell is known by most to be a site of sub-par fast food, fluorescent lights, and commercialism. However, what co-exists with these negative notions is a positive: a diverse array of people. Customers and employees come from all walks of life to interact in spaces such as Taco Bell. Many find themselves walking through those smudged glass doors, whether a hipster ironically stopping in, a family looking for a cheap meal, or a couple friends who just really like Taco Bell (because it somehow reminds them of home and is oddly comforting). This experimental documentary sound piece attempts to evoke a wide range of feelings. Aural metaphor and collage are at work, causing the listener to pay attention more closely to what is normally seen as a contemptible, “throw-away” place.

About the Artist

Andrea Kannes is currently an employee and student at The New School pursuing a graduate degree in Media Studies while exploring every single creative outlet that exists. This most recently includes producing, “We Lived Alone: The Connie Converse Documentary,” dabbling in found footage of the 16mm variety, and the occasional stand-up comedy. Her Twitter handle is @ZBogart, if you’re into that sort of thing.

Posted by Josephine Holtzman at 12:57 am Sound Showcase 2013 - The Conversation Comments Off

Melissa Grey

Jan 102014

60×60 is a project containing 60 compositions each 60 seconds in length. Founded by Rob Voisey in 2003, 60×60 presents a slice of the contemporary music scene by representing 60 diverse works. Pieces were selected from an international pool of emerging and established composers and sound artists. The resulting mix is broadcast, without interruption, as a continuous one-hour event. Melissa Grey is the audio coordinator, macro-composer for the 60×60 (2012) New York Minutes Mix, which is the second mix comprised of composers, musicians and sound artists from New York. Featuring the work of Hans Tammen, Laurie Speigel, Robert Dick, Reena Katz (student from Melissa Grey’s Sound Studies class; Parsons MFA 2012), Chris Mann (New School faculty), Joel Chadabe, and others.

Program notes:
http://www.60×60.com/2012_New_York_Minutes_Mix.htm

Appassionata

A film collage and musical composition (pre-recorded electronics, flute, violin or two violins). Artist Angela Grauerholz invited me to interpret a fragment of music that Ludwig Wittgenstein had scribbled down in his journal in 1931. Accompanying this music, he wrote: “That must be the end of a theme which I cannot place. It came into my head today as I was thinking about my philosophical work and saying to myself, I destroy, I destroy, I destroy.” Wittgenstein’s attempt to consider the implications of the limitations language places on human experience is reflected in this piece where the meaning remains open, and several sensibilities and forms of expression are merged into one. The film collage, by Grauerholz and Réjean Myette, was constructed as a response to my resulting composition, in a dialogue that reconsiders image-sound hierarchy. This work premiered at the National Gallery of Canada, 2010.

About the Artist

Composer Melissa Grey’s projects include concert works, electroacoustic performances, field recordings, installations, music and sound for film and video and collaborations with artists and designers. Recent works have been published by The MIT Press and exhibited or performed at the National Gallery of Canada, Goethe-Institut Montréal, The Stone, Spectrum, Dorsky Gallery, Judson Church, Whitney Museum of American Art (with Antenna International), International Computer Music Conference, Alphabet City Festivals 2010 AIR and 2009 WATER, Cinesonika: First International Film and Video Festival of Sound Design, Reno Interdisciplinary Festival of New Media, and others.

Posted by Josephine Holtzman at 12:46 am Sound Showcase 2013 - The Conversation Comments Off

Fantastic Futures

Jan 102014

Our collective, Fantastic Futures is a collaborative team of students, artists, doctors, and future leaders from Iraq and the United States. For our recently completed Rhizome Commission, we created a free and open online sound archive that examines concepts of time through the recording, collaging, and sharing of sounds between these two countries. As we are faced with huge questions about their future, the website serves as a platform to subvert unjust structures of power used to divide us by instead supporting each other and offering a means through which our stories might be heard. Our goal is nothing short of social justice and the means of achieving that are slow, steady, and subversively poetic. For the performance event, which took place in the New Museum Theater this past fall, we created a participatory performance of the website, enacted by humans wearing sounds. To further explore shared experiences of time, memory, and trauma between countries in conflict, audience member

About the Artists

Fantastic Futures is a collective that began two years ago as a group of about 20 artists, designers, students, doctors, and activists from Iraq and the U.S. This project developed from conversations about the importance of sharing stories and collectively envisioning the future. To that end, the group created an interactive sound archive (www.fantasticfutures.fm) through which they could collect and share sounds from different locations and collage them together to form chance-based compositions. Since then, wehave created a collaborative performance which we presented at the New Museum and are currently (as part of the iLAND residency) collaborating with scientist Jason Munshi-South and movement-based artist Sonia Finley to 1 investigate the biodiversity and history of Queens Flushing Meadows-Corona Park (as the site of the 1939 and 1964 World’s Fairs and temporary site of the UN) and current changes around its use as a public space.

http://fantasticfutures.fm/

Posted by Josephine Holtzman at 12:41 am Sound Showcase 2013 - The Conversation Comments Off

Dane Filipczak

Jan 102014

Sound art piece, completed as my senior capstone project for the senior seminar led by Robert Sember. A recording was prepared that asked 13 student volunteers to react to several prompts using noise, while being recorded. Thewords were 1) emptiness 2) suffering 3) liberation. Each of the 3 sets of 13 responses were composed together using a grid based on each volunteer’s first name and zodiac sign. The result is a single piece in three movements, each cataloging 13 spontaneous non-sensical, but very humanreactions. The piece builds off of John Cage’s concept of aleatoric (chance controlled) music, using humans instead of inanimate objects as the instrument. The intended effect is to allow people to “wake up” to the sounds around them, including the ones that they create.

About the Artist

Dane is a Lang graduate with an A.F.A in music theory from the Community College of Baltimore County, originally BA/BFA with Jazz (guitar) and Lang before switching to just Lang (Arts in Context Music/Philosophy).

Posted by Josephine Holtzman at 12:30 am Sound Showcase 2013 - The Conversation Comments Off

Benjamin Fausch

Jan 102014

The sound you’re hearing is TNS’ logo in JPEG form, the raw data was then translated directly into sound using a special algorithm in Audacity’s import settings. I added reverb in the style of Tischman Auditorium using a room emulator.

I wanted to explore the hidden sonic signature that can be associated with digital objects, then take that sound and place it into a familiar space. Then the idea is to see what the translation can present, good or bad. So here’s the question then, We are constantly attempting to quantize our art through digital means, and are trying to produce hi-fidelity objects as much as possible. The statements we make, the art we produce, the sounds we record, all of it is quantized into data. Data, not information. Can you translate an aura, an idea, or even a statement without addition/loss when you quantize?

About the Artist

Ben Fausch is a classically trained Tubist, Engineer, Graphic Designer, and Sound Artist at the New School. He has performed with a variety of acts ranging from Burlesque to Punk Marching bands. As an engineer, Ben has worked professionally with a variety of artists, and recently finished working for the world-famous Avatar studios. He specializes in the manipulation of audio for artistic and comedic purposes.

Posted by Josephine Holtzman at 12:11 am Sound Showcase 2013 - The Conversation Comments Off

Diane Dwyer and Matthew de Leon

Jan 092014

Performance

The title for the proposed piece is taken from the Orwell essay, which concludes, “Political language — and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

“Politics and the English Language,”
Orwell, Horizon. — GB, London. — April 1946

Two performers, dressed identically, offer people a word selection. Once the word is chosen, it is recited in unison, followed by contradictory definitions.

For example

SANCTION
to authorize, approve, or allow

SANCTION
to penalize

A simple consideration of context and meaning, political rhetoric and its obfuscation. What may sound fixed, is, in fact, mutable.

Artist Bio

Matthew de Leon was born in New York, raised on Governor’s Island, and now lives in Brooklyn. He received his BFA from the UConn, and his MFA from Parsons. Diane Dwyer grew up in New England. She now live in Brooklyn, where she hosts a circus in her apartment. Matthew and Diane are long time collaborators.

Posted by Josephine Holtzman at 11:58 pm Sound Showcase 2013 - The Conversation Comments Off

Nicholas Campbell

Jan 092014

Persono

Persono is a conceptual and interactive sound-art installation. Falling sand and spinning motors play guitars, creating a peaceful, patterned drone. Viewers will have the ability to be part of the installation in a way that will add to the experience for all if they choose. Conceptually, Persono utilizes “infinite” and “finite” elements to both create a meditative, structured ambience and to symbolize the two time-elements of existence. One plane of the room is anchored by guitars played by infinite falling sand, while the other plane features two guitars played by automated motors performing a cyclical, finite pattern. In thecenter of these planes is human life, and so an audience triggered element sits in the center.

See some of the elements in the video below. This installation has been performed twice before in Southern California at small galleries:

Artist Bio

I am a newcomer to the world of gallery art, having started my musical journey in more traditional settings. The move towards different forms of sonic expression began initially as an out-cropping of film scoring experiences (I’ve had music in Sundance and SXSW award winning films). When not working on music, I work in web development. I started classes through the New School as a way to deepen my knowledge in that field, and am very happy I did so!

wageswages.com

Posted by Josephine Holtzman at 6:59 pm Sound Showcase 2013 - The Conversation Comments Off

Phuong Nguyen

Jan 092014

The Awkward Listener is a participatory performance. It explores the relationship between sounds, awkward intimacy, the act of listening and movement of the body. The piece will consist of handmade speakers with limited volume in order to demand a specific type of listening from the audience. The sounds are to be explore in limited body movements and demand a specific type of observing. The viewers are asked to have their ear against or close to the speaker’s surface, and also asked to be still in their movement. Thus this act of listening does not only demand a certain kind of attention, it also create awkward intimacy between the viewers and the objects. The piece contains 4 speakers, each plays a different track: a whispering of a story, a reading of academic text, a conversation and a composition of sounds of the body, bodies to bodies and bodies in space.

Artist Bio

Phuong Nguyen, originally from Vietnam, is currently a designer and artist currently residing in Brooklyn, NY. She concentrates in New Media art. She is a part of Fantastic Futures and performed at the New Museum. She also has worked as a designer for MTV Networks. Her works are usually mixed media installation, sculpture and performance. Currently she is an iLand’s resident and Culture Push’s fellow

Posted by Josephine Holtzman at 5:17 pm Sound Showcase 2013 - The Conversation Tagged with: nuygen, phuong Comments Off

Ryan Raffa

Jan 092014

2013, Digital Prints

She Surrounds Us explores personal geographies. These photographic pieces have been manipulated by resonances of the human voice with a single image processed by projecting sonic waveforms into it. Using time and a continuous stream of yelling, the woman depicted distorts, eventually becoming unrecognizable.

Posted by John Roach at 5:11 pm Sound Showcase 2013 - The Conversation Comments Off

Peter McQuillan

Jan 092014

ECO(SOUND)SYSTEM: Suite 1: The Seed is a 30 minute mixtape weaving together field recordings, music, poetry and LP samples. Elements of musique concrete and sound collage are employed to explore urban sound ecology and and the human relationship with nature & technology. Eco(sound)system is part of a larger interactive art installation which made its debut on April 20, 2013 at Wollman Hall as part of the 2013 Megapolis Audio Festival. The installation explores our urban ecology through a polyphony of senses. Visitors engage with listening stations, sound objects, microscopes, photographs, collages and found objects woven together into an ecosystem of its own, The project focuses on some of the sounds, sights and symbols which help to define our urban environment and the human relationship with nature & technology.

Artist Bio:

Peter McQuillan is a musician, radio producer and show promoter based in New York City. Originally from western Massachusetts, he is a founder of Rooftop Shout, a DIY artist collective & record label. McQuillan also co-hosts and produces Amplified Friends, a performing arts podcast on WNSR New School Radio and is a soon-to-be graduate of Eugene Lang The New School for Liberal Arts where he studied Music & Environmental Studies.

Posted by Josephine Holtzman at 4:16 pm Sound Showcase 2013 - The Conversation Tagged with: Peter McQuillan Comments Off

Derek Baron

Jan 072014

Performance.

The score of John Cage’s 0’00” (1962) reads:
In a situation provided with maximum amplification, perform a disciplined action.
This realization of 0’00” involves 5 maximally amplified contact microphones, connected to keys on the performer’s laptop. The return key and the C, A, G, and E keys are amplified (in honor of the tradition, at least as old as J. S. Bach, of using the letters in composers’ names as pitch material or structural limitations in a work).

The “disciplined action” in question is a live transcription of another John Cage piece, the Lecture on Nothing (1949). As the performer listens to the lecture privately, he publicly presents the artifact of an written transcription. The obstructive force of the contact microphones, as well as the stenographic limitations of transcribing the spoken word, will lead to a visual artifact shot through with imperfections. The aural artifact, the sound of the keyboard as transmitted through contact microphones, an exploration in its own right into the rhythmical possibilities of the modern keyboard, remains, perhaps as mere byproduct

About the Artist:

Derek Baron is a percussionist and composer based in Brooklyn, NY. He is a student of composition and performance at the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music and a student of Philosophy at Eugene Lang the New School for Liberal Arts. Before coming to New York, Derek was active in Chicago, where he grew up.

Posted by John Roach at 3:39 pm Sound Showcase 2013 - The Conversation Comments Off

Kevin T. Allen

Jan 072014

– Super-8mm, 11 minutes, 2012.

A study of three similar but distinct microcultures: the Manhattan Bridge, Brooklyn Bridge and Williamsburg Bridge. Interrogated through the use of contact microphones, the physical infrastructures of these bridges become audible and reveal their inherent macroacoustics. The film treats the bridge as an anthropological body for discourse, as a physiology of limbs, organs, eyes and ears moving in time.

About the Artist:

Kevin T. Allen is a filmmaker, sound artist, and independent radio producer whose work traverses museums, galleries, festivals, and conferences around the globe. He is increasingly fascinated with the territory that straddles ethnography and the avant-garde, disciplines that are both deeply immersed in “the other” and a thick approach to representation. His recent interest in acoustic archeology urges him to locate culture not only in human forms, but also in physical landscapes and material objects. His current project, “Real West,” uses handmade contact microphones to interrogate the material artifacts of roadside ghost towns in South Dakota. As a Part-Time Faculty member at The New School for Public Engagement, he teaches courses in film form, sound studies, and documentary practice. Samples of his work can be found at www.phonoscopy.com

Posted by John Roach at 3:26 pm Sound Showcase 2013 - The Conversation Tagged with: Kevin T. Allen Comments Off

Brittany Paris

Jan 072014

Most of us understand sound to exist as forces and flows of pressure bending and moving through resonant substances. This experimental audio portrait seeks to reorient the human listener’s thought for a moment to ponder what it might mean politically for these vibrations and necessary resonant materials to exist in themselves. This project features the Manhattan Bridge, a large man-made object that conjoins with thousands of human lives everyday in aggregated communicative experiences. It intends to displace the human as communicative subject and render communicative modes already preset in the non-

living world perceivable and audible. This piece investigates sound as a medium expressive ‘vital materiality’ flowing through and across bodies, both human and nonhuman,allowing for the recognition of the active participation of nonhuman forces in events and to common public problems concerning space, travel and pollution.

About the Artist:

Brittany Paris is completing her M.A. in the School of Media Studies at the New School. Her research interests include
relationships of sound and new materialisms along with the interstitial areas between philosophy of technology and political economy.

Posted by John Roach at 10:22 am Sound Showcase 2013 - The Conversation Tagged with: Brittany Paris Comments Off

Sergio Sayeg

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Jan 072014

Walk Down on Broadway

On last April 11th I walked through the whole extension of Broadway Avenue in Manhattan with a field recorder, registering the sounds happening as I passed by the different neighborhoods. This process resulted in an six hours long soundwalk, which I edited down to different sound collages corresponding to different neighborhoods and acoustic climates I encountered. The project is to be framed in an album format both as a CD-R and online. The tracks narrate my trajectory from the starting point on Broadway & 220th Street to the end point in Battery Park. Walking down on Broadway while recording sound was the only guideline, or score, I set for myself in order to arrive at the source material informing my sound collages. In this way, the mundane, or seen as mundane unfolding of quotidian life is the agent of my piece celebrating sounds that are dismissed as noise or non musical.

Excerpt : Upper West Side

The full length of Broadway can be experienced HERE

Artist Bio:

I’m a São Paulo, Brazil born musician living in Brooklyn. My explorations with sound range across diverse fields. I have worked with music for video and advertisement, recording studios, performed and recorded for over six years with São Paulo’s rock group ‘Garotas Suecas’, big record collector, psychedelic music enthusiast, occasional DJ, and developing audio engineering with a growing interest for field recordings and unconventional musical practices.

Daniel Creahan

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Jan 072014

Utilizing a single sound sample ran through multiple permutations of manipulation, editing and recontextualization, tetrad consists of a series of folds, re-evaluating a sound through its own passage through space, and each minuscule detail of the sound form to drive new, generative sonic processes.

This work is composed entirely from the sound of a single punch, cut and stitched, time-stretched and affected until it takes on a new form, a map exploring the artist’s engagement with environmental sound at a fundamental level.

Skyping

This submission is a collaborative piece with artist Jules Leano Gay of Glasgow School of Arts, involving a trans- atlantic sound relay established via Skype. By passing a Skype chat signal from cell phone (with speaker active) into a mixing console and effects loop, then into a laptop with a second skype account in the same chat session, the piece effectively turns a consumer-grade web application into the source of a feedback signal between two performers, which they are then able to manipulate via their chosen performance materials. Engaging with the signal from both ends of the system, the performers blend the environmental sounds of their surroundings with their own gestures, and the inherent sonics of the Skype relay, effectively creating a shared environmental space that is maintained between users while remaining constantly in flux.

Artist Bio:

Daniel Creahan is a musician, sound artist, writer and poet, living in Brooklyn, NY. He currently runs the label Prison Art Tapes, and is one half of the band Mind Dynamics.

Earlids

Jan 072014

An Exhibition Hosted by Sound@Newschool
January 24th through February 5th 2014
Reception and events on January 29th 5:00 – 9:00

5:30 – Earlids Reception
6:30 – Performance 0’00” Derek Baron
7:00 – Talk by Tom Roe of transmission arts organization Wave Farm and artist Sam Sebren
8:00 – Performances Melissa Grey – Appassionata (10min) and 60×60 (2012) New York Minutes Mix (60 minutes)Arnold and Sheila Aronson Galleries Hallway
66 5th Avenue, New York City

“Come with me now and sit in the grandstand of life. The seats are free and entertainment is continuous. The world orchestra is always playing: we hear it inside and outside, from near and far. There is no silence for the living. We have no ear lids. We are condemned to listen.” – R. Murray Schafer

We are often reminded that we are a culture of spectacle. If we privilege our eyes, what does it mean to return our attention to our ears and listening? As Schafer and many others have argued, our ears open us to the world. Our species once depended on the openness of the ear to shape understanding; the survival of our earliest forebears may have depended on a keen attention to the snaps, scrapes and echoes that surrounded them as signals of imminent danger. As long as there have been sensate ears to hear it, sound has been leveraged as a tool to create community, to maintain power, to please, and to punish, but have we begun to lose our appreciation for the potency of this sense that sits in the shadow of vision? How can listening and the openness of the ear help us to think through interdisciplinary work in art, philosophy, media and beyond?

In the exhibition Earlids, the research group Sound@Newschool draws attention to some of the many manifestations of sound within our own university including performance, radio documentary, sound and image, interactive installations, community-based podcasting, video, and sound art. Earlids seeks to engage the following questions: How can sound be used as a vehicle to transport meaning across different disciplines? How might a focus on our methods of listening to, generating, and studying sound, provide a feedback mechanism for shared dialogue? How might sound act as a transdisciplinary hub within the New School?

Earlids began with a call for works from students, faculty, alumni and staff, and the works seen/heard here are drawn from those submissions. Artists include:

Kevin T. Allen	Lauren Kelly
Derek Baron	Christoffer Laursen Hald
Nicholas Campbell	Peter McQuillan
Daniel Creahan	Diane Moser
Steven Dale	Phuong Nguyen
Diane Dwyer	Brittany Paris
Benjamin Fausch	Themistoklis Pellas
Dane Filipczak	Nerina Penzhorn
Fantastic Futures	Ryan Raffa
Alexandra Gilwit	Barbara Siegel
Melissa Grey	Rory Solomon
Josephine Holtzman	Tessie Word
Melissa Grey	Sound Matters
Andrea Kannes

The exhibition is accompanied by two online projects that
can be found at sound.newschool.edu:

The Conversation Sound Showcase
The works presented here will be available as a permanent online exhibition. We will mount a new showcase annually.
The Conversation at 2 West 13th Street
For this online project Sound@ invited participants from the New School and at large to respond sonically to their choice of 33 images taken within the Sheila Johnson Design Center.

You can also look for QR codes at the 2 west 13th street building
to listen to the playlists created for each specific location.

Posted by John Roach at 10:07 am featured Tagged with: projects Comments Off

Alexandra Gilwit

Jan 062014

A sonic exploration of Deleuze’s philosophical principle, The Fold. A sound will travel through a conch shell to its center and then back out again.

About the Artist:

Alexandra Gilwit is a video artist and writer from Baltimore, MD. Through the New School, she became more acquainted with sound design and looks forward to working more with the medium.

Posted by Josephine Holtzman at 8:55 pm Sound Showcase 2013 - The Conversation Comments Off