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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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