TransX Audio Archive

In this talk, Steve Bates will discuss some of his recent projects that include site-specific recording, questions of threshold and border, residues of colonialism, silent broadcasts, sonic infiltrations and transmission. These projects include low-power productions in Dakar, and Ndar/Saint-Louis, Senegal and on Austria’s national state radio network. While different in their range and context, these investigations with site-specific sound geographies relate to a larger whole. The colonial history of longitude connects the project Radio 16º 16º to the site of Saint-Louis where site-specific recordings were collected as the raw material for low-power broadcasts. The title, borrowed from the abbreviated coordinates of the city, indicate an influence of military concept and jargon on the everyday. A Year of Radio Silence is a project with multiple iterations that uses the idea of a silent broadcast as its primary material, here one that causes a grand piano in Austria’s state radio studio to resonate across the former colonial power.

Steve Bates is an artist and musician living in Montréal. The sonic is always the starting point for his projects which are evocations of communication networks and systems, or expressions of spatial and temporal experience. Bates frequently uses sound material that is site-specific in an attempt to uncover place and how the sonic effects our experience of site. Time is measured, stretched, pulled at, ignored, and extended. His work has been exhibited in Canada, the United States, Europe and most recently, Senegal. Steve Bates works in the field, on the air and in museological/gallery contexts. These shifting territories reflect the content of his practice.

Radius’ 2012 series RANGE: Local, Distant, Fringe explores the importance of place and proximity in the event of radio transmission and reception. Radius, the experimental radio broadcast platform based in Chicago, IL, USA, released a three-part, location-based commissioned series and booklet titled RANGE: Local, Distant, Fringe, which highlighted the economic, political, and technical dimensions of the electromagnetic spectrum. The artists involved in RANGE produced sound works for the three coverage areas of Local (Emilie Mouchous and Andrea-Jane Cornell “Rise & Shine”), Distant (Damon Loren Baker “Distant”), and Fringe (Rob Ray “Subject to Greater Uncertainties”) in order to challenge issues of signal accessibility and question radio’s role as a distribution tool. The three parts of the series are based on the proprietary mapping software that plots radio station coverage areas. The talk will present audio excerpts of the three episodes featured in the RANGE series, and Radius’ curatorial vision for executing location-based broadcasts.

Jeff Kolar is an audio artist working in Chicago, USA. His work, described as “speaker-shredding” (Half Letter Press) and “wonderfully strange” (John Corbett), includes cross-platform collaboration, low-powered radio, and live performance. Jeff is a free103point9 Transmission Artist, and also the director of Radius, an experimental radio broadcast platform. His work has been released on Panospria (Canada), HAK LO-FI Record (France), free103point9 (USA), and has appeared in compilations by Furthernoise.org (Australia) and Sonic Circuits (USA). His video work was published in the DVD journal ASPECT: The Chronicle of New Media Art. He presents at festivals, radio programs, exhibitions, and performance venues which recently include GLI.TC/H, KUNSTRADIO, and The Kitchen; and in Argentina, Mexico, and the Netherlands, among others internationally. http://www.jeffkolar.us/

Meredith Kooi is the editor for Radius. She is currently a PhD student in the Graduate Institute of Liberal Arts at Emory University where she organizes the salon series SENSORIUM for the Visual Scholarship Initiative. She received her MA in Visual and Critical Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her BA in Environmental Studies from Denison University. Her visual and performance work has been shown in galleries and medical venues both nationally and internationally including the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, the Goat Farm Arts Center in Atlanta, Swedish Covenant Hospital in Chicago, and the Green Lantern Gallery in Chicago. Her critical writing has been published in Theorizing Visual Studies: Writing Through the Discipline edited by James Elkins, Kristi McGuire, Maureen Burns, Alicia Chester, and Joel Kuennen (Routledge 2013), her arts commentary in the DVD journal ASPECT: The Chronicle of New Media Art (2010), and her poetry in CTRL+P (2012). http://meredithkooi.us

Part public sound installation, part narrative documentary Frequencies: Dawson City is project for a series of low watt FM transmitters laid out around Dawson City Yukon. It was commissioned by the Klondike Institute for Art and Culture as a part of their series The Natural & The Manufactured. The transmitters are all broadcasting on the same frequency and laid out in an array so that as you walk the installation with your radio tuned one transmitter starts to fall out of range as the next one is coming in. Each transmitter broadcasts a different collage of soundscapes and stories (played on a loop) that relate specifically where you are standing. The buildings, the landscapes, the stories and experiences attached to them, and how these memories resonate in a physical location. By employing random chance and juxtaposition, multiple narratives are combined in a way that creates a unique listener guided narrative experience.

Andrew O’Connor is a transmission artist based in Toronto. His work for the radio has been featured on numerous programs across CBC Radio 1 & 2 such as Inside the Music, The Signal, and Metro Morning as well as syndicated internationally on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Radio Zero in Lisbon and WGXC in upstate New York. Andrew’s installation and sound design work has been presented by the Vancouver New Music Festival, the Third Coast Filmless Festival, Megapolis, and was recently featured in a multi-disciplinary theatre project called Boblo that premiered in December 2012 at the Theatre Center in Toronto.

Still Here is a soundscape of the island of Santorini, in the Cyclades, Greece, recorded and composed by the artists Ramona Stout and Alyssa Moxley.

We have selectively edited our recordings from Santorini to create a sound map. It is fundamentally inaccurate, yet it is all drawn from the aural environment as it is today, and likely will be for many years to come. It is a soundtrack that glosses the extremes of silence and noise that have come to dominate the island and recreates a bygone era in which there existed a host of functioning communities like Vothonas, of which there are now very few. It is the result of our recording the pulse of a place that now exists in suspended animation, a place that is alive but not quite living.

Alyssa Moxley is an artist, writer, and audio producer with interests in embodied knowledge, music, cosmology and acoustic ecology. She studied Ethnomusicology at the School of Oriental and African Studies, Sound Design at the London College of Communication, production techniques at the Banff Centre, and is currently studying an MFA in Sound at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. www.alyssamoxley.com/ www.soundcloud.com/dromomaniac

Ramona Stout studied ethnomusicology at the University of Chicago. After graduating she dealt in vintage vinyl. She now lives on the island of Santorini, Greece, where she also learned to walk, talk, and swim. She is organising an annual music festival on the island, which will cater to its permanent community with a showcase of lesser known musicians from around the Balkans. She works as a freelance writer and sound artist/audio producer.

Expanded Radio (Robin Koek) – approaching the concept of ‘radio’ from the perspective of composition and the practice of sound art. The lecture deals with the possibilities radio allows for composers to work with non-lineair concepts of time, make instant global musical, connections through transmission and re-define concepts of the public space within their creations. It elaborates on how radiophonic concepts like interference, wavelength and tuning were translated to the domain of musicians within the work Tuned City

Robin Koek (Netherlands, 1987) is active as a composer, musician and designer of artistic systems. Koek studied Sound Design and Composition at the Utrecht School of the Arts.
Over the last years he established a repertoire of various multidisciplinary collaborations. With a main focus on sound art and interactive systems he was involved in projects that range from installation art to interactive dancepieces.
His works explore states wherein acoustic, digital and analog signals intertwine and form in to one body of sound. Currently his focus is on compositions and sculptures that explore the spatial potential of sound.

Speculations and curiousities regarding the Radio of the Future, including the search for extraterrestrial life and cetacean radio. Maps are certainly lost, and mutiny may be declared.

Anna Friz got her start in campus/community radio at CiTR Vancouver in 1993. Since then she has created audio art and radiophonic works for extensive international broadcast, installation, or performance in more than fifteen countries. She is currently an FQRSC post-doctoral fellow in the Sound department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2011-2013), and holds a Ph.D. in Communication and Culture from York University, Toronto. Anna is a free103point9 transmission artist. www.nicelittlestatic.com

City Sondols is the title of an ongoing series of public interventions exploring architecture and public space that employ performative practices and mobile audio technologies to induce perceptual shifts within the built environment. Performers equipped with self-made mobile electronic musical instruments lead an audience on a walk through the city while probing the surrounding space with sound. In this talk we will present some questions that form the background of our project and summarize the trajectory that has conducted to its current state of development. We will further report on the two week residency organized for us by NAISA in Toronto during the Deep Wireless festival preceding the Trans-X Symposium, presenting documentation of our interventions in Toronto and Mississagua and relating the process of choosing locations, composing the soundwalks and interacting with both incidental listeners and with the audiences attending the Deep Wireless program.

Matteo Marangoni
(Florence, 1982) Focusing on the potential of listening to establish new connections between people, places and objects, his performances and installations employ field recordings, sound archives, computer programming and DIY electronics. His research investigates the relationship between sound, space and the body, looking for ways to address the body of the listener and to induce enhanced states of auditory awareness.

His work has been presented at Stroom Den Haag (The Hague), at the European Media Art Festival (Osnabruck), Patterns Pleasure (Amsterdam), Fabbrica Europa (Florence), Q-02 (Brussels), Signal Raum (Munich), the International Biennial of Contemporary Music (Koper) and Tadaex (Tehran). He is currently working on a commission from the Humboldt Lab Dahlem in Berlin.

Ángel Faraldo
(Spain, 1980) is a composer, sound artist, improviser and digital instrument designer currently based in The Netherlands. He is interested in processes that maximize minimal resources, as materialized in his ongoing cycle, The Feedback Study Series his digital synthesizer MISS or his interactive sonifications of Tanja Smit’s Textworks.

He has presented his work in festivals and venues throughout Europe and the United States; his music is released for free through various net-labels on the internet and his works involving computers are entirely based on free and open-source software.

He also teaches workshops on improvisation and electronic music with Pure Data, and collaborates as digital instrument designer or electronic music performer with projects and ensembles such as Modelo62 (NL), Fonos21 (ES), Medea Electronique (GR) and IOM (NL).

We present our work on the development of a device by which a dancer may wirelessly transmit bodily motion to a MIDI-capable device or computer in order to produce or alter sound, creating music that is immediately integrated with and inseparable from the dance.

To begin we briefly consider the history of movement mapping and dance notation. Moving into more recent history, we then present the technology employed (Arduino).

An accelerometer measures the motion. The x/y/z components are scaled and inserted into a MIDI message, which is then transmitted to a receiver and can be interpreted by any MIDI device. The motions can be mapped to parameters such as filters, pitch, etc., allowing the dancer to affect any sound that can be created electronically.

We then discuss some of the possible applications.

Several short vignettes will be used to demonstrate the device, followed by a three-minute piece showing the techniques working together as a whole.

Tricia Postle is the artistic director of Majlis Art Garden, a multidisciplinary seasonal art space in Queen West presenting poetry, music, dance and storytelling. This summer through Majlis she will be hosting a number of salon evenings on the intersection of music and technology, to be documented online, as well as other performances. For further information please visit majlisarts.com

Tricia is also a poet and a musician with a strong interest in medieval troubadour traditions, and has recently started composing. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Medieval Studies and Music from the University of Toronto.

Leif Bloomquist has been creating computerized sounds since the days of the Commodore 64. Classically trained in clarinet and percussion, he now composes using sequencing software and homebuilt hardware. His music can be heard in diverse environments such as gothic nightclubs and churches. He has released five albums to date through his various projects. For further information please visitwww.schemafactor.com .

When not creating experimental music, Leif is a senior engineer at MDA, an aerospace company best known for their work on the Canadarm. He holds a Bachelor of Applied Science in Systems Design Engineering from the University of Waterloo.

The Cellphonia.org project explores the social, technological, and creative possibilities of cell phones with bias to encourage new applications for cultural growth. With over a dozen examinations of this approach to using cellphones as social microphones, the Cellphonia: SONicGeo -Toronto was formulated around the concept of moving through time and the landscape of Toronto. The participants asked to “press” a number to answer one of the three questions:

Where have you been? – Where are you now? – Where are you going?

The server side script then puts their various responses into three sound storage locations: Then- Now –Future. The score changes slightly with each new call, so participants can continue to hear their contributions in the various sections juxtaposed in new ways with each new call and providing a new aleotoric narrative each time. The conceptual framework of cellphonia is direct and comprehensible, but capable of constant and varied levels of surprise.

Steve Bull
is a mixed-media technology artist and entrepreneur whose practice includes extensive software engineering experience. For the last ten years he has created location-specific narratives and games that explore the social, technological, and creative possibilities of cell phones. Bull received grant to create Cellphonia from NYSCA in 2005.

Scot Gresham-Lancaster
is a composer, performer and instrument builder. Currently teaching Sound Design at ATEC UT Dallas, his recent work at IMéRA is a 2nd order sonification of data sets. With HUB he is an early pioneer of “computer network music” and cellphone operas and “co-located” international Internet performances.

“Be Here Now”: Meaningful Strategies for Embodied Presence at Live Music Concerts in the Age of Techno-Mediation’ offers an in-depth analysis of the state of modern-day live music concerts in the age of techno mediation, where social media platforms, wireless communication and mobile technology play an integral part in our social identities and the ideologies that surround us. After briefly examining the dichotomous philosophy that informs many technological sceptics and musical purists, the paper offers an opportunistic argument for the inevitable convergence of new media and sensory-enhancing technology in the live music arena.

Crucial questions are posed: How can we innovate and maximise our state of presence as technologically driven individuals and through the familiarity of visual media? Where does this leave the unique physicality, temporality and ‘liveness’ of live music?

Be Here Now draws on a large breadth of scholarship and is organized into four sections – Antiquity, Erosion, Alternatively, and Recuperation – which, through the thoughtful consideration of varying performance case studies, serve to provide a mediated resolution.

Alexandria Lepinski received a BA in Popular Music and Women’s Studies from Western University, focusing on desktop production and the cultural significance of music. Upon graduating, Alexandria attended a live concert that prompted her to reconsider her understanding of music performance and the formalized divisions between art mediums and new media. She pursued a master’s degree in Creative and Cultural Entrepreneurship at Goldsmiths College in London, England, and in the fall of 2012, submitted her thesis entitled ‘“Be Here Now”: Meaningful Strategies for Embodied Presence at Live Music Concerts in the Age of Techno-Mediation’, along with a curated concert series proposal. She is now living in Toronto, eager to begin a dynamic career in live music curating that shatters conservative performance standards and explores daring, pluralistic multi-media platforms.

The Sounds of Sea Swim is a collection of compositions, sound collages, and installations developed as part of commissioned work for the Sea Swim project run in Scarborough, UK. Part swimming club and part art club, Sea Swim explores how swimming transforms the way we feel ourselves to be in our bodies and the liberating effects these changes have on the imagination.

Several aspects have been explored in this work, including phonography, sonic geography, acoustic ecology, field recording practice, and voice.

Set-up by co-artistic directors Lara Goodband and John Wedgewood Clarke, Sea Swim is part of imove: a Cultural Olympiad Programme in Yorkshire –www.imoveand.com/seaswim

imovehas been funded by Legacy Trust UK, creating a lasting impact from the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games by funding ideas and local talent to inspire creativity across the UK.

Rob Mackay is a composer, sound artist and performer. Currently he is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Music Technology at the University of Hull. He is the director of the ‘Sounds of Our Surroundings’ research group (http://icpcluster.org/page/sounds-of-our-surroundings).

Prizes and honours include: IMEB Bourges (1997 and 2001); EAR99 from Hungarian Radio (1999); Confluencias (2003); La Muse en Circuit (2004 and 2006). His work has been performed in 18 countries (including several performances on BBC Radio 3). He has held composer residencies at Slovak Radio (Bratislava), La Muse en Circuit (Paris), the Tyrone Guthrie Arts Centre (Ireland), and CMMAS (Mexico).

He has worked in a number of groups, including the Welsh Hip-Hop collective ‘Tystion’, collaborating alongside John Cale on ‘A Beautiful Mistake’, as well as two John Peel sessions on BBC Radio 1 and supporting PJ Harvey. More recently, he has collaborated with percussionist Evelyn Glennie on the Ruskin Rocks project (www.leeds.ac.uk/ruskinrocks).

John Wedgwood Clarke trained as an actor at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and holds a D.Phil. in Modernist poetics from the University of York. He is currently Leverhulme Artist in Residence at the Centre for Environmental and Marine Sciences at the University of Hull, Scarborough.

Lara Goodband is an curator and artist. She studied art history and English literature at the University of York and holds an M.A. in art history from Manchester University. Since then she has worked continuously in art galleries, first as an in-house curator and now as a freelancer, specialising in temporary and touring exhibitions, in museums and galleries throughout Yorkshire.

This paper/listening presentation focuses on interstitial urban space and clandestine soundscape interventions. The presentation starts with a contextualization of themes and references related to sonic territory, intervention, time, anonymity and the psycho-politics of cities, then shares original listening examples from transmission art projects in Los Angeles, California and Houston, Texas.

Each paper section is approximately 6 minutes in presentation length:

1. Charles Babbage and the permanent impression of sounds in our environment

2. JG Ballard and spatial/urban paranoia

3. Temporal monuments and ruins, citizens, habitants, wanderers

Listening examples are approximately 6 minutes in length (three 2-minute excerpts).

Abinadi Meza is a sound artist and writer based in Houston, Texas. He was educated at Drake University, University of Northern Iowa, University of Minnesota and Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc). Meza\’s performances, installations and transmissions have been presented in the United States, Spain, Ireland, Sweden, Portugal, and Brazil. He teaches in the Interdisciplinary Practices and Emerging Forms MFA program at the University of Houston.

Distant Touch and a Faraway Feeling (DTFF) is a suite of wearable electronic apparrel equipped with radio transeivers, vibrating motors, and touch sensors. Participants wear haptic sensor gloves that use radio to control vibrating motors embedded in hats, gloves, wrists bands, underwear, and socks. Marshall McLuhan described the immense network of electronic connections that made possible the distant transmission of signals as a sort of externalized central nervous system for the human race. Distant Touch and a Faraway Feeling experiments with this externalization of our nervous system. The project allows people to feel another’s touch not through proximity, but by transduction of electronic sensors and transmission as radio. Using custom circuity, caresses can cross rooms and go through walls.

Samwell Freeman works with electricity, trying to find a starry synthesis of the mysterious speedy electron and the soft slow human. Studying obsolete technology Freeman explores our potential lives as elderly cyborgs. Many of his works are platforms for creativity that facilitate virtual drawing using sensors like gyroscopes and joysticks.

Freeman has exhibited at Maker’s Faire, Figment Detroit, Seton Hall University, New York University, Flux Factory, Burning Man, and Dorkbot NYC. Always interactive his work takes shape as devices, applications, videos, performances, drawings, and conversations. His website is: http://welike2draw.com/samwell/