Audio Harvested from the Sound Garden

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The Sound Garden project by Norbert Herber was recently installed at the 2009 Spark Festival of Electronic Music and Arts. By good fortune I was in the right place at the right time and had the opportunity to discuss the work with the artist at the event.

The installation includes multiple channels of speakers and a variety of sensors where the installation is installed. It is also linked to a web application where sound files are “planted” and “pruned” by site visitors. Visitors to the physical location for the installation influence the audio processing by interacting with various sensors in the space.

A more thorough explanation of Norbert’s piece is available on his site. Norbert gave me permission to capture a segment from the audio stream for the purpose of this article. Before doing so I planted one of my own files from Audio Cookbook to influence the output.

Segment from Sound Garden

Impossibly High Rhodes Sample

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I took the idea from the last post a little further and tried a different sample; an already high pitched phrase of Rhodes electric piano. I played the sample in the software sampler, Simpler, higher and higher until it faded from an audible range. I kept going until finally, around eight octaves up, I started hearing strange artifacts from the sample. At this stage I created a MIDI clip with a scale of these sounds, then ran it through compression to bring out some of the more subtle effects, equalization to eliminate any canine-hearing-damaging-frequencies, and some processing to randomize the scale. Here’s what I ended up with.

Impossibly High Rhodes Sample

Meditation Bell Simpler Freakout

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I created this sound by resampling the output from Ableton‘s Simpler as I played a meditation bell sample that I recorded at a register far beyond the audible range. Somehow I got all these odd clicks with strange tones in between. Simpler is aptly named, being a very simple example of a software sampler, so I imagine that not much development has been put into handling samples at very high frequencies. This is fine with me since it creates these interesting glitches. Perhaps I’ll try the same technique with some other samples to see what happens.

Meditation Bell Simpler Freakout

Captive Mosquitoes make Music in Innovative Installation

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Ali Momeni has recently posted an article about his and Robin Meier’s installation Strategies for Post-Apocalyptic Computation that was shown at the 2009 Spark Festival. Based on the article it looks as though they have renamed the piece Truce. Here’s an excerpt from the article:

Our installation explores reciprocal musical interactions between the mosquito and the computer. The computer produces a stimulus signal to which the living mosquitoes synchronize. Subsequently, the computer sings a third voice that responds to the musical inflections of the mosquitoes’ buzz. These three voices come in and out of harmony depending on the mosquitoes propensity to maintain its sync with the stimulus signal.

I made three or four visits to this fascinating installation during the festival. Here’s a segment from a recording of the piece that I made during one of my visits. To see some well produced video of the installation please visit the original article.

Brief Recording of Truce

1972 Dialogue Processed with Distort Plaster Photoshop Filter

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Testing the newest version of Photosounder gave me an opportunity to apply some Photoshop filters to sound that I had not yet tried. I experimented with halftone patterns, lens blur, pixelated color halftones, the patchwork filter, and the smudge tool.

One of the more interesting filters ended up being the plaster effect under distort. The plaster effect has a relief setting to give the image a 3D look, but also smooths the insides of areas within the image. This eliminated the noise between the speech, but also made the dialogue virtually unintelligible.

1972 Dialogue Through Distort Plaster