Items where Subject is "Sound art"

Alongside South India’s rapid urbanisation, the early decades of the twenty-first century have witnessed the arrival of new digital technologies and social media platforms in India, opening new possibilities for performance on a mediatised urban and global stage. In a wave of popular performance practices emerging around 2011–2, Bengaluru (as with other cities across India) became the site to a host of flash mobs staged in urban spaces and filmed for online publics. This chapter examines the flash mob performance trend of that era in relation to national discourses of ‘New India’as an example of forms of cultural practice characterised by an ‘aesthetics of arrival’ in globalising India.

Gobbledegook Theatre’s Ear Trumpet is a site-responsive outdoor theatre performance in which a team of “sonic investigators” have discovered pockets of sound, trapped in the Earth beneath our feet. The show allows audiences to listen, using “ear trumpets”, a collection of recycled trumpets, trombones and gramophone horns that have been re-purposed as listening devices. In this paper, Dr Jon Croose describes the aurality of Ear Trumpet through a qualitative, practice-led methodology of first-person performance-as-research, interviews with the artists, and analysis of audience response. The essay considers Augoyard & Torgue’s notion of ‘sharawadji’ in Ear Trumpet in terms of ‘sonic effect’ (2006, xv; 8) arising, the author argues, from its encouragement of ‘the consciousness of early listening,’ (2006, 13) and through a combination of the sonic effects of anamnesis, de-contextualisation, de-localisation, attraction, phototonie and quotation. The paper considers how Ear Trumpet positions the relationship between ‘physical environment, the socio-cultural milieu, and the individual listener’ (2006, xiii) and reveals how participants’ suspension of disbelief in the pseudo-science of ‘sonic geology’ allows them to posit the possibility of multiple ‘historic dimensions of sound’, in a way that reframes their everyday soundscape and ‘magically and suddenly transports [them] elsewhere’ (2006, xv). Finally, it raises questions about the effect of sharawadji in terms of the tension between theatrical illusion, “belief” and critical distance among audiences, and considers a possible politics of aurality in performance contexts.

From the inception of sync sound in the late 1920s to the modern day, sound in animation has assumed a variety of forms. This article proposes four principal modes that have developed in the commercial realm of American animation according to changing contingencies of convention, technology and funding. The various modes are termed syncretic, zip-crash, functional and poetic authentication. Each one is utilized to different aesthetic effect, with changing relationships to the image. The use of voice, music, sound effects and atmos are considered as well as the ways in which they are recorded, manipulated and mixed. Additionally, the ways in which conventions bleed from one period to the next are also illustrated. Collectively, these proposed categories aid in understanding the history and creative range of options available to animators beyond the visual realm.

Within the field of digital musical instruments, there have been a growing number of technological developments aimed at addressing the issue of accessibility to music-making for disabled people. This study summarizes the development of one such technological system—The Modular Accessible Musical Instrument Technology Toolkit (MAMI Tech Toolkit). The four tools in the toolkit and accompanying software were developed over 5 years using an action research methodology. A range of stakeholders across four research sites were involved in the development. This study outlines the methodological process, the stakeholder involvement, and how the data were used to inform the design of the toolkit. The accessibility of the toolkit is also discussed alongside findings that have emerged from the process. This study adds to the established canon of research around accessible digital musical instruments by documenting the creation of an accessible toolkit grounded in both theory and practical application of third-wave human–computer interaction methods. This study contributes to the discourse around the use of participatory and iterative methods to explore issues with, and barriers to, active music-making with music technology. Outlined is the development of each of the novel tools in the toolkit, the functionality they offer, as well as the accessibility issues they address. The study advances knowledge around active music-making using music technology, as well as in working with diverse users to create these new types of systems.

The Power of Collaboration as Practice-Based Learning investigates the rich entangled hierarchical processes that occur during a collaborative artistic project called Sonic Camouflage. The Sonic Camouflage project was conceived at a time of decreasing radical art school cultures in an attempt to re-radicalise and intensify periods of learning for both students and tutor through a flattening of power structures between students and tutor. The research unearths insights into the effects of hierarchical power sharing during Sonic Camouflage on its collaborative participants by asking How do participants negotiate an artistic learning collaboration individually and collectively? The enquiry reveals that themed collaborative projects can be used successfully to provoke and propose a levelling out of power dynamics as positive agency for participants learning. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rA5t0gYd088

Exploring musicactively can be restricted for someone with cognitive, physical, or sensory impairments. They may face barriers to participation and diminished experiences between their musical expression and the music making means available to them. Technology can be used to bridge these gaps and focus on a person’s capability to create personal instruments that allow for active music making and exploration of sound. Thisdoctoral research aims to look at the use of music technology within the school setting and the needs of the users and those around them.Drawing on this and following an Action Research methodology, a tool will be developed following a participatory design process that utilises both hardware and software, in a modular fashion, to provide a flexible and adaptable system to facilitate music making and sound exploration.The desired outcome will be a toolbox that allows users to put together instruments that suit the needs of those playing them allowing access to musical expression.

Creation of new interfaces for musical expression can be especially challenging when targeted at end users having complex learning needs. Such users have sensory, cognitive, or physical impairments, which affect their ability to play traditional instruments, leading to a diminished music making experience. Technology can often help bridge the gap between the user and their musical intentions. However, its use in schools introduces additional constraints, such as, affordability, acceptance by staff and acceptable learning time. We developed the SenseEgg system to address these issues.

This research unearths insights into the entangled pedagogic processes that occurred between students and educator when co-creating during a contemporary art project called Sonic Camouflage. The off-campus project-based learning environment of Sonic Camouflage was shown to boost and intensify learning for all participants, with an integrated re-energising tri-role for the educator to partake in art, education, and research practice. The research discovered that Sonic Camouflage contained intertwined learning processes that I term ‘microcultures of collaboration’. These microcultures are unravelled to reveal new insights surrounding improvisational learning using a cultural instigator as provocation and around individual artistic development. Sonic Camouflage was also shown to react to pervasive segregating media and technology by generating an immersive sense of belonging to a co-supportive learning community that instilled an empowering resilience for participants’ future art practice. Dialogic and collaborative constructivist approaches were integral methods employed to undertake the research.

The Genius Loci exhibition asks how ten artists can explore sensations of landscape, how are experiences of sensing the character of a landscape transformed into a painted surface or a sonic action? How does each person’s diverse knowledge of that place inform the artwork? Katie Barons is an artist who investigates sensations felt when immersing herself in nature and capturing these sensations using paint. The series of paintings in this exhibition are derived from Hengistbury Head, a headland which wraps around Christchurch Harbour not far from Bournemouth. Luke Mintowt-Czyz’s uses the physicality of paint to explore competing physical tensions on Bournemouth beach where the polarities of young and old, rich and poor, lonely and connected, healthy and ill, extrovert and introvert, coalesce on the seashore each summer in a writhing bodily mass. Sonic Camouflage is a series of collaborative improvisational sound workshops which asks how an ancient Greek whistling language called Sfyria can be used to provoke the creation of contemporary collective artworks.

Transmission was a live contemporary artwork commissioned by Arts Council England to help celebrate the 25th anniversary of 'Sea Music’, an immense multi-platform sculpture by Anthony Caro, which has stood on Poole Quay, Dorset since 1991 and is renowned as the artist’s only site-specific artwork.

Working with invited sonic artist Sian Hutchings, Waring conducted extensive research into the material, weight, mass, volume, colour and locational positioning of the sculpture, so as to help
identify methods for making an interpretive and performative artwork comprising simultaneous light projection, sound and moving human bodies. Working within the context of contemporary research into visual and sonic perception, they re-interpreted ‘Sea Music’ as a dynamic catalyst to inspire Transmission, with the performance taking place in the dark and within the actual large-scale structure of Sea Music.

Contemporary dancers improvised to the amplified noise of steel, hearing this for the first time live on the night. This gave the performance a vulnerability, echoing that of the location of the sculpture itself which is perched precariously on the edge of the quayside. Drawing on Steyerl’s treatise on the dramatic impact of new technologies of surveillance, tracking and targeting our spatial and temporal orientation, the performance required that dancers respond to the sound, whilst a horizon of white light swept up and down, simulating the smooth progression of a scanner as it collects data.

Transmission had an active engagement programme, with full video documentation for Poole Museum, including two public lectures by the director of the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Peter Murray, and by Alistair Sooke, art critic and TV presenter. Waring’s subsequent research projects for ITV and the 2019 exhibition commission for Dazzle: Disguise and Disruption owed much to the collaborative learning from Transmission.

Transmission (8.5 mins)
https://vimeo.com/247467411
password:
transmission151218