Synesthetech

After an excruciating less than two week wait, my Korg DS-10 arrived from Hong Kong this week - that’s a picture of Alex holding it up to her iSight to prove to me that it showed up to her office. ;) Here are two mp3s of some things I’ve played around with so far:

• Track 1 - a goofy techno thing
• Track 2 - a more abstract dubby thing

PYo + bitxel

Gorgeous video collaboration between French artists PYo (sound) and bitxel (video).

Hey, my brother — who has a PhD in comics scholarship and curates ComicsResearch.org — wrote a book, and it just got published this week! Everyone reading this should go to this link right now and use the Amazon link there to pick up a copy — and then pick up another copy or two for a friend. It’s a really gorgeous book, with a nice layout and excellent typography, plus lots of great illustrations…obviously geared towards a slightly more casual comics audience, but it’s detailed enough to give just about anyone ideas on where to go for further reading, regardless of how much of a comics expert you may be. Not that I’m biased or anything. ;)

• 500 Essential Graphic Novels: The Ultimate Guide [ComicsResearch.org]

Two new music videos of songs from the latest Collections of Colonies of Bees album Birds just got posted on Stereogum today…make sure to check them out when you have a spare twenty minutes. The video for “Birds II” is by artist Michinori Saigo, and uses dripping pink paint, boxes, and cutout bird images to illustrate the song’s structure, while the video for “Birds III” by Arthur Ircink features extreme closeups of the band and their instruments and investigates “potential vs. kinetic energy” as the band describes it. Whatever the theory behind its execution, I can’t get enough of those shots of Jon Mueller’s cymbals hitting each other. But that’s just me.

• New Collections of Colonies of Bees videos [Stereogum]

I just discovered the 2006 BBC docudrama The Impressionists last night, playing on my local PBS station. As a fan of both BBC dramas and art history, I should eat this up…and I did, except for probably all the wrong reasons. It was absolutely hilarious, all over-wrought melodrama, bombastic music, clumsy exposition, and a Manet duel scene that could have been ripped straight from the pages of Two-Fisted Painters. Maybe it’s just hard to get into the drama of it all since Impressionism has lost all of its renegade impact ever since Monet became the artist of choice for freshman dorm walls everywhere; whatever the case, I’ve already added the two-disc DVD set to my Netflix queue and am very much looking forward to a couple evenings of drink-along fun.

Smashing Magazine has a post up this week about album cover design, and of course the comments section is full of the “This is great!” vs. “This is shit!” polemics which the fans of Smashing have come to know and love. Also like so many of the posts on Smashing, some of their choices for inclusion in this gallery are fantastic (like the Editors album and the Muse album) and some are puzzling (the new Coldplay album? Van Halen’s “1984″? If you’re going to go with Van Halen, there are so many better choices out there), while their attention to detail is occasionally frustrating (come on, at least Photoshop the Compact Disc logo off the cover of “Ghost In The Machine” if you can’t find an image without it, guys!).

And to be honest, they really should have categorized this as “pop music covers”, because there’s not a single jazz album cover to be found here (not to mention classical, world, country, or anything other than pop/rock and a sprinkle of hip hop), which is a real travesty. But this post definitely gets one thing inarguably right: its inclusion of the very first album cover design in history (see above).

• 35 Beautiful Music Album Covers on SmashingMagazine.com

There’s a story on BBC News today about researchers at the California Institute of Technology carrying out a synesthesia study inspired by a student who claimed they could hear the image of a computer’s screensaver. The story includes a video of the pattern which was used in the test (screencap above). I really wish I could hear it…

• ‘Can Anyone Hear That Picture?’ on BBC News

IMAGE: Passive-Aggressive street busker sign spotted at the Chicago Folk and Roots Festival, Lincoln Square, July 2008

Time for a new batch of field recordings…these are just some odds and ends I’ve recorded in the past few weeks…

1. Huettenbar ambience (1:12, 2.4MB mp3)
   Alex and I finally decided to try out Huettenbar, a Bavarian-style pub close to our apartment in Lincoln Square. Walking inside was like stepping into another world: gone were the Lincoln Square hipsters and young couples with baby carriages, replaced by a much older (and much more consistently German) crowd. A two-man band (consisting of two 60-somethings on guitar and synth) kept the crowd “hopping” with Elvis covers and traditional German beer-drinkin’ songs, while the crowd got rowdier as time went on. This was recorded shortly before we left, and is notable for the drunken man yelling out the words “deadly silence” at about 0:50.
2. Angry bike rider in Evanston (0:09, 426k mp3)
   A little lunchtime squabble between a bike rider and an SUV driver.
3. Malfunctioning iPod, State Street Chicago Apple Store (0:43, 1.5MB mp3)
   Alex noticed this iPod spitting out digital junk upstairs, conveniently located right next to the iPod Bar, so I took a chance and stuck my Zoom H2 inside the greasy Bose headphones attached to it and got this recording.
4. Audience entering the Music Box Theater (4:36, 8.3MB mp3)
   We headed to the Music Box this weekend to see Godard’s Contempt, which was more than worth it if for nothing else than the scene of Jack Palance throwing a film canister like a discus — absolutely priceless. But this recording of the nearly empty theater beforehand is also fun…like the incredibly loud squeaking seats once the music gets going and it no longer feels like we’re sitting in someone’s silent living room, like it did before they remembered to turn on the music.
5. Thunder outside our apartment window (4:51, 9.1MB mp3)
   The weather was pretty crazy all day yesterday — the sky became pitch black at 7am after a perfectly normal sunrise, and bad rains moved in off and on all day. This is the evening semi-calm storm before…
6. Tornado sirens outside apartment window (2:13, 4.2MB mp3)
   This was definitely a little frightening, as we followed the rain on the radar on our laptops and Alex declared “There’s a tornado in Logan Square!” Luckily it passed by without any real damage (at least in our neighborhood — looks like it wasn’t so pleasant around the rest of the city though). But that didn’t mean anything to our cat, who sat under my desk the whole time in a state of kitty panic.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

Last week I received a review copy of the latest release from WHITE_LINE editions, the publishing operation run by Baz Nichols in Northampton, UK. ARCHISONICS: sonifying architecture is a twenty page book of photographs, illustrations and essays accompanied by a CD containing six tracks related to the book’s subject matter. A joint effort by Nichols (aka FOURM), Andy Graydon and Maura Wallace-Nichols, the release is a personal work intended to begin a new series of works which will hopefully add to the critical discourse concerning the relationship between sound and architecture.

Wallace-Nichols’ photography takes the visual center stage in the book, providing the imagery which adorns the cover as well as the first half of the page count. Minimally captioned as “From the ‘Barcelona’ series”, the four images are presented as somber duotones which explore repetition and angular form. The detail view of windows and railings on page 4 is the most overtly referential to sound, with its perspectival shift and repetition splaying out like a sound wave or perhaps unravelling like a graphic score for performance by glass and wire.

FOURM’s introduction establishes Archisonics as an ongoing project, using Goethe’s “architecture is frozen music” as a thesis statement and springboard for exploration; challenging the reader to invert the phrase as “music is frozen architecture”, Nichols suggests sound be “unfrozen” as a means of defining spatial form, and in the essay “The Built Form as a Natural Metaphor” he discusses the interpretation of architectural structures as graphic notation and the fluidity of sound waves and their delineation of space. Nichols’ other major essay, “Sonifying Architecture” discusses variety of phenomena which allow people to perceive architectural space without the benefit of sight, including Blind SIght, a perceived “acoustic shoreline” and the Echelon Effect.

In the second half of the book, New York sound artist Andy Graydon takes the overarching themes of Nichols’ essays and runs with them, illustrating the relationship between sound and architecture with specific observations from his own artistic practice. From walking through the overtly public sonic space of Max Neuhaus’ installation Times Square, to joining an art historical project to photograph a group of reverberant Buddhist devotional caves in China, to noticing the acoustic properties of broken concrete intentionally included in the architecture of the New Museum of Contemporary Art’s well-trodden floors, Graydon’s observations betray a depth of sonic perception which permeates his own artistic output. A final essay on the unrealistically overdubbed sound in Jacques Tati’s Playtime opens up the conversation to cinematic portrayals of architecture, pointing the way towards yet another possible avenue of investigation the Archisonics project might lead to.

As for the included CD, FOURM and Graydon each contribute solo sound pieces which begin the Archisonics series of sonic investigations of architecture. The four FOURM pieces offer sparse soundscapes of minimalist drones with occasional sputters of dense sonic data, some manipulated field recordings and other sounds which could very well be architectural renderings and floorplans parsed through a jpeg-to-wav file converter like MetaSynth. These tiny fragments of sound continue moving through various acoustic configurations, simulating movement through shifting architectural environments. Graydon’s two tracks are even more overtly referential, with more recognizable sounds from a variety of structures and spaces. High-pitched circular drones mingle with what could be traffic heard through a window, melodies wrap themselves around what sound like a room lined with ceramic tile. “Dissolved Solids”, the final track on the disc, is a climactic journey into the superstructure of a skyscraper, with metallic breathing sounds that bring to mind the exposed-guts piping of the Centre Pompidou.

If this initial offering is a clear indicator of what’s to come, WHITE_LINE’s Archisonics project looks to be a promising ongoing investigation of the centuries-old conceptual link between architecture and sound. But in the interests of full disclosure: WHITE_LINE has announced the inclusion of one of my digital image compositions in a future installment of the series, the Archisonics Dossier…