Synesthetech

Another new video piece I’ve completed since starting school this fall, Growing is the first really personal video I’ve made. It’s inspired by Alex and I quitting our jobs and moving away to a new city so that I could start school, but it draws its audio and visual source material from the small garden we had on our new apartment’s back porch this summer. This is the first time we’ve ever been able to grow any vegetables, so it’s been a pretty life-changing event for us in and of itself! So, into my lap gardening plopped as a metaphor for personal creativity.

This video will have its gallery premiere next weekend in Long Beach at the annual Soundwalk festival. Wish I could be there to see it alongside all the other exciting work there…hopefully next year!

• Home Run (00:36, 1.7MB mp3)

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  The first piece in what I’m planning as a series of performance-based sound and video projects involving the baseball diamond in West Park, directly across the street from our apartment in Ann Arbor. This first piece is extremely simple: the sound of me running the bases around the baseball diamond, while holding my breath so it doesn’t show up on the recording. Stark and without fanfare, context or narrative, it’s a raw recording of me partaking in a celebratory act without an audience (it was recorded in the early morning hours while the park is usually deserted). I win! I’m practically in my backyard! Now that’s a home run.

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PHOTOS: Images of the interiors I recorded in Toronto on July 31 and August 1 of this year, from my Flickr stream.

This first set of field recordings I made recently on our trip to Toronto focuses on interior spaces, most of which are museums and galleries.

1. Film projector in Henrik Håkansson’s Monarch - The Eternal, The Power Plant Gallery, Harbourfront Centre (6:07, 12.5MB mp3)

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   Our visit to The Power Plant almost didn’t happen, as we were pretty worn out by the time we made it to the Harbourfront Centre and had already spent the entire morning at the Art Gallery of Ontario (see below) But it’s a good thing Alex was determined for us to go, because otherwise I would have missed the best exhibit I’ve seen so far this year. Universal Code, as the exhibit description puts it, “presents responses from a broad range of contemporary artists to cosmology and ideas of the universal in our current information age.” There was so much jaw dropping work here…acoustically, my favorite piece was the one in the foreground of this recording, Henrik Håkansson’s Monarch - The Eternal, a large room containing a film projector and a massive screen showing footage of butterflies. While the visuals were definitely engaging, the sound of the projector in this space was overwhelming (in a good way!), and when combined with sounds from two other pieces in the corridor outside (the rhythmic “boom, boom” sounds come from Antonia Hirsch’s String Theory while the occasional rising and falling buzz is from Tania Mouraud’s Le Fabrique) they created an amazing sound composition. The abrupt change in the acoustics in the middle of this recording happened when I decided to start walking around the room, and quickly dodged the projector beam and started walking around the perimeter of the room, behind the screen, and back out into the corridor.

2. Iain Baxter&, Television Works, Art Gallery of Ontario (3:28, 7.2MB mp3)

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   Earlier in that same day, we visited the Art Gallery of Ontario. One of my sonically favorite pieces was this installation of analog televisions, all of which were tuned to static. The buzz from the picture tubes was amazing in person, and luckily at least some of its impact showed up on this recording of me slowly walking past each television in sequence from right to left.

3. Michael Snow room, Art Gallery of Ontario (3:25, 6.8MB mp3)

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   Also at the AGO an entire room of experimental filmmaker Michael Snow’s works, whose centerpiece was a slide projector. This recording documents the time it took me to walk all the way around the room and pause for a brief look at each piece, with the slide projector a moving focal point.

4. Robert Smithson room, Art Gallery of Ontario, (2:24, 4.8MB mp3)

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   A brief interlude sitting in a room in the AGO predominantly filled with works by Robert Smithson. The soundtrack to a video featuring Smithson’s voice can just barely be heard in the first part of the recording.

5. Walker Court, Art Gallery of Ontario (6:13, 12.1MB mp3)

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   The main entry court of the AGO is a fantastic space, with a winding staircase visible above. Unfortunately, I didn’t have to foresight to document the installation which is audible here: a tent containing a chandelier and a video projected on the floor. If anyone could let me know who it is and what it’s called, I’d appreciate it!

6. Escalator inside PATH underground walkway, Toronto (2:13, 4.6MB mp3)

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   We’d almost forgotten about the underground PATH system, which is similar to the Chicago Pedway. We walked into it our first night there, after business hours, and were the only people using it. Being alone in it had kind of an eerie, THX-1138 vibe even though the decor is borderline suburban. At the end of the first hallway we walked through was this squeaking escalator.

7. Royal Ontario Museum gift shop walkthrough, Toronto (2:33, 5.1MB mp3)

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   The current blockbuster show at the ROM, the Dead Sea Scrolls, was such a huge draw the line to get in was out on the street and around the block when we got there, which was only about an hour before closing time. Needless to say we didn’t make it in to the show, but we did get to walk around the gift shop. I hadn’t been to the ROM since the new addition, the Daniel Libeskind-designed “Crystal” was added; the new structure is pretty breathtaking, at least on the outside - a colossal difference between it and the rest of the architecture surrounding it. It definitely has a more bombastic feel to it than the somewhat more sombre Contemporary Jewish Museum that Libeskind recently completed in San Francisco, which we saw last summer.

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

PHOTOS: Things seen during the past summer in locations around Ann Arbor, from my Flickr stream.

I’ve been focusing on more visual than sonic documentation of my new surroundings in Ann Arbor, Michigan this summer. It’s partially due to sheer laziness: it’s much quicker and easier to break out a camera, snap a quick photo and be done with it than it is to stealthily situate yourself with a microphone and record for several minutes until you get just the right sounds to add to a field recording library. Some of the pictures I’ve taken have been an attempt keep a visual list of places to return to with a recorder; while I may not have made as many recordings as I would like right now, I have a fairly lengthy (and still growing) list of locations and phenomena I’m planning on recording. But without trying too hard, I’ve already collected several interesting recordings, the first batch of which is below.

1. Night train crossing Huron Street bridge (4:16, 8.8MB mp3)

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   The first recording I made here is probably still my favorite so far. During a nighttime walk, Alex and I happened to pass underneath a bridge just as we could hear an Amtrak train in the distance. I managed to record its entire approach and passing in what feels like an epic-length recording. I would imagine quite a few drivers were frustrated that night having to sit and wait for over four minutes for this train to pass them.

2. Fire Alarm Static, Pierpont Commons (0:55, 2.1MB mp3)

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   What sounds like an overactive fire alarm, recorded in the Pierpont Commons on the University of Michigan’s campus next door to the Duderstadt Center which will probably be my second home in a couple more weeks.

3. Argo Park, Huron river under traffic bridge (4:42, 9.1MB mp3)

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   A nice combination of river sounds echoing beneath a bridge with traffic going overhead, recorded during one of several hiking trips this summer.

4. Ann Arbor 4th of July parade 2009 (5:18, 10.7MB mp3)

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   Ambience at the beginning of the local July 4th parade. The incoherent narration over the too-quiet loudspeaker in the background is my favorite part of this.

5. Fireworks, back porch (6:13, 12.1MB mp3)

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   We were under the impression there were no fireworks to watch in town on the 4th; then suddenly a massive fireworks display began in a park somewhere west of our apartment - we couldn’t see it from our place, but we could definitely hear it. While not quite as impressive as the sounds I used to record on our sunporch back in Chicago, the distance and reverb in this recording is really interesting.

6. William Street, morning setup for Ann Arbor Art Fair (2:01, 3.9MB mp3)

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   The Ann Arbor Art Fair is described by some naysaying locals as “not art, and not fair”. This recording is in the early morning, on a mostly deserted street filled with artists’ tents waiting for their owners to arrive. Someone was sitting outside watching a portable television, which you can hear during the second half of this; not quite sure where they were or what they were watching.

7. Classic cars parking in Ypsilanti’s Depot Town (1:41, 3.7MB mp3)

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   Before we spent a weekend in Toronto (recordings from there coming soon!), we spent an evening in Ypsilanti, Michigan’s Depot Town, where we stumbled on the Depot Town Cruise Night, where owners of classic cars gather every Thursday to display some of their collectibles. This is the sound of several of them maneuvering their cars into position along the closed-off street. Includes a bonus out-take of one of the car owners chatting to us before noticing I was holding a microphone, and my goofy uncomfortable laugh in response.

8. Depot Town Cruise Night walkthru, Ypsilanti (3:43, 7.5MB mp3)

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   A walk up and down the Depot Town street filled with classic cars, as well as the sounds of a portable DJ booth spinning mp3s of ’50s and ’60s songs. There was something oddly funny about watching an oldies DJ use the same gear that other people use to create cutting-edge sound art.

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Moroccan Fantasia festival, photograph courtesy of Listen to Africa.

Listen to Africa is a two-year phonographic survey of Africa being carried out by a group of sound recordists on a bike tour. The tour’s pretty much just begun, so now’s a good time to subscribe to their podcast and follow along as they make updates.

(Thanks to Eric Leonardson on the World Listening Project mailing list for the tip)