sound art reel
Includes:
1. SONAF_19
Digital abstractions of frog sounds sourced from digitized tape. Released in conjunction with the Smithsonian Folkways reissues of 1958’s Sounds of North American Frogs by herpetologist Charles M. Bogert and 1979’s Gateway Summer Sound: Abstracted Animal and Other Sounds by composer Ann McMillan. Sound effect design.
1. SONAF_19
Digital abstractions of frog sounds sourced from digitized tape. Released in conjunction with the Smithsonian Folkways reissues of 1958’s Sounds of North American Frogs by herpetologist Charles M. Bogert and 1979’s Gateway Summer Sound: Abstracted Animal and Other Sounds by composer Ann McMillan. Sound effect design.
2. Field Recordings from Italy
City sound gathering, from a larger piece that acts as a sort of sound slideshow of our trip.
3. ❀ MAYFEVER ❀
Soundscape for a work of contemporary dance, choreographed by Erin Landers and premiered in New York, 2019.
4. Orange Segments - Cities & Memory
My contribution to the Cities & Memory project The Orange Garden. An experiment in pattern-recognition. Certain sounds have regularities, and noticing their timings can make the world feel like a working system. The birds call every few seconds, people walk by every half minute, planes pass every few minutes… By jumping around a field recording in tempo, the sounds are sorted, and become easier to hear as a melody.
I coded an abstraction in Pure Data that divides an audio file into segments of equal size and then shuffles them. Melodic patterns seem to crop up - it's a miniature of the experience of listening to a park in real time, how our brains attempt to make sense of it all.
5. The Sea at ??Levanto - Cities & Memory
My contribution to the Cities & Memory project Sounding Nature. This piece explores intentional white noise - internal or external, synthetic or natural.
6. Commodore
A field recording that blurs the line between biogenic and anthropogenic sounds. As a rookery of herons clatters along, a train passes - and the herons start to sound like fish plates on the rails. The full recording is ambiguous, haunting.
7. Pythagorean Ratio Sequencer
A pitch sequencer programmed in Pure Data. It was an experiment, mostly a search for a way to produce melodies in just intonation without having to program all the scales, but it turned into something really fun - some of the idiosyncrasies have brought up sounds of bagpipes, bells, lots of unexpected things. The abstraction is available on github, along with some more examples of possible uses for this type of pitch math.
8. Wind for Robert(a)
A work of contemporary dance scored using only field recordings of wind. Source audio was fed through various effects built/designed in Pure Data and Ableton.
9. The Mountain
A fiction poem. A fantasy scene, an ancient living mountain. Field recording, flute, score, sound design, narration, voice… I love this piece.