Tick multiple boxes to narrow search.

or clear all.

C o m p i l a t i o n s

Field recordings

Headphones: Sound Without Space

Curated for Architectural Association Independent Radio by Charles Stankievech. Part of 1 of 3 in the series Sound + Space: Headphones | Architecture | Transmission -------->   LISTEN TO THE COMPILATION  <--------- Headphones are the norm.  The new addiction replacing smoking, headphones frame the head and the perception of most urbanites today in some form or other. Whether commuting with an iPod, exercising to the radio, talking on a hands-free cellphone… or actually listening to music, headphones create a mobile and continually changing architecture that follows the listener, wrapping them in a private bubble.  As the world rapidly interfaces, overlaps and confronts the boundaries of Private and Public through technologies and legislation, headphones become a quiet and invisible site of investigation.  The audio tracks in this collection attempt to define a body of work that is fundamentally connected to the phenomenon of headphone listening.  Some work was made specifically for headphones such as Bernhard Leitner or Janet Cardiff, other work was not originally composed for headphones, but when played over headphones a unique experience of the work is created—sometimes against the original intention of the artist or at least as a surprising by-product.  While the most common thread between the works is the unique spatialisation of headphones, other attributes of headphone listening—such as intimacy and privacy—are also explored and included. Headphones: Sound Without Space stems from the research consolidated in “From Stethoscopes to Headphones: An Acoustic Spatialization of Subjectivity” in Leonardo Music Journal (MIT Press). Vol. 17. 2007. Image: Sezione di orecchio, Ex Optimis Neotreriocrum Operibus  1804.  Archivi di San Servolo. This compilation should be listened to with headphones. #

Play UNKNOWN min, Charles Stankievech 18/4/2009

No Such Thing as a Quiet Hammer

DIN The noisy neighbours and the noise musicians UPROAR The producers, the protesters and the polluters CLAMOUR The instigators and the investigators TUMULT             Vernon & Burns, thinking aloud, offer a quiet meditation on noise. Extracts from interviews with noise pollution officers from Dundee City Council's Environmental Health Department are combined with found sounds, songs, field recordings and other voices to create this experimental live radio piece. Part audio collage, part documentary this is an unorthodox investigation into attitudes towards extraneous noise and noise pollution. --- Performed and produced by Barry Burns & Mark Vernon. Website: www.meagreresource.com   Myspace:www.myspace.com/vernonandburns   e-mail:meagreresource@hotmail.com           ‘Play’CD:http://www.kormplastics.nl/Audiotoop.html --- Commissioned by Extrapool (NL) in 2005 for ‘Audiotoop' - an evening of live, performed radio plays and Hörspiel. The full programme was aired on Resonance FM in June 2008. A condensed version appears on ‘Play', a CD and publication produced by Extrapool, 2006. #

Play 28:06 min, Mark Vernon 18/3/2009

Non-Members Night Out

A number of years ago I suffered from a bout of prolonged back pain. Bad reactions to the high doses of pain killers meant social drinking was out of the question and combined with the inability to stand for longer than 10 minutes without excruciating pain this began to seriously curtail my social life. On the odd occasion I did go to the pub I would invariably leave after an hour or so. The pubs, karaoke bars and clubs became symbols of my exclusion. It was around this time that I began making recordings of the outdoor night life on my weekly shadowy walks. I was drawn to the back doors of clubs, deserted alleys behind bars, non-places where the filtered bass of the discotheque made the sense of isolation more palpable.//This soundscape, created with sounds familiar to anyone used to prowling the streets of a big city late at night, features surreptitious recordings made outside Glasgow nightclubs, skulking around back doors and fire exits in the early hours of the morning.  Despite the obvious presence of others these sounds are strangely isolating. They document only the exterior, the periphery. The listener is excluded from the exciting and lively atmospheres that can be heard at a distance through the barriers of closed doors, brick walls and back alleys. You can hear the party going on but you haven’t been invited.//These recordings also document the effects that high volumes of music and the city’s club culture have on the surrounding architecture and acoustic environment. A door frame rattles in time, but at a slight delay, to the music within. A closely miked recording of a broken but intact windowpane at the rear of one club makes the grinding together of the shards of glass audible as they vibrate in time to the bass. Microphones inserted into drainpipes amplify the audible white noise content creating warm drones; filtered higher frequencies from the music and sounds from outside are still just audible. Windows rattle in their frames under an assault of bass heavy music.//All of the acoustic effects in this piece are natural; this is a simple edit and arrangement of the untreated field recordings. --- Produced by Mark Vernon / Website: www.meagreresource.com / e-mail: meagreresource@hotmail.com --- Abridged versions of this piece have been presented at ‘Carte Blanche’, Vollevox, Brussels and ‘The Audible Picture Show’, on ‘Framework’ (Resonance 104.4FM) and Radio Deutschland. It also appears on the Vernon & Burns LP, ‘The Tune the Old Cow Died of’ (Gagarin Records). #

Play 21:50 min, Mark Vernon 7/3/2009

Bedford Square

Bedford Square Garden is in the Bloomsbury district of the Borough of Camden in London, England. It is a private park requiring a key to enter and exit. Contact microphones were attached to the fence surrounding the park. The resulting field recording is not altered other than some equalization. The primary sound is the gate shutting as key holders enter and exit. The fence faintly transmits other ambient sounds of pedestrians and traffic surrounding the park. Most people don’t have keys and simply sit surrounding the park, leaving it empty most of the time. 'Bedford Square' is a 30 minute field recording made for radio broadcast on the Architectural Association Independent Radio (AAIR). Recorded in July, 2008. Steve Bates currently lives in Montréal, Canada where he is an MFA candidate in Studio Arts at Concordia University. He works on music, radio, and installation projects with an specific interest in experimental forms of organizing sound as improvisation and as composition. Founder and 8-year director of the sound art festival, Send + Receive: A Festival of Sound, in Winnipeg, Canada, Bates' recent collaborations include 100 Lines with jake moore, and soundFIELD, an outdoor installation at the International Garden Festival, Reford Gardens/Jardins de Métis, with landscape architect Douglas Moffat. #

Play 30:00 min, Steve Bates 5/2/2009

Send & Receive

I always wondered what kind of sound would be heard whilst on its journey when you either send or receive an e-mail or transfer data across a Network. The idea first presented itself when an IT friend of mine was chatting about his workplace and that I should pop along one day and record some of the sounds . Not wanting to let the opportunity pass me by, I spend a day, armed with a number of recording tools sitting in an enormous network server room. My initial thought was that of complete shock! I couldn't quite get over how noisy the space was, I foolishly always imagined that it was going to be really very quiet, with just the discreet sound of a small fan and the occasional bleep from time to time. The noise was mainly due to the number the cooling fans required. So never really wanting to capture the sounds of cooling fans, I would focus on the light sources from any LED light by using a number of different photocells and by using a specially constructed audio/ network cable that allowed me to connect to both the server and my laptop at the same time, where I wrote a MSP patch that recorded to one soundcard when data was being Sent, and to another soundcard when the data was being Received. This method enabled me to kill two birds with one stone and allowed me the option for working with either sound source whilst the data was being transmitted. The final piece is comprised from 16 different servers, and from 1200 different ports, collecting close to 16,000 sounds . The first section of the piece are the sounds heard when the data was being 'Sent' and the second half of the piece is the perceived sound of the data being 'Received'. Markus Jones #

Play 13:12 min, Markus Jones 17/1/2009