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Sound Project

In the past few months I've been working on a digital sound project. This sound project engages the critical process of listening to, recording and understanding soundscapes as cultural artifacts. The purpose of the project is to develop and produce experimental sound art, which calls on an audience to actively listen to the accented vocal sounds of the speaking voice as a sonic artefact.

Listening

Listening, unlike the largely involuntary and passive (unconscious) process of hearing, is the development of sonic literacy; it requires the listener to focus actively, to draw on knowledge of past experiences with sound and to understand all listening as culturally situated.
Listening is an art, a conscious process of observing and defining sound. And like the art of writing, it is affected by one's place in and knowledge of a particular sonic environment as much as one's previous experiences with sonic forms. (Comstock, M. and Hocks, E.)

Phones

Recently I've been interested in accent. Its facinating that in the space of as little as a mile or so we have different accents. Because I'm from the northern part of Ireland, and have lived in Dublin in the east, Cork in the south and now Limerick in the west, my own accent is a blurr, I'm a parrot picking up quirks from the people around me.
Acoustic phonetics is concerned with acoustics of speech: The properties of the sound waves, such as their frequency and harmonics.

This video is amusing but it gets a point across...



A little more serious....

Finding hybrid - physical/digital - objects

Recently the best place to find good examples of hybrid physical/digital objects is on the street...
For example 'Greyworld', a collective of London based artists are interested in public-activated art, sculpture and interactive installations..

The video above of the 'Monument to the Unknown Artist' is installed beside the Tate Modern, the permanent work has attracted the attention of the worlds media, and is accessible at all times.
At first glance Monument to the Unknown Artist appears to be a simple bronze statue, dressed in a neck scarf and loose fitting suit. However, the six meter monument seeks inspiration from passers-by, inviting them to strike poses which he copies, continually changing his form in a light-hearted and mischievous way. The unique sculpture offers an alternative and accessible creative experience for the public allowing them to create a dialogue with the work of art.

Materials of Making

This is a blog inspired by a love of physical interaction with a material, clay, and the adventure of mixing it up with computerized digital technology.
Here's Hiroshi Ishii's version of what I mean...



A tangible user interface (TUI) is a user interface in which a person interacts with digital information through the physical environment.

One of the pioneers in tangible user interfaces is Hiroshi Ishii, a professor in the MIT Media Laboratory who heads the Media Group. His particular vision for tangible UIs, called Tangible Bits, is to give physical form to digital information, making bits directly manipulable and perceptible. Tangible bits pursues seamless coupling between these two very different worlds of bits and atoms.