music installation

This is a preview of Youth Music Box, a free interactive musical experience, designed to let you create a unique track and video in under 10 minutes.

Youth Music Box is currently living at the Royal Festival Hall, London.

Youth Music Box is a project of Youth Music, the UK’s largest children’s music charity, providing funding for music projects and activities.

Photophonics is an audiovisual installation by Bruno Mathez and Mike Blow. It was shown at the “Sonic Art” exhibition at The Blank Gallery in Brighton, part of the Brighton Fringe, in May 2009.

According to Blow & Mathez:

Photophonics is the first result of Bruno’s 3d video-projection mapping experiments. It is a ‘dispersed instrument’ with a number of electronic oscillators created by Mike, positioned on architectural elements of the dark performance space. Each one emits sound in direct response to light. A visual score is played, transforming the space into an hypnotic audiovisual experience.

You can find some of Mike blow’s work at evolutionaryart.co.uk.

via Califaudio

Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin’s Listening Post is an art installation that culls text fragments in real time from thousands of unrestricted Internet chat rooms, bulletin boards and other public forums. The texts are read (or sung) by a voice synthesizer, and simultaneously displayed across a suspended grid of more than two hundred small electronic screens.

Listening Post cycles through a series of six movements, each a different arrangement of visual, aural, and musical elements, each with it’s own data processing logic.

Artists description: Dissociating the communication from its conventional on-screen presence, Listening Post is a visual and sonic response to the content, magnitude, and immediacy of virtual communication.

via MediaArtTube

Nebraska science god Aaron ALAI, an expert in the theoretical side of wildlife ecology, demonstrates Stochasticity, a music installation that lets you draw musical notes with water:

The name of the piece is called Stochasticity. I built it to demonstrate the randomness that humans introduce into very precise systems.

When someone uses my art piece they are directly interacting with a very precise electronic tool. It produces musical tones based on the amount of resistance sensed in trails of water. The resistance changes unpredictably, and thus this is where the variability in the system arises from. The water evaporates, the user will flex their muscles, their hearts will pump blood at varying rates, and the conductivity of their skin will change. All of these variables change the placement of the notes in the water and make the system unreliable. I found it interesting that even though imperfect animals such as ourselves are plagued with randomness, we are capable of producing reliable highly precise tools that we can indirectly interact with.

I have included it here on my webpage because it fits within my philosophy rather well. The concept of resistance is commonly explained with analogous personal experiences, a common experience involves turning on a water faucet, wider openings allow more water to flow through and more water means more electricity. My art piece bridges the gap between personal experiences and the complexity of resistance. The user can visually see themselves changing the resistance of the electronic system while receiving an instantaneous auditory response. They become the resistor and can manipulate that variable in a familiar way.

It’s fascinating as an art installation – but can you imagine larger, multi-player temporary electronic instruments – made of water?

Bacterial Orchestra – Public Epidemic No 1 (2009) (App Store link) is an unusual iPhone app designed to turn a group of iPhones into “a huge musical organism that is not only self-organizing, but also evolving with the sound environment.”

The video above is a first test of the prototype – with only a few cells. The first performance will be the 6th of June at Volt Festival in Uppsala/Sweden.

Details on the Bacterial Orchestra below. Read more…