the Shape of Sound (courtesy of Andrea)

After getting burnt out on AutoCAD yesterday, today I researched for site design ideas.  I am discovering a whole realm of information that I didn’t know existed - from beautiful new data mapping techniques to Acoustic Ecology and existence of “a worldwide network of environmental sound art“.

Thank-you Andrea for sharing this link.  I love it!

The method behind The Shape of Song

The diagrams in The Shape of Song display musical form as a sequence of translucent arches. Each arch connects two repeated, identical passages of a composition. By using repeated passages as signposts, the diagram illustrates the deep structure of the composition.

More complex compositions create more intricate diagrams. The diagram above represents one of the Goldberg Variations. It shows that the piece divides into two main parts, each made of a long passage played twice–or what a musician would call an “AABB” structure. LINK TO THE FULL ARTICLE

 

water and sound

I found an article that will be interesting and inspiring to anyone interested in community development.  It is also a nice example of how unexpected results can add to a project.  In this case the ends of propane tanks were used as an economical alternative to newly fabricated metal catchment bowls and it was discovered that they had musical properties and the vibrations had interesting effects on the water.

My RPCV friends should definitely take a look.

Letter from an Artist: Catching Magic in the Los Padillas Water Catchment Project

By Chrissie Orr

 

Sound and Environmetal Health

The term “sound pollution” is well known, generally in the context of how it affects people’s quality of life.  We don’t generally think about sound as an environmental indicator.  Here is an interesting excerpt taken from http://www.danchan.com/weblog/andreapolli . Andrea Polli is Director of the MFA Program in Integrated Media Arts at Hunter College and her blog is called Ecomedia How the Natural World is Transforming the Nature of Media. I should have more posted about her work soon.

sound density is an important indicator of the health of a natural environment…

animal species populate the sound spectrum of an environment in much the same way they populate its geography. When in an environment, animals thrive when they can position themselves in different bands of the sonic spectrum than other animals. When a particular frequency band is open, this provides an opportunity for an animal to come into an environment without sonic competition. Animals have difficulty surviving in areas where their particular frequency band is already occupied.

 

I started to write about my design ideas and it turned into a rant

the sound of a train passing by reminds me that I need to hone in on design and stop cruising around on the Internet for a while. Amongst other things, I did find an interesting sound installation on YouTube. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4096586/ (there should be a video clip instead of the link) The kid who made the video talks about some things that I find appropriate to using sound as part of my design for Perkins Underpass. His installation is about making music-making as intuitive as listening. He also talks about emergent systems, so it seems that the concept of emergence is following me around as well.

Like that video, most of my ideas for designing with sound at the site incorporate light and movement. I still don’t know what I will do to use sound as a design direction. I have some general design ideas, about what should go where, some theories, things I want the space to achieve and how it should make people feel. The hard part - the part that is hard for me at least - is turning those thoughts into images. It is like when you can understand a foreign language, but can’t really speak it. Can you draw a feeling if you have poor drawing skills? I can not. Same goes for drawing vague images that are in my head. A drawing class is definitely on the agenda for this summer. Would have been for last summer too if I had known. For some reason I thought it would be a skill taught as part of LSU’s curriculum. There is some kind of drawing “class” in Brooklyn called Drink and Draw - or something like that. Assuming I manage to pull off an internship this summer I will definitely spend some time there. What a brilliant idea. but for now, back to the scribble scrabble.

 

Phytoremediation (this post is dedicated to Brooke)

Phytoremediation is the use of plants to clean pollutants out of water, soil, air, sediment.  It falls under the more general term of bioremediation, which includes other living things that can be used to clean pollutants, for example fungi or different types of bacteria.  Just think of the prefix bio as life and phyto as specific to plant life, combined with the word remediation.  On the down side the remediation generally goes only as far as a plant’s root system can reach, we are not sure if the pollutants are transferred to bugs and animals that eat the plants, and there is concern that the pollutants can still leach out into the groundwater.  Some typical  pollutants are metals, sewage, explosives, arsenic…

Using the example of a contaminated industrial site where toxic metals have sept into the soil, phytoremediation is a lot more effective and cost efficient than removing contaminated soil or sealing it in concrete.  It looks a lot nicer too..  Constructed wetlands are one method of phytoremediation,

the EPA published an informational document called “The Citizen’s Guide to Phytoremediation”.  It is very basic, easy enough elementary school students to understand.  http://www.clu-in.org/download/citizens/citphyto.pd

another EPA guide is more advanced with a lot of short articles starting on pg 27 of the pdf ww.epa.gov/tio/download/remed/phytoresgude.pdf

Phytoremediation is being used at Fresh Kills on Staten Island for the dual purpose of cleaning the soil and building up a layer of organic material to cover the ground.  (I think you need a NY Times log in for this one.) http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/24/garden/24natu.html?pagewanted=2&8bl

army is using phytoremediation to clean explosives from soil: http://el.erdc.usace.army.mil/resbrief/phytoexp.html

Plants have been used in Chernobyl clean up: http://www.mhhe.com/biosci/pae/botany/botany_map/articles/article_10.html

And, it is cleaning the former steelworks plant, now a park, Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord that I wrote about in an earlier post.

One newer and interesting aspect of phytoremediation is phytomining.  Research has shown that some plants that extract metals can then in turn have the metals extracted out of them.  Below is an excerpt from:  Phytoremediation: Using Plants To Clean Up Soils”
Published in the June 2000 issue of Agricultural Research magazine.

In 1998, ARS agronomist Rufus L. Chaney and colleagues in ARS, at the University of Maryland, and in England patented a method to use such plants to “phyto-mine” nickel, cobalt, and other metals.

Chaney says biomining is the use of plants to mine valuable heavy-metal minerals from contaminated or mineralized soils, as opposed to decontaminating soils.

“The crops would be grown as hay. The plants would be cut and baled after they’d taken in enough minerals,” Chaney says. “Then they’d be burned and the ash sold as ore. Ashes of alpine pennycress grown on a high-zinc soil in Pennsylvania yielded 30 to 40 percent zinc—which is as high as high-grade ore. Electricity generated by the burning could partially offset biomining costs.”

full article at http://www.ars.usda.gov/is/pr/2000/000622.ht

I don’t know the implications of burning all this plant material, but it is amazing that we have found a way to recover metallic waste.

 

Pipe Cleaners

I swear my computer is dying.  I have had to force quit programs about six times tonight.  No, it was more than six.

Modeling sound is an interesting exercise.  i have some ideas about what I want to do, but keep falling asleep on the started work.  It is hard to build models with your eyes closed.  maybe a few hours of sleep will help.  I think I want to make a giant model out of all pipe cleaners.  I wonder if there are really long pieces of pipe cleaners.  Like the length of those Swiss mountain horns that they have (had?) on the Ricola commercials. Sequins would be a nice addition too.

 

More cool stuff…

There is a lot of cool stuff going on with sound mapping of one sort or another. This Japanese artist makes maps that plays sounds from different parts of a city when you trace over the map with a special pen. All the sounds played are ambient noise taken from different locations…

Here is an excerpt from “We Make Money Not Art” archives (Here is the link)

Sound mapping

By Regine
on January 18, 2005 11:02 AM

“Streetscape“, by Japanese artist Iori Nakai, is a plastic map with the sounds of the city “attached” to it. When tracing over the city’s white map with a special pen, you can hear everyday noises that were recorded at that particular location: conversations, passing traffic, and all the ambient sounds that make a city. The artist has produced many different versions of it, according to the city where he exhibits the work.

I also read something about crazy people running around a room wearing sound helmets

http://www.turbulence.org/blog/images/av04.jpg

And here is something for you guys doing that tag it project:

With Audiotag, by Lalya Gaye and Margot Jacobs, from the Interactive Institute in Sweden, previously recorded personal messages are left at hidden places in public spaces to be whispered to passersby as they lean towards small boxes fixed in urban environment(blogged last year.)

See also: Siemens’ electronic Post-It (via textually.)

Now, I have passed the Point of Diminishing Returns (thank you Kevin) and need to get busy on some Villa Lante. But I did just learn about the Dissonanze festival in Rome and now I’m daydreaming about Italy. Maybe i can channel the daydreams into the Villa. Pizza, Pasta e cia cia cia (that is pronounced cha cha cha for all you non-Italians!)

 

Words about sounds translated into images

I was looking for some inspiration a couple of nights ago and found something that is really interesting and relevant to our project. Check out the online version of “Painted by Numbers” from last month’s Wired magazine. One of the featured artists is Casey Reas, who came here as a Manship speaker last semester. Most of the artists use his open source software and are translating data into art in a way that is similar to what we are attempting to do for our project.

My experiment with one of the programs is below.

Words describing sounds are googled as images and re-drawn with a program called Dreamlines that uses “1500 autonomous particles in perpetual movement”. It will make sense when you see it. And it is fun to play with.

my words in order of each row of pictures were:

• songbirds
• pidgeons
• traffic
• clunk-clunk
• rustling leaves sound
• whoosh
• bar sounds
• traffic noise
• traffic sounds

 

cheep,cheep-cheepwhoosh.whoosh.whoosh.whoosh.clunkclunk–clunkclunk

My thoughts about Project 2.

The site is Perkins Road and Christian Street, aka the Perkins Road Overpass (or underpass, depending on your perspective). I don’t know enough about the history of the area to really go into it, but I’ve been told that there is a strong Baton Rouge social history attached to it. It’s a very strange area if you’ve never been there before, Perkins Road practically touches Chelsea’s (bar/restaurant), I-10 also passes overhead, there are strange angles and nooks from the overpasses and the properties below, all ways in seem like back doors but chelsea’s is a popular bar, and the Bet-R grocery store is like everyone’s quick stop when you don’t have time for real grocery shopping. anyway strange, awkward space that has a lot of potential.

I am interested in the sounds of the place as my phenomena. There are so many different sounds going on, and not all noisy traffic like you might think. The aspect I am interested in is the symphonic effect created by everything together. If I can figure out some ways to map everything I think some incredibly interesting results could come out of it.

• Whoosh - car on Perkins
• clunkclunk, clunkclunk - vehicles on I-10, the sound is a double clunkclunk
• cooo - pidgeons (I think they are in nesting season and not typically that loud)
• cheeping, chirping, tweeting - happy song birds - definitely seasonal, they started up about a month ago when it was still cold. It seemed even louder then. I think they were yelling for warm weather to come. 3:00 - 4:00am start up time
• Whiiirrrr - wood saw
• wind rustling through trees - all day long, typically stronger in the afternoon, getting stronger through the night, stopping around dawn. Very loud when a front is moving in.
• babbling brook - water running over gravel and into a drain. it made a lovely noise. I recorded it, but didn’t think to seek out the source. oops.
• Train - I didn’t see it when I was there, but I know it usually comes through town at night, after dark but before the birds
• People - crunch of walking on gravel parking lot, talking, clanking glasses and dishes, bar noises, drunk people noises - definitely louder as evening approaches, loudest at night, Friday and Saturday

break it down by: type, volume, location, natural v/s not natural… divide it up by: season, time of day, day of week, location

Lots of thoughts rumbling around my head - but I need to focus on the storyboards for tomorrow. Focus. FOCUS!

um, I really want to post some video clips on here, but need to get back to the FOCUS thing.

 

Project 01 concept - kind of a wrap up

I’ve been trying to write a summary of project one for close to a week now, but it just reads like a ridiculous laundry list of tasks and trials.  I just couldn’t even start a post about Project 02 without saying something in summary of Project 01.  Moving on, I present a short version and save anyone reading this from that torture.

Project name: EMERGE (for emergence and emerging)

My concept was inspired by the way the neighborhood has bound together and is emerging into something new. They are neither denying nor clinging to the history of the place, but organizing themselves to build upon what is left - thus came the concept of emergence.

I had the concept pretty early on, and actually felt good enough about it to stick with it. But turning the idea of emergence into a design was a long, drawn out process, with more than half of my work getting abandoned. At some point, a sketch of a wedge like form showed up in my sketchbook, Brad told me to go with it and the landforms were born. The thing with the design process (at least for me) is that what looks like a simple logical path in retrospect really took a lot of sketches, models, plans and revamping all of the above to get to. I can say I went from this: to the very similar landform ramps in my final design and it makes sense. But if I show all of the steps that were in between the two things, then you can see why design is not so simple.  Half of those in between steps are chronicled in this blog.  Now, for Project 02…