NIME 2014 (New Interfaces for Musical Expression)

TIPPING POINT

Bristol based artist Kathy Hinde is creating a new sonic installation and performance Tipping Point concerned with our relationship with water. The installation will reveal the sonic and visual phenomena resulting from changing water depths within an inter-dependant system.  It will explore the sonic complexities and possibilities of combining water with glass vessels and the resulting frequencies and feedback tones that are created through the changing depths and movement of water.  The work will form both a sound sculpture and the basis of a live performance. The piece is being developed with John Rowden at Bristol University's Scientific Glass Workshop. Custom made software will be programming by Matthew Olden.

A Cryptic commission for Sonica, supported by the PRS for Music Foundation Britten-Pears Foundation and The Hinrichsen Foundation. 

http://tippingpointwater.wordpress.com

Convergence is a sound sculpture that presents a sonic impression of information saturation, with increased access to information represented as an increased level of noise.

The concept of convergence was chosen as a metaphor for the implications of data consumption via the Internet. Real­time data is converted into sound, and converged into a central location, whereby the sum of the information may be experienced by the viewers. 

Plein de vide - On Paul Destieu’s Fade Out by Caecilia E. Anderhub

With a furred tongue, sand between my teeth, a sore throat, and a sense of having witnessed a tragedy no-one else had perceived and of which the report would cause little ado – thus Fade Out finally released me into the shadow of the Galata Tower back in autumn 2011. But perhaps it was my fault that I hadn’t seen a comedy. Already on the stairs leading to the upper floor of the former tobacco factory in Istanbul’s Beyoğlu I had been drawn by the indecipherable clatter, a mighty roar that filled all the exhibition rooms. What I saw at first sight were bits of a conventional drum kit half-protruding from a cone, set solitary in an ochre-yellow sand and gravel pit in bright sunlight reminiscent of southern climes, as a powerful vertical percussionist eruption disgorged itself from the image. Or was it the gentle caress of a rubble load rattling down onto its partner?

I had stepped right in the middle of the screening and stayed until the last tiny pebble had dropped. Then I wanted to see the whole drama from the beginning, even though I could easily imagine its course. For just under a minute it consisted of an expressionless still life, with a breath of wind now and then gently tilting one of the cymbals or twitching a twig in the background foliage, a total immanence – until the scene is shattered by a barely perceived tremor after which a few particles, like droplets, begin to evoke the first gentle tones. Then, with flashing crescendo, impending fate unerringly delivers its lapidary freight, and the percussed instrument responds accordingly: with acoustic resistance, modulating in tone for as long as it can as slides constantly re-arrange the shape of the heap. The performance

ends once the musical set is silenced, incorporated into the cone, now part of the landscape. But a tiny bit of a cymbal protrudes like a final witness, ultimately thwarting the perfection. We are left to wonder what the other heaps might conceal.
Fade out. The inconspicuous acoustic diminuendo is complemented by the landslide’s agonising retardation, which postpones the long foreseeable end; indeed, what applies here
is the principle of the theory of self-organised criticality, to which the drama is subject. The fade out itself contrasts with the ever increasing abundance of material; the less we hear, the more substance is heaped around the acoustic soul. – A simple allegory, certainly, but of what? One is tempted to speak of a rencontre fortuite, a fortuitous bruitist encounter of gravel and drum kit in the cosmos of gravity, a dadaistic gesture the meaning of which is a lack of meaning as sober as it is merry.

Even today and after repeated viewing I find it quite strange that I stood there for a whole twelve-and-a-half minutes and watched this stoning of a drum kit, which, constantly and with sustained tension, that is to say, without any element of surprise, goes against every fundamental dramaturgical rule. In the same way we play Sudoku online – defying the need to make good use of our time – or asked to have the same fairy tale read out to us countless times, right through to the familiar, repeatedly redemptive ending, regardless of whether or not we understood it. Likewise, Fade Out, with its fateful reliable continuous narrative, provides us temporarily with a tragic homeland; but by contrast, it is the unpredictable deviations in the heap as it strives for perfection that bring us moments of excitement, tiny rediscovered irregularities in the stoic regularity which shatter the familiar unrelenting imperturbability of events – if only for an instant. They remind us of the hope for potential freedom or, depending on the mood, the fear of it.

Fogo, São Filipe, 03.08.2012 

Humming Mississippi is a sonic sculpture that performs a section of the Mississippi River on resonant wood planks as an organic instrument. In collaboration with researchers from Louisiana State University’s Coastal Hydraulics Lab a LIDAR scan of the Mississippi River floor was used to translate 18 miles of riverbed into individual planks of cedar. Small transducers attached to the back of each plank transform the board into a speaker colored by the individual characteristics of the wood and influenced by the carving of the river’s contours. The audio composition is generated based off a linear reading of river topology combined with a sonification of real­time river data including temperature, salt content, flow rate, and river height.

The piece is presently installed at the Louisiana State University Museum of Art until March 2014. As it’s currently operating the work provides interactivity with real­time river data. For the next showing of HummingMississippi the artists are extending the work into a multimodal form allowing for interaction with the installation through an online representation of the work. Individual panels from the river are presented to web users who are invited to explore the river’s depths. Device clicks or touches use the contours of the river to create a spectral pulse through the web browser on the local device and induce an immediate sonic response in the corresponding physical board. Aggregate user data is retained to create a heat map of interactions which is then used to guide the spectrum at the physical installation. The installation becomes a meta­instrument performed by web viewers and the river itself.

I am not playing Violin “ is a kinetic sound installation, which makes use of a series of abandoned violins to compose automatic music. With the absence of performers and bows, an untraditional way in playing violins is displayed. 

Quotidian Record is a limited edition vinyl recording that features a continuous year of my location-tracking data. Each place I visited, from home to work, from a friend's apartment to a foreign city, is mapped to a harmonic relationship. 1 day is 1 rotation ... 365 days is ~11 minutes.

As the record turns, the markings on the platter indicate both the time as it rotates through every 24 hours and the names of the cities to which I travel. The sound suggests that our habitual patterns have inherent musical qualities, and that daily rhythms might form an emergent portrait of an individual.