Wednesday 17 December 2014

Sound walk/ Acoustic ecology

What is a sound walk you ask? It is a way of listening to what is going on in your environment by means of a walk, wander free range roam or perhaps, a designated and mapped route.
Of course it comes from Acoustic Ecology and to me, this is as fascinating as a research project can be. I am interested in how we relate to sounds in our environment, how we fill spaces with sounds and why.
Some of us are impervious to noise and others are extremely sensitive to it, personally I am acutely sensitive to environmental sounds and am curious to learn what others think. According to Time magazine, here are the top ten most annoying sounds of all time, do you have any others? Leave yours in the comments.


For the interests of the research I will subject myself to this test that I can only assume will be excruciating. Results are as follows:

1..  Vuvuzela.... I had to pause it almost immediately, and then a few more times.. and then I muted it..that is horrible. ( also, whoever invented this, you have a lot to answer to mate) In all I probably only stood it for a total of 10 seconds

2 .  Emergency broadcast system.... not as hideous as I expected, pretty shrill and piercing but oddly not the worst.

3. Gilbert Gottfired... oh my goodness, no man, no .. stop talking now. I  got through the introduction, probably 4 seconds and no, mute.

4.  Nails on a chalkboard.... ok so it's a Freddy Kruger impersonator and we were expecting it but still, this is probably the most universally agreed upon "worst sound ever" .. it started scratching, I lasted a sum total of 1 second, maybe 2... no, it was 1 ( that said this was a pretty rubbish example of  the Worst Sound Ever

5. Car alarm... in my top 3 sounds from hell, it always make my head feel like it's going to explode and completely removes the ability for my brain to do anything else but get really angry and stressed... 3 seconds... enough. but then i played it again, like an idiot... I think it is the rapid fire repetition that does it and it simply floods the brain.

6. Dial up modem.. I don't actually mind this, perhaps it was so ubiquitous back in the day that it signified digital conectedness and the exciting dawn of the internet, or something! yeah, no worries on that one.

7. Snoring... ok, another one in my top 3... I HATE snoring, don't even need to listen to the clip to know this.... grrr.....it makes me ad because while the offending auditory assailant is sleeping peacefully, I most certainly am not.. also, it sounds awful. ( the poor dude in the clip has a serious problem though and needs to lie on his side and maybe... I dunno, get a bed?)

8. Cicadas.... a bit like a car alarm I guess but not really that bad, maybe it is just artificial ( sorry snorers) sounds that bother me the most... that said the cicadas could do with toning it down a bit...quite selfish of them.

9.  Jim Carey in Dumb and Dumber.... Quite bloody annoying yes, but then again I find Old Jim pretty bloody irritating anyway... what is that noise he is making all about?Just do not be that guy Jim, please.


In conclusion.....there is surely a test out there with far more irritating noises than this, I shall not be seeking it out... that said.... AARGGHH....



Monday 8 December 2014

Psychogeography

So as it turns out, while researching the sound and silence ideas and looking into how I can work with this idea, I would like to take it in the direction of Psychogeography.

PsychoGeography: “the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals.”
Guy Debord  Link to source.

I have always been interested in how we use and inhabit the environments we are in, share them with others and view them from our own perspectives so this may be a very interesting project and, of course I have NO idea where it will lead.

One thing I do know is that I want to look at the spaces we inhabit in terms of sound, what is naturally there, what we consciously or subconsciously put there and what we can put there, this sort of idea is interesting in that there can be a visual as well as auditory response to the space, I would like to look into this.

Dec 17th

I have been reading and looking for ways to figure out how to approach this so that I don't leave out the initial concept of sound and allow  it to move on to something else so I concluded that embarking on a series of soundwalks would be the best way forward. I will record these in a series of field journals.
a field notes page I made up for the book
and record and create sounds depending on the situation, I'd like to archive the sounds and have them easily accessible so I am going to try and find a way to create a mobile ( app maybe) way to let people access this. The idea is to create a bound book with all the journal pages, this will be not just the sound ones but a more general explorers journal as well.
field notes page




I will record everything, keep an archive of found objects, photos and observations and culminate this with the book, the objects and a map design that I am yet to work out. It will be very interesting to see how  all this information comes together. Essentially, this is the type of thing I am looking at.



Sunday 30 November 2014

16mm film workshop

We did a really fun workshop with 16mm film where we worked straight onto the film with a variety of things, I used sandpaper, markers, a hole punch and a bit of ink... you know, the usual things! it gave out some really great effects and one thing interesting is that you can manipulate the sound element with the destruction... sorry, manipulation of the film if you know what to do.

my little sequence here is all out of frame, I was helping film all the other students pieces to digital from the projections and ran out of time to do mine so I did not check to see if it was lined up... it totally was not lined up.

It is a mess and I should really not show it here but ... I will... you can get the idea of what I did without seeing the entire frame.




Wednesday 26 November 2014

silence, noise and the physical effects of sound

For our next unit, 2nd project I have decided to put away things for this one and focus on being, on creating your own world within the world we already inhabit and especially in the cities we find ourselves, well  at least I find myself in. I want to map a quiet city, find and create peaceful places and quiet  spaces in the city and beyond. I have no idea how it will turn out, even if it will work but it will be an interesting experiment.

The world has become a noisy place, a cacophony of  sounds clashing and competing for your attention, I want to find ways to shut that out, to avoid or ignore it if even for a few moments at a time or, indeed longer.

The first thing I came across while looking into this was someone in my home city of Adelaide Australia had done a very similar thing. He created an app that showed people where to go for quiet place, I find this pretty interesting really, that it would be someone from Adelaide which in my experience of noisy places is not that at all, in fact there is a lot of peace and quiet to be had in the city of churches, we have some lovely parklands and green spaces not to mention the hills, but that is a tangent I shall  not go into just yet.

So, how to go about this, well.... stay tuned as I investigate and attempt to create a quiet way to inhabit Manchester, a very unquiet city.

November 30th
It occurred to me that the reason I am drawn to this idea is that sound, noise, audio, what have you effects us physically and emotionally, sound waves and vibrations can and do move matter so I want to look at how this relates to me in that I prefer silence to the usual barrage of noises that most of us seem to have become very used to.
There have been a number of studies done that look at how we are  physically affected by sound and I want to look into how we can create more healthy environments considering this.

Mapping towns and cities in a sounds based way is a really nice way to look at this so some field recordings are on the cards for sure.
 Future posts on this project will be tagged psychogeography project.








Saturday 22 November 2014

Pecha Kucha

Pecha Kucha presentation for 4 week project. my project is at the the lantern slides and new ways to use and view the old technology, alternative ways to present images on glass and how to alter the images to recreate something new.
Images:






Two images on slides that I played with in PS and AI





Sunday 16 November 2014

Slideshow project

A project based on images from the Visual Resources Centre ( the slide library) at Manchester School of Art. With a couple of others in my class we are putting on an exhibition at the Salutation on the 19th of November, this is in response to a group project where we were asked to come up with a campaign to raise awareness of the existence if the slide library, the project was hypothetical but we found out the threat of closure to the library was real so decided to take it further and do a real campaign.

I created a few pieces of work, titled "Now and Then" that essentially combine old and new images, methods, tech and equipment, I have recreated lantern slides in A4 fomat but instead of the usual two sheets I have done 3 layer versions, these are not intended to necessarily be projected but are perfectly happy just being looked at!
I used original vintage lantern slides which I then photographed on 35mm film, developed and then manipulated with Photoshop and Illustrator, combined with some mobile phone photos that I overlaid and then sandwiched together. I wanted to use a combo of new and old tech to create /recreate images of the same places. I used laser printing, risograph printing and letterpress as well as the physical glass pieces.
Some of the work is focused on the city of Manchester and some of the machinery that formed the indistrial past. The point of this is to highlight the fact that our history is always important and worth remembering and hanging onto.

here are a couple of the images I have done:

http://interactiveartsblog.wordpress.com/2014/11/24/the-view-through-ashs-work-in-the-link-gallery/



 
Making the large sized lantern slides


my little vintage Kodaslide machine, one slide at a time goes in the top and the previous one pops out the bottom, fantastic gadget but it does get very hot.


A couple of the images I produced for the project using old imagery and new technology, not the newest idea under the sun but relevant for this project and really fun to do.



Some work in progress








I scanned in this Arabic Phrase and made this with it in Illustrator


vine project

Vines workshop from October, here you will witness the world famous AwfulBad CamelVines among other masterpieces of the genre, not my finest hour to be fair. But you can't tell a camel what to do, as we all know. Some are mine, some I am in others etc.

 

Wednesday 22 October 2014

Crazy Golf

So after the Liverpool Biennial the idea was a group project where we made crazy golf courses and clubs based on what we had seen, it was interesting, here's what my group did, it was kind of a cityscape, going along the roads and across the Mersey into the Tate and teh Biennial at the end, it was great because we had to be very resourceful, found a pallet in the skip and went from there.




















two of us in my group won joint first for best golf putter, it was a moment of true glory.

This is the golf club that I made, surprisingly it worked really well, ridiculous thing it is.


Monday 20 October 2014