Discovered the artist Amulets this week. He works with cassettes, players, tape loops and effects , creating woozy soundscapes and atmospheres from these simple sources. Of particular interest is the physical aspect of what he does, manipulating the sounds and machines in real time.
Also reading The Oxford Handbook of Interactive Audio, with a view to developing a more theoretical approach to the sound that will be part of my final installation.
Currently experimenting with combining simple tones to make chords / walls of sound, using this for reference: Frequencies for equal-tempered scale, A4 = 440 Hz
Panned version.
Mono version.
Also read this piece recently on FACT – The Sound of Fear, which mentioned the Ghost Tape Number 10, which was unpacked in this podcast a while ago. An interesting example of using sound to play on people’s cultural preconceptions.
During the Vietnam conflict, US troops played a soundtrack known as Ghost Tape Number 10 against the soldiers of the National Liberation Front. Used as part of Operation Wandering Soul, the unsettling tape collage tapped into Vietnamese beliefs that ancestors not buried in their homeland roam without rest in the afterlife. This spooky mix of voice, sound and music was intended to haunt Vietnamese soldiers and encourage them to abandon their cause.
Quite intrigued by this visualisation of sound in space via AR. Discovered this while reading about the Weird Type AR app.
I have also been investigating a few options for networking and interacting with the objects that will be the 3D models in the installation.
One is X BEE – apparently “the Digi XBee3 Series offers design freedom with easy-to-add functionality and flexible wireless connectivity.”
Another is the Google’s Project SOLI, a sensor which recognises hand gestures.
And finally, a MIDI controller ring, The Wave, as featured on TechCrunch.
Sadly the last two will not be available for a few months yet.