Posts Tagged ‘Audio’

Recording in Portland and Weymouth

As part of the development for Variable 4 Portland Bill, we’ve been working with musicians local to the Portland and Weymouth area, developing movements which reflect the area’s maritime and social heritage. We’ve been working in the studio of Simon Swarbrick, an astonishingly talented local violinist who also has an astonishingly nice self-constructed recording space.

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Pictured above is Simon performing some of the score fragments we’ve been devising for Variable 4. We have been experimenting with generating parts of the score based on algorithmic processes, to then be displayed on iPad and performed by musician. An an example, one such process takes the gradual directions in wind speed that have taken place in Portland over the past hundred years, and translates these compass directions into modular score parts. This can then be reassembled to produce musical movements portraying different eras of Portland’s weather history — or fed into the system to generate live patterns based on moment-to-moment wind speed detected by the weather station.

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Snape Maltings night report

We’re twelve hours into Variable 4 Snape Maltings and layering up for nighttime under the Suffolk sky. Thanks to everybody who caught the coach to join us this afternoon — after a long period of grey skies, the sun eventually broke through to herald its departure.

Remote viewers can listen to our audio stream, and view a fantastic ongoing timelapse video of the site courtesy of the endlessly skilled Louis Mustill.

The Freesound Project

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We’re big fans of the Freesound Project here at Variable 4. The project is run by the Music Technology Group of Pompeu Fabra University in Spain.

We’ve decided to share our current archive of field recordings that we created for the Dungeness installation on May 22nd 2010.

You can download and listen to the field recordings under Creative Commons license here.

We’ll be updating this page with more recordings as the research period for our next installation gets underway. More news about that coming shortly!

KEF tour

To Maidstone this morning, visiting the Kent Engineering Foundry – better known as KEF – who invited us down to discuss weatherproof speakers. As a top name amongst the audiophile community, we were looking forward to auditioning their Ventura outdoor range as a candidate for next month’s installation. What we hadn’t anticipated was a comprehensive tour of their facilities, encompassing a museum of KEF’s engineering achievements since the 1960s, plus their Acoustic Laboratory, featuring anechoic chamber and all manner of analysis equipment.

Aside from their plaudits in the engineering world, we’re really pleased to be able to work with local technology: KEF’s home is just 40 miles down the road from Dungeness, in Maidstone, Kent, where they’ve been located since their inception in 1961.