Quiet Please! Sound Art and Interactive Design
13th Jan. 2005
I should have posted it sooner but I am only now getting back into the groove of things after a solid week of no sleep. In a short period of time Chientai, Celia, and I have put together a small exhibition, 8 pieces in total, that opened on January 8th at the Hsinchu Railway Art House. Considering the budget and time constraints it's something to feel a certain bit of pride over. This exhibition falls under a project at ITRI called smenms and marks my return to my music and sound roots. It's only a small first step but taking that step is often the most difficult. Hopefully opportunities will present themselves to allow for the continuation of this work. I've included the lengthy backgrounder below.
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Hsinchu, Taiwan... Quiet Please!, an exhibition of Sound Art and Interactive Design is a collection of work which attempts to change or perception of how we view and interact with music and sound. This exhibition created by Canadian Clark MacLeod and a small team of local artists will be featured at Hsinchu Railway Art House from January 8 through January 22, 2005.
Sound art challenges fundamental divisions between visual art and music. Works of sound art play on the fringes of our often-unconscious aural experience of a world dominated by the visual. This work addresses our ears in surprising ways: it is not strictly music, or noise, or speech, or any sound found in nature, but often includes, combines, and transforms elements of all of these. Sound art sculpts sound in space and time, reacts to environments and reshapes them, and frames ambient "found" sound, altering our concepts of space, time, music, and noise.
Tangible interfaces allow us to realize seamless interfaces between humans, digital information, and the physical environment by giving physical form to digital information and computation, making bits directly manipulable and perceptible.
Sound and information space dominate the mode of hearing of the twentieth century, and their dialectic has only recently begun to evolve a third mode of hearing, the soundscape. Music from Russolo to Cage strips itself of inessentials (melody, harmony, counterpoint) to encompass all hearing, transferring your mode of listening to the sounds of the world. Information structures, movie soundtracks, the temporal and public functions of broadcasting: in the audiovisual media, the dialectic of music and information has produced the multichannel soundscape as a novel synthesis, the kind of land in which music and dialogue are reduced to sound effects and the sound approaches parity with the image. Soundscapes generated by the network help illustrate the the silent organic network lifeform.
Quiet Please! is part of a broader project at the Industrial Technnology Research Institute called Sme(n)ms: Shared Musical Environment for Non-Musicians. Sme(n)ms is an investigation into the creation of collaborative environments that will allow for the ongoing sharing and creation of sound events (music). The goal of such systems is to provide an easily understood yet malleable environment that allows for creative expression and communication at a rich level.
Categorized: Work and Working , Projects