April 6
Assignment:

You will be assigned a text excerpt from a book listed in the bibliography or a link on the materials page. Read the text and formulate an idea of how you could explore one of the author’s points in a site specific sound installation.

Write a 100 word summery of your idea. You can write in Italian or English. Email this summary to no later than 24 hours prior to the beginning of the next class (Aprile 5 ore 16:00 deadline). I will add your texts an online forum featuring our findings.

Prepare a five minute presentation on the assigned topic to present in class next week. Your presentation can be delivered in English or Italian.

Antonio Barbalace

Ron Kuivila
IL GIARDINO DI BABELE, part 1

Kuivila's installation "il giardino di Babele" in Florence, 1990, is a 3 part realization that make use of three different section around the old clock tower in the Piazza Poggi. The first part consist of a video camera suspended over a grid of linoleum tiles which would trigger pitches, organized in scales of fifths, when they were stepped on. Walking over each tile would trigger a program that played patterns
in response to the movements. Players could see through their interaction with the grid how the pitches and the images were being determined. Another great improvements of this installation is that as more players joined in, the sounds would become incoherent and the players agitated.

Daniele Pasetto

Edgar Varèse

Titolo: I SUONI CI RACCONTANO LA STORIA

Il mio progetto si ispira alla più grande installazione multimediale della fiera mondiale di Brussels dove nel Philips Pavilion, Edgar Varese compose il" Poem Electronique".Si cercò di combinare luci immgini e suoni in una perfetta composizione multimediale.Il mio progetto si svolgerebbe naturalmente in scala più piccola, introducendo in una stanza affrescata (come può essere ad esempio la Sala dei Giganti) almeno 4 alltoparlanti uno in ogni angolo della stanza.Un fascio di luce illuminerà quindi conseguentemente una serie di affreschi, alle quale verrà immediatamente associato un suono,una voce o una musica, proveniente dalla medesima direzione, che richiami storicamenta all'immagine illuminata in quell'istante.Il fascio di luce illuminerà però ogni volta rappresentazioni opposte l'una all'altra e il suono, nell'intervallo di oscurità che intercorrerà tra una immagine illuminata e l'altra, anticiperà di qualche secondo la direzione della nuova proiezione.Questo contribuirà a creare un senso di disorientamento nell'ascoltatore e ne faciliterà la perdita di senso di spazio e tempo aiutandolo ad impersonificarsi negli eventi storici. Il tutto potrebbe indurre a cercare di creare come appunto anche Varese fece, una partitura multimediale della composizione.

Marco Braggion

Alvin Curran’s Music from the Center of the Earth
A short survey by Marco Braggion

Music from the Center of the Earth (MCE) is an ongoing installation project mainly built on the following idea: to use the underground sounds of the earth as a composition/installation device. Up to now, this idea gave birth to three electronic music installations:
1. Notes from Underground (realized with Melissa Gould);
2. The Magnetic Garden (proposal status);
3. The Listening Well (proposal status).

This obsession for nature and site specific sounds is at the core of Alvin Curran’s opus (for example the use of foghorns and sea sounds in Maritime Rites): he usually uses environmental sounds that are useful to build up every installation.
In particular in the first abovementioned installation he used sound to build imaginary wallsounds in a destroyed Berlin synagogue’s reconstruction; this sound was a reproduction of million human voices coming from the underground.
In the second installation some speakers are put underground and optionally above the ground in a garden. The sound source is taken from every kind of possible sounds (music, spoken words, classical, jazz, etc.) and played through these under/overground speakers. The sound spatialization is set up with a random digital controller that follows earth’s biological time. This sound system is meant to connect different areas of the garden.
The third one is a part of the Magnetic Garden. The project is to build a well that plays and amplifies synthetic sounds.

Ideas:
1. to use sounds in order to build a physical structure;
2. to use sounds in order to make people feel better in a natural landscape;
3. to use speakers in unusual positions in order to get a better ‘answer’ from the listener.

Everything can be found on Alvin Curran’s Website.

Marco Gonella

Stephen Vitello

Stephen Vitiello is a sound and media artist. In his work, he is particularly interested in the physical aspect of sound and its potential to define the form and atmosphere of a spatial environment.

Stephen Vitiello is currently Assistant Professor of Kinetic Imaging at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) and Archivist for The Kitchen, NYC.
He coolaborated Since 1988 with artists, musicians and choreographers, including Dara Birnbaum, Jem Cohen, John Jasperse/White Oak Dance Project, Pauline Oliveros, Tony Oursler, Andrew Deutsch, Eder Santos, Nam June Paik, Scanner, Yasunao Tone, Frances-Marie Uitti, Julie Mehretu

He received many awards for his works in the last years:2006 Creative Capital, “Emerging Fields, and Innovative Literature”
2003 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, “Performance/Multi-Disciplinary”
2001 Penny McCall Foundation, Penny McCall Award
1999 Independent Radio and Sound Art Fellowship, Jerome Foundation/Media Alliance

His works includes music compositions and music installation that contain important visual, spatial components.

One of his most frequent kind of installation, and in my personal opinion, one of the best in order of visual emotion and originality, consist in hanging with nylon or metal many music speakers at different heights creating a sort of music wave in the space with a very suggestive and original effect. For example the installation titled “wind in the trees” presented at Galerie Almine Rech, (Paris 2005) were Low frequency sine waves are used to move the surface of the speakers but do not produce any audible sound. Other works of this series can be considered: A Slow Wave to Climb, an installation for the 5th Bienal do Mercosul , Porto Alegre, Brazil, here like in Wind in the Trees, low frequency tones are used to move the surfaces of the speakers. And Fear of High Places and Natural Things,composed by 9 speakers suspended from a 40 foot ceiling.Inaudible frequencies are sent through the speakers, so that the speakers pulse, shake and vibrate with a physical energy to be viewed rather than heard.

Moreover,he was one of the eleven artists called in torino this year for the progect “Echoes from the mountains”in occasion of the 2006 olimpic games, to record the sounds of nature, linked to the specific sounds producted by sports like skiing, and reorganize them in specific music installation works

I found in his personal site lots of other interesting works linked to the idea of music like a sound composition, like a concept described by words, like sounds linked to sculpture, like an happening, like an analisys of natural sounds by man or by the nature(for example using special microphones to record sound during a glider plane flight for the work titled ”Glider over Marfa”, or from a builing like in the World Trade Center recordings in 1999.

I was very surprised discovering the possibilities of music expression linked to particular visual and space context in the use that this artist do of that, and I think that this could be a first step to define the music installation that our group is going to prepare.

I think we could focus on our metropolitan contest in order to link the sounds of the city, its noises to our specific sensibility and reorganize them in a new order, in order to consider them from a different point of view.I imagined a recoring composed by various recording of sounds of the city in different places, at different times in order to built a sort of sound map of the city; considering that like a new way of considering a so complex reality like a city using no maps or pictures but sound patterns.

Florian Matteo

David Tudor

In the suond installation Rainforest IV (1973), an electroacoustic environment by the group Composers Inside Electronics, this group of artists constructs 40 suond sculptures suspended in free space. As Michelangelo found the figure in the Marble, so we have to compose music inside the electronics. David Tudor said: “I try to find out what’s there - not to make it do what I want, but to release what’s there. The object should teach you what it wants to hear”.
Based on the ideas of John Cage and on the experiences of David Tudor, my idea is that every person of this class create his personal suond sculpture, then we hang them in a low and sound-proofed room. The passing of the audience will move our objects (like Calder’s sculptures!) that will play sounds. In this way we exploit the material properties (paper, wood…) to filter music or sounds, to create unexpected effects. We can also think about play classical music with electronic sounds to give the idea of continuum present/past.

Andrea Liuzza

John Cage

The biggest issue in John Cage’s works has been freeing music from the prison where compositional rules constrained it. He simply returned music to its inner nature, and to the human faculty it involves: a sound to be listened to. That means, any possible sound and any possible way of listening. The musician is just the one who makes that sound happen.

John Cage’s CREDO brings me two ideas. The first one is concerned to the importance of listening: to record any kind of natural or artificial sound all around. That’s the same Massimo Troisi does in The postman: he records the sound of sea, people, sky, for Neruda, who’s far away. But I want to take a photo of the source of the sound, too: to find the links between visual and acoustical experience of the world, and to find how sounds can evoke a thing.
The second idea is the natural musical consequence, and it’s what Cage auspicates at the beginning of his essay: “we can compose and perform a quartet for explosive motor, wind, heartbeat, and landslide”. I’ll organize an imaginary soundscape with the sound I registered before, to find how sounds can be mixed and with what result.

My intention is, through these two experiences, to find a way to create a soundinstallation where sounds and visuals will be an intimate emotional experiences for both musicians and audience.

Daria Trevisan

JANET CARDIFF
Audio walks

Janet Cardiff is a Canadian artist who created a particulat kind of artistic sound installation called “audio walks”. People put headphones connected with a cd player on and follow Cardiff’s recorded voice and directions through wherever she takes them. These audio walks are set into museum and galleries that sponsor her works, but the environmental sounds we hear through the phones are not those of the place we actually are. So this experience is powerful, dramatic and disconcerting because people don’t listen to recorded sound as they would do if these sounds were actually surrounding them, but everything becomes amplified and amazing because senses get extremely hightend. In this way we have a totally different vision and perception of ourselves and of the place we are. People don’t understand if the sounds they hear are real or recorded, so their reactions can be very astonishing. Audio walk work on different levels and totally involve people’s bodies and their senses. People can see things and places, details, in a different way, also their background, their inner memories and thoughts are involved in this evocative experience.

The first idea that flashed into my mind is related to my need to live with a soundtrack. When I walk I always put headphones in my ears and music changes my perception of reality, it has the power to make worst things/moments beautiful and amazing things/moments unforgettable. Also music (or sounds ) have the power to recollect memories and sensations, and to make them have substance, to make them actually be. I’d like to use these arguments to create our work, a sound installation that could interact with people, and specially with people inner feelings and emotions, that could dismantle their certainties and their bodies, recalculate their existences and change their perceptions.

Marco Bizzotto

Alvin Lucier

“I am sitting in a room” è stata composta nel 1970 ed è stata eseguita per la prima volta al Guggenhaim Museum di New York sempre nello stesso anno.
La performance consiste in una serie di discorsi registrati riprodotti simultaneamente dentro ad una stanza e registrati ancora e ancora per molte volte nella stessa. Mentre il processo di riproduzione continua, alcuni suoni cominciano a mutare sommandosi ad altri, alcuni vengono gradualmente eliminati. Lo spazio agisce da filtro cosicchè il discorso viene trasformato in puro suono.

Tutti i frammenti registrati sono messi assieme nell’ordine in cui sono stati ideati per costituire il lavoro.