Gene Pool Avalanche

Duncan Speakman, pstudio, june 2010Probably my last individual Gene Pool post before I won’t be able to keep up!

Back in July, I went down to Bristol to meet up with artists, Simon Whetham and Duncan Speakman and Clare Reddington at PM Studio. Nailing lots of things in one go, I booked Simon for a performance, Duncan for a weekend workshop and interviewed them all for the Summer Gene Pool shows on Soundart Radio 102.5FM.

The radio got first dibs on the resulting “Locative Media” episode of Gene Pool, which I’m now putting out on the podcast feed for download.

Starting from 8th Sept, I’m going to try to keep up to date by releasing the podcasts after the radio show goes out, so every Wednesday night running through to December a new episode will hit the RSS feed.

Anyway, Gene Pool#23 ready for your listening pleasure. Subscription in iTunes is the easiest option, which you can do via the Gene Pool Channel on iTunes. Alternatively, a one shot, no commitment link is below. Enjoy!

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Gene Pool Autumn Season

mf-recitalrm2The Gene Pool continues it’s radio season on Soundart Radio 102.5FM (www.soundartradio.org.uk) from 8th September. I’ll be putting together a series of weekly shows, airing on Wednesdays 7pm on 102.5FM and live web stream. I should be uploading the episodes to the podcast more frequently now too, as we’ve turned around from the shows being made in advance for podcast, to being made for radio as we go along.

I’m getting some material ready in advance and recorded with Felicity Ford today for the first show, which features an interview with sound and video artist, Kathy Hinde and material from Sound Diaries and London Sound Survey, all of whom feature in the Sound:Site sonic arts festival which we’re holding on 2nd October.

The Soundart Radio live stream dropped out at the end of the last season, so the second show this season, which we’ll be airing again on 15th Sept. is our episode with sound artist Jonathan Coleclough, who talks about his performance approach and a particular technique he’s using to extract sound from recordings of silent rooms.

In fact, I got the job of taking an all night recording in the old Library at South Hill Park for Jonathan to use for his performance at Sound:Site, resulting in a 13 hour long 2gB mp3 file for him to work with!

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Day & Night Recordings

san_stefanos1Just back from this year’s holiday to the beautiful Greek island of Corfu. This time we stayed on the North West coast, in a town called San Stefanos. On the Ionian Sea side of the island, the horizon is haunted by the silhouettes of the islands of Nisos Mathraki and Nisida Kravia, one inhabited but the other a protected bird sanctuary.

I couldn’t resist the night time magic and went out on a recording session to capture the sound of the night creatures. But I also went out on an early morning walk up into the Olive groves in the hillside.

The daytime sun certainly made any major exertion out of the question, so that gave an edge to my trip up into the hills. Was this a wise thing for a lone Englishman to do undertake with only a digital recorder and a box of Tic Tacs ?

This first recording is from my night trip down into a small grove of Olive trees facing the shore. I hadn’t planned for the enthusiastic reception I got from the local Mosquito community, which made prolonged recording impossible. I woke around 3am and left the apartment in my pyjamas (but with hat, of course) walked down from the coast road towards the sea into the grove of trees, and got this recording:

Agios Stefanos Coastal Olive Grove

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san_stefanos_hillside The bay is surrounded by hillsides, covered with Olive groves. This recording is from my early morning walk going away from the village, then up a series of dirt tracks into the hillside.

On my way, I came across a beehive lodged into a a tree by the side of the road. I didn’t say around too long, so there’s not much of this recording but the sound is pretty striking.

Roadside Bees

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29/08: I just contributed this last “Roadside Bees” recording to the interesting Sound Diaries project, run by Felicity Ford and Paul Whitty from the Sonic Art Research Unit at Oxford Brookes University. They have rolling themes for contributors, the current one being “Holiday Recordings”.

Walking along a stretch of the dirt track where this picture was taken.

Hillside

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These recordings were made with the OKI Soundman binaural microphones and an Edirol R09.

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Gene Pool – July Radio Schedule

studio location 2OK, so I’m pretty late with this but I don’t suppose anyone’s setting their watch by it.

Gene Pool runs on through July on Soundart Radio up to the end of the Summer season before returning in September. I’ve used a trip over to Bristol and some of my forthcoming Autumn programme at South Hill Park to provide source material for a few episodes this month.

Already broadcast, but coming to the podcast version in a month or so, I made a feature on the Watershed offshoot, Pervasive Media Centre which gears it’s output around a grouping of academics, technology developers and artists making use of “technology that knows where you are”. PM Studio resident, Duncan Speakman and Director, Clare Reddington spoke about the new avenues being explored within the area of Locative media.

The final two weeks of July home in on the Sound:Site event, which takes place on 2nd October, with our last two episodes of the month featuring guests who will be appearing at the event, which hinges around sonic arts and the internet as a distribution platform/community resource.

Soundart Radio broadcasts from Dartington, Dorset, UK on 102.5FM and streams live on the web from www.soundartradio.org.uk

14 July: Locative Media
Bristol’s Pervasive Media Studio Director, Clare Reddington and artist, Duncan Speakman talk about “technology that knows where you are”, pervasive gaming and interaction with public spaces around us.

21 July: UK Sound Archive
The British Library Sound Archive explored with artist, Felicity Ford and recordings of the dark, Estonian night made by Simon Whetham.

28 July: Sound:Site
Sound artist and performer, Jonathan Coleclough joins us to talk about his work recording silent rooms, plus “Sound Diaries” with Felicity Ford. Both artists feature at the Sound:Site event at South Hill Park on 2nd October 2010.

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Transformations

sonogram800Still working on the set of drone pieces with material from Andrey Faryus. A new download of fresh drones has come up with something interesting. It’s been sitting on my hard drive for ages while I work out what to do with it.

I’ve taken to putting these tracks through numerous stages of processing, to a point where something comes out that catches my ear. A bit of a time consuming way to work, as I often leave it lying around for a month or two, but that seems to define my own artwork output at the moment.

I’ve always been interested in the output of sonograms and have just had a play with an application called Sonogram Visible Speech, written by Christoph Lauer. The image here is a section of the audio sample projected into a new 3D mode which maps time, frequency and amplitude along the x,y and x-axes.

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