A fine collection of sound works more or less based on field recordings, by Matthieu Ruhlmann, Yannick Dauby, Michael Northam, Eric La Casa and Cedric Peyronnet, John Grzinich, Francisco Lopez, Jeph Jerman, Ralf Wehowsky, Christopher McFall, Murmer.

Compilation CD : 78  min
(digisleeve with 24pp booklet)
Nitkie # patch two

Distributed by Monochrome Vision

Tracklist

1. Mathieu Ruhlmann – Tranquille (5:55)
2. Yannick Dauby – Neuf Aout Deux Mille Dix (6:44)
3. Michael Northam – A Fabric Of Moments Among The Rolling Of Thoughts (5:27)
4. Eric La Casa & Cédric Peyronnet – Liége Short Cuts (5:14)
5. John Grzinich – Field Mix: Tape, Wire, Wind, Rain (6:58)
6. Francisco López – Untitled # 247 (10:49)
7. Jeph Jerman – Desert Windmill (9:55)
8. Ralf Wehowsky – Dmitry Speaking (10:01)
9. Christopher McFall – An Arc Casting The Stitch (8:50)
10. Murmer – Strata (8:18)

Первый в серии сборников, посвящённых саунд-арту, ”Range” представляет ряд работ талантливых музыкантов, чьё мировоззрение и методы чрезвычайно интересны и разнообразны. Термин ”звуковая экология” в данном случае не имеет никакого отношения к любым организованным движениям и сообществам, это всего лишь метафора для творчества, освежающего взгляд на современный мир, загрязнённый потребительским отношением к искусству. Кроме того, это платформа для дискуссий, обмена мнениями и опытом, приглашение к обсуждению всех связанных с этим вопросов – и, конечно же, возможность открыть для себя музыкальный мир, который часто окружает нас в реальной жизни, но остаётся незаметным для большинства людей. Желание следовать за музыкантами, обладающими удивительной способностью открыть этот мир и транслировать его в аудиторию, стало основным стимулом для составителей сборника, которые надеются на продолжение выбранного пути и привлечение к проекту всех заинтересованных музыкантов и единомышленников. С участием: Mathieu Ruhlmann, Yannick Dauby, Michael Northam, John Grzinich, Francisco Lopez, Jeph Jerman, Ralf Wehowsky, Murmer, Christopher McFall, Eric La Casa и Cedric Peyronnet. Лимитированное издание в дигифайле с 24-страничным буклетом, тираж – 500 копий.

Discogs link

In using sound as a departure point, we can easily drift into any number of fields, each with its own focus. Even though the medium is the same and concepts and techniques are shared, we end up with an array of different possibilities. With the simple formula of paying attention to sound, recording it, then editing it the result can end up being “art”(sound art, installation, experimental music), “science”(nature sound, acoustic ecology), “engineering”(acoustics, studio recording) or “entertainment”(film sound, sound design, radio) just to name a few. Apart from some random crossovers, it appears to me that each of these fields exists relatively independent from each other. Yet there is one defining link, the use and dependence on technology. There is one problem I’ve encountered during the process of giving sound workshop. Not everyone seems to understand the fundamental significance of sound, listening and our own cognitive process until you give them a microphone and a pair of headphones. How is it that it a technological interface helps so much to spark people’s imagination? I’ve often asked this for myself. If I’m so interested in acoustic perception, what’s the point to record anything at all? Yet I do and I’m quite deeply involved in using technology for recording and reproduction of sound.

Getting back to the various strands of audio cultures, I’ve come across some good “blogs”, particularly in the sound design field, of people who like to share what they record. It is possible that revealing some transparency in the process will help bridge some gaps between different fields. As people can see and hear more what goes on behind the scenes we can take note of some shared interests in the process, regardless of the outcome, particularly when it comes to thinking about awareness of our sound environments. It is also key that we maintain diversity and quality of our practices rather than quantity and authority to keep these respective fields open and dynamic. On a side note… I’ve noticed that the various fields here tend to be male dominated. This is a topic for another post, but when giving workshops I see no evidence that interest and attention and creative ability to to work with sound has anything to do with gender.

Sound Design / Film Sound / Field Recording

• Noise Jockey
• fieldsepulchra
• the music of sound
• sound + design
• chuck russom – audio guy
• ONPa ふろく.
• Surround2011.org
• Fieldcore

Nature Sound / Acoustic Ecology

• Nature Recordists email group
• Curt Olsen soundblog
• acoustic ecology news
• wildlife sound recording society
• listening earth blog

Misc. Projects and Resources

• Listen to Africa
• resources for studying sound recordings
• sound is art
• soundwalk.com blog
• positive soundscapes
• everyday listening

And to close, here’s a Newsweek article about audio ecologist Gordon Hempton’s work to raise awareness about silence and natural sound environments.

EAR ROOM | re-sounding dialogues across the globe

# 4 Online now :: John Grzinich

~~~~

Ear Room, an ONLINE publication for developing critical DISCOURSE and debate
on the creative, and EXPLORATIVE use of SOUND in artistic PRACTICE.

~~~

WHERE… http://earroom.wordpress.com/

Contact microphones are actually piezoelectric transducers and are mostly used for producing sound as buzzers, beepers and small speakers in electronic devices. If the signal is reversed using a piezo transducer as a mic, you’re actually picking up vibrations and having it produce voltage. Connecting this to a recording device or mixer allows you to hear the vibrations as sound. Piezo transducers come in all shapes and sizes, the most common ones ranging from 25-50 mm in diameter. They can be ordered from electronics components distributors such as Maplin in the UK or DigiKey in the US. As for what kind of disc to buy this is a question of great debate, but I generally stick to mid sized discs of 30-40mm with a resonant frequency of 1khz. Best of all they are cheap, usually 50 cents or so.

As for building contact mics, the process is fairly simple. A soldering iron and raw solder is needed. Some flux paste is helpful for getting the wires to stick more firmly. As you can see some piezos come with leads already attached. All you need to do is connect then to a wire and the appropriate plug. The center circle of the disc is the ceramic piezo element (what produces voltage). The ‘hot’ lead needs to be connected to this and the ground needs to be connected to the outer metal part.

What plug you use depends on what kind of device you use for the signal. Most likely you will connect your contact mic to a mixer or directly to a recording device such as a flash recorder (Sony PCM-D50, Edirol R-9, Zoom H4 etc.) or Minidisc. I often work in the field and connect my contact mics as a stereo pair to a flash recorder with a 1/8″ mini-jack.

To make a stereo pair, simply solder up two single discs and attach the ‘hot’ leads to the two center signal leads on the mini-jack plug. Be sure to insulate any contact to avoid shorting the signal.

Finalizing your contact mics is an important step. Piezo transducers tend to be fragile. If the ceramic crystal is damaged in any way you’ll immediately know it. At the very minimum its good to put some kind of glue over the back of the disc to protect the crystal. I sometimes put the felt furniture pads that are used on chair leg bottoms over the crystal to protect it then I cover the whole disc with electrical tape. I also glue a thin piece of wood to the front side with epoxy. This is to make sure the disc does not bend and crack. The wood also “softens” the sound as piezos tend to have a sharp metallic sound (since they are actually made of metal). Some people also coat their mics with something like plastidip which makes a nice clean protective finish.

Another reason to protect the piezos is because they tend to work better when a bit of pressure is applied. The sensitivity increases and you tend to get much better bass response. With the felt furniture pad backing and wood front I’m not afraid of bending the disc or crushing the ceramic part when using clamps or clips. Its also handy to use something like blue-tack to make a firm connection to the surface of what you are trying to record.

It is good to carry around a number of different clips and clamps for the materials and situations you might encounter. Most of these are cheap and lightweight and can be found from most building supply stores.

Lastly, this is a device I often use when recording with my contact mics. The FEL Microphone Amplifier is small, runs from a 9V battery and can boost a stereo signal up to 50dB. This really helps when the source is more quiet or you want to pull some bass out. Most of the time I need to boost the signal about +15-30dB, but occasionally you need more.

For examples of my recordings using contact mics check the posts with the tag *contact mics*

The two digital recording devices used are the Edirol R-09 and a Sony PCM-D50. For some some microphone tests and personal commentary on these check here and here.

Hopefully this helps anyone who is interested in working more with contact mics. Most importantly, remember there are no fixed rules about the best ways to use contact mics and it a matter of continuous experimentation. I will update this page if more questions or info comes in.

*UPDATE*

I made a simple set of contact mics for XLR plugs. I search around for some basic designs and didn’t find much. Here is what I came up with for a setup. I used 2 piezos instead of 1. The center ‘positive’ leads of each piezo are connected to the 2 and 3 leads of the XLR cable, while the outer ring (ground) of both piezos are connected to the 1 (ground) lead of the XLR cable. The diagram can be seen in the first photo. Some have noted that this wiring should ‘phase cancel’ yet for some reason it works. If you encounter problems, simply use a single piezo and do not connect anything to the negative #3 lead.

The tops faces of the piezos are turned inward toward each other. On each face is a self-adhesive felt circle (for furniture legs). Once the two felt circles are in place they can be glued together with a semi-flexible glue like ‘moment glue’. In this case the felt circles were smaller than the piezos so I wrapped the edges with nylon string and filled it with epoxy for strength. When this was done and all glues were dried I wrapped everything with electrical tape. The result is sensitive, low noise, contact mics. All this (good cable, neutrik plugs, piezos, felt) still cost lest than 20 euros.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Recording a suspension bridge (above).

Below is a video from MAKE Magazine about building a contact microphone that includes the schematic plan for a 9V powered amplifier. The amplifier can be handy if you don’t have a suitable amplifier on your recorder.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Recording fences in Avebury UK (below).

EAR ROOM | re-sounding dialogues across the globe

First edition online now :: Jez Riley French.
~~~~
Ear Room, an ONLINE publication for developing critical DISCOURSE and debate
on the creative, and EXPLORATIVE use of SOUND in artistic PRACTICE.
~~~
WHEN… on the FIRST of every month (August launch is a special double
edition on the 1st and 15th).
~~
WHERE… http://earroom.wordpress.com/ear

via… mark peter wright

2 performances and a sound workshop with murmer (patrick mcginley)

HELL OF THINGS

jgrzinich/murmer – opening concert:
19:00, saturday, 7th february

revenant : bytom – sound workshop:
friday and saturday, 13-14th of february

opening performance
murmer/jgrzinich live at Kronika gallery (excerpt recorded by patrick mcginley): download link
rynek 26, bytom, poland

—————

plus: Galleria Entropia

jgrzinich/murmer live in Wrolcaw

18:00, free
zeźnicza 4, wrocław

Special thanks to Krzysztof Gutfrański for helping organize all this and for taking photos!

Here is a video about the performance in Wroclaw. It was billed as “Revenant Sound” which is not entirely accurate. While we do use many elements of the space and participation of those who are present, there are many added elements and aided sounds as well. Anyway its good to see how people interpret this…

Click here to view the embedded video.

While in Berlin, I had the pleasure to meet and talk with Udo Noll, the inventive person behind Radio Aporee ::: Maps. For some time we’ve been discussing the diverse aspects of the project, including new features and possible additions to the interface, some of which have been successfully implemented. One new feature is ‘projects’ which can be used as a filter for specific recordings a user adds to the site. All of my recordings can now be found under the permalink: http://aporee.org/maps/projects/jgrzinich. Specific locations can also be embedded into other websites (assuming the code is allowed) as can be seen below.

For more on the embedding function check the sonic sites blog where all new additions are automatically diplayed in an individual window. I’m looking forward to continuing thse collaborative efforts and seeing how Radio Aporee Maps develops and where it takes us, both on the personal and experiential level.

Here’s what I’ll be involved with the next week or so:

Monday, January 26, 21.00
*Electropera Act 1: Parahouse_12
self-evolving participatory environment
by Egon March Institute and partner productions
Studio Martina Schumacher & Joulia Strauss in Ullsteinhaus

the photo above is from my participatory installation “feed back”

Monday-Thursday, 26th – 29th of January
X-OP- Conference Berlin
„True Art / Truely Merchandise“
at ConcentArt

Friday, January 30th, 21:47
Das Kleine Field recordings Festival
with: Paulo Raposo, Baruch Gottlieb, Feedbacksociety, John Grzinich
loophole – boddinstrasse 61

coming up next, Bytom-Wroclaw Poland…

7:30 in the morning woken by the sound of skwaking above central of Dresden. It was somehow more noticeable than any time  before. Every day at dusk thousands of crows and jackdaws gather outside this building converging on the rooftops and trees to roost for the night. This morning I got up and made my third attempt to record the phenomenon. Standing on the balcony I began to wonder what, if any, was the message of these birds. Why here? And why in this manner? The birds were flying in a dense spiraling form like a tornado around the clock tower of city hall (of all places). Again, if nature tries to tell us something, how do we listen? Do we read into these swarming actions as signs of a complex form of animal communication? The scientist Konrad Lorenz kept pets (including jackdaws) to research them but in the end often questioned the purpose of keeping animals as pets and in fact, over time, took a deep ecological stance of mans relationship to nature. He wrote in 1973 on what he saw as a paradoxical view of this relationship:

“All the advantages that man has gained from his ever-deepening understanding of the natural world that surrounds him, his technological, chemical and medical progress, all of which should seem to alleviate human suffering… tends instead to favor humanity’s destruction”

a conspiration of birds [128k 9:01 mp3]: mp3 file

The sound works of four past resident artists of Binaural Media in Nodar will be exhibited at the
Teatro Viriato in the nearby city of Viseu, Portugal. The artistic projects include:

Aaron Ximm : As Paredes têm Ouvidos
John Grzinich : Nodar Flowlines
Maksims Shentelevs : Nodar Soundscape Mapping
Pali Meursault : Walk[s]

Each audio installation represents an individual exploration of the sonic environment around Nodar through field recordings and site-specific activity and resulted in a small project at the end of the residency. More information about the other works can be found on the artists websites and the Binaural Media website. These audio installations will be on display in of the foyer of the theater from now until December 14th. Special thanks to Luis and the others at Binaural for setting this up.

This past weekend was in Madrid for the Sonikas festival where I performed. While there, I learned about several sound-mapping projects in Spain. As some know, I contribute to Radio Aporee Maps, a growing collection of sounds from around the world which are playable in several ways. The projects linked below are more regional, focusing on specific areas within Spain. With sound-mapping being an expanding phenomenon, it will be interesting to see how it develops.

Escoitar http://www.escoitar.org/
Soinumapa http://soinumapa.net/
Madrid Soundscape http://www.madridsoundscape.org/

Special thanks to Mikel for introducing me to these projects and to Alfonso, Juan Carlos and Molino for their sincere organizational efforts. Below is a recording of a pet shop in Madrid that specialized in singing birds.

birds in pet shop

This is a question I’ve been asking myself ever since I realized that “field recording” was something of a viable genre for many working with sound. Before hearing the term “field recording” (and I’ll throw in Phonography), I never thought much in making a distinction between working in or out in the field. I recorded what I wanted and where I wanted (and still do).

While some view it as a recording technique for any place other than the studio, others seem dedicated to the cause and strive to reach new levels of purity. The spectrum of approaches is wide from scientific ‘nature recording’, and commercial ‘relaxation environments’ (some may know the interesting ‘environments’ series from the 70s) to weekend hobbyists who simply like to get our and record sounds they like.

Like any term, the definition is open to interpretation. The artist Jez Riley French has opened up the discussion with his ‘four questions’ series regarding sound artists/musicians and their use of “field recording” in their work. Below is the current list of artists Jez has included in his survey which I feel is more than worthy to help promote. I’m sure more are on the way, but this should be more than enough to start with:

• Andreas Bick
• Cedric Peyronnet / toy.bizarre
• Eric Cordier
• Goh Lee Kwang
• Jean Francois Cavro
• Jez riley French
• Jez riley French interviewed by John Grzinich
• John Grzinich
• Kiyoshi Mizutani
• Lawrence English
• Maksims Shentelevs
• Marc Namblard
• Matt Davis
• noid (Arnold Haberl)
• Patrick Farmer
• Rob Curgenven
• Simon Whetham
• Thomas Tilly
• Zoe Irvine

Yannick Dauby makes and important point  in his description of “Field recording and phonography” as to why we who record sounds in the field are shaping the sound as much as we are simply capturing it:

“The couple microphone/headphone acts as a filter and an enhancer for perception. The use of these tools is absolutely not neutral : the choices of the place and the moment, the gestures, the technical limitations and the zoom/macro effects of the microphone affect the result of the recording. The recordist makes a series of decisions in his practice, and these decisions are related to his own subjectivity.”

Numerous other in depth perspectives on the practice have emerged in recent years, I suspect due to the availability and ease of use of digital technology. People like Aaron Ximm (Quiet American) and Patrick McGinley (murmer/framework) have been long term proponents of creative uses of filed recordings and seem to have inspied many through their output. As the “field recording” bug spreads I suspect we may see ever more variations and mutations on what this is about. As for listening to field recordings it’s a fertile matter for another post.