Orchid House - world of sounds: Sound from around the world, between 3 am and 6 am

8 channel sound installation as part of Dee Isaacs' opera for children "Watching" at the Royal Botanical Garden, Edinburgh

Natural Selection: A Stethoscopic Amphibious Installation.

This paper discusses emergence as a complex behaviour in the sound domain and presents a design strategy that was used in the creation of the sound installation Natural Selection to encourage the perception of sonic emergence. The interactions in Natural Selection are based on an algorithm derived from an innately sonic emergent ecological system found in nature, that of mating choices by female frogs within a calling male frog chorus. This paper outlines the design and implementation of the installation and describes the research behind its design, most notably the notion of embodiment within a sonic environment and its importance to the perception of sonic emergence

Impressionistic techniques applied in sound art & design

Sound art and design collectively refer to the process of specifying, acquiring, manipulating or generating sonic elements to evoke emotion and environment. Sound is used to convey the intentions, emotions, spirit or aura of a story, performance, or sonic installation. Sound connects unique aural environments, creating an immersive experience via mood and atmosphere. Impressionistic techniques such as Impasto, Pointillism, Sgraffito, Stippling introduced by 19th-century painters captured the essence of their subject in more vivid compositions, exuding authentic movements and atmosphere. This thesis applied impressionistic techniques using sound art and design to project specific mood and atmosphere responses among listeners. Four unique sound textures, each representing a technique from Impressionism, and a fifth composite sound texture were created for this project. All five sound textures were validated as representative of their respective Impressionistic technique. Only sonic Pointillism matched its emotive intent. This outcome supports the research question that sound art and design can be used to direct listeners’ mood and atmosphere responses. Partnering Impressionistic principles with sound art and design offers a deeper palette to sonically deliver more robust, holistic soundscapes for amplifying an audience’s listening experience. This project provides a foundation for future explorations and studies in applying cross-disciplinary artistic techniques with sound art and design or other artistic endeavors

Variable 4: A Dynamical Composition for Weather Systems

Variable 4 is a multichannel sound installation that uses meteorological sensors and a multi-layered array of algorithmic processes to transform weather data into musical patterns in real time. This paper describes the work in detail, outlining its historical context, systems infrastructure and installation specifics. The piece is discussed in relation to sonification and environmental installation, and observations are made on the process of siting a complex sound work in the natural world

Corpus-Based Transcription as an Approach to the Compositional Control of Timbre

Timbre space is a cognitive model useful to address the problem of structuring timbre in electronic music. The recent concept of corpus-based concatenative sound synthesis is proposed as an approach to timbral control in both real- and deferred-time applications. Using CataRT and related tools in the FTM and Gabor libraries for Max/MSP we describe a technique for real-time analysis of a live signal to pilot corpus-based synthesis, along with examples of compositional realizations in works for instruments, electronics, and sound installation. To extend this technique to computer-assisted composition for acoustic instruments, we develop tools using the Sound Description Interchange Format (SDIF) to export sonic descriptors to OpenMusic where they may be further manipulated and transcribed into an instrumental score. This presents a flexible technique for the compositional organization of noise-based instrumental sounds

Overlapping murmurs

Overlapping Murmurs is an ambient sound installation presented as part of the 'INDELIBLE' exhibition at Waikato Museum. Overlapping Murmurs is a collaboration between Jeremy Mayall, Kent Macpherson, Haco, Horomona Horo, Reuben Bradley, and Megan Rogerson-Berry. It is designed to provide an overall accompaniment to the show, whilst also being a deconstruction and re-working of elements from the Where We Overlap recording sessions

Global Sound Movement: Morske Musak

Founded in 2015 and winners of the Times Higher Education award for ‘Excellence and Innovation in the Arts 2016’, the Global Sound Movement make a significant contribution to the field of sound archiving. Focussing on new ways of disseminating research findings, GSM completed a multimedia installation in June 2018 titled - MORSKE MUSAK. Morske Musak is a multimedia installation that situates Nikola Bašić’s Sea Organ (Zadar, Croatia) in dialogue with audience interactivity. Visual projections cohere with multichannel audio presentation, connoting Zadar as a place within which audiences are immersed. The installation invites audiences to engage and interact with sound recordings of the Sea Organ via new instrument technology. Gestural control over musical, sonic, and sound-diffusion parameters of the installation allow audiences to engage imaginatively with Zadar’s Sea Organ. Tidal movement plays Bašić’s instrument in-situ; Morske Musak is designed to give agency to audiences whereby the intermodality between movement and sound parameters combines typically isolated elements. Effectively, through this interaction, audiences “perform” the Sea Organ as an instrument through control of discrete (pitch, rhythm) and/ or analogue (dynamics, diffusion) means. The installation characterises original and innovative contributes to audience interactivity and engagement, generating discourse pertaining to issues of place, agency, and the preservation of sound. This instance of presenting our practice and research within an installation format has informed new practice and new presentations whereby audience engagement takes place in a live setting, extending the dissemination of our work beyond the remit of web-based distribution

Sound as Material

My thesis investigates the possibilities of sound as material in the visual arts through means of semiology and phenomenology. My art work focuses on sound installation, performance and sculpture

Effects of installation caused flow distortion on noise from a fan designed for turbofan engines

Far-field noise measurements were taken for three different installations of essentially the same fan. The installation with the most uniform inlet flow resulted in fan-blade-passage tone sound pressure levels more than 10 dB lower than the installation with more nonuniform inflow. Perceived noise levels were computed for the various installations and compared. Some measurements of inlet flow distortion were made and used in a blade-passage noise generation theory to predict the effects of distortion on noise. Good agreement was obtained between the prediction and the measured effect. Possible origins of the distortion were identified by observation of tuft action in the vicinity of the inlet