Daily lives & local journeys across Houston’s Mexican ward.

2nd Ward | 2° Barrio, a sonic bike opera, directed and composed by Kaffe Matthews, with music made by 9 girls, 2 seniors, writers and musicians, through workshops with Nameless Sound. For the Houston Alliance Transported and Renewed Festival 2014. With Vampire Squid Labs and BRI realizing the tech making the first american sonic bikes.

If you got on a sonic bike and rode along the Harrisburg bike trail a version of this would play through it's speakers.

Down the tree lined Harrisburg bike trail that bends east and south from Drennan St across Lockwood to Bryan St,  an improvised duo tracing text the workshop had found from the map and scored to their own routes. A computer simulation of what you would hear from a sonic bike, minus the passing sounds.

Voice David Feil, Guitar Denis Cisneros.

MORE: sonicbikes.net/2nd-ward-a-bicycl…era-en-bicicleta/

2nd Ward | 2° Barrio: Harrisburg Bike Trail

The London Pedalling Games. Detail of one (tennis area) of my sounds for the performance in London Fields area with the Bicrophonic Research Institute: http://sonicbikes.net  
My sounds will be mapped to the activity areas in the London Fields main park.

sample from Velocipede sketches - tennis area

'Radio Cycle' was a terrestrial radio station that ran from Kaffe Matthews' studio, Hackney, London July 2002 as part of Public Sound project Intereference. Broadcasting 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, it was a mobile stage and space for anyone to come broadcast their music, stories, ideas and favourite sounds. At special moments teams of cyclists with radios strapped to their handle bars would gather and carry pieces made from free workshops run in the Idea Store, Bow mapping out London’s East end.  

Radio Cycle saw the birth of Matthews ideas for sonic cycling, routes as scores, and the abundance of creative possibilities gatherered working across local communities.

~ “Imagine a bird’s eye view of Bow, East London. Imagine the shifting sound map that ebbs and flows with the passage of the day. Imagine a music that infiltrates that. Not just through several homes tuning into the same radio station at the same time, or a host of folk all being into the same cd at the same time. No. Imagine that piece playing from 50 small speakers, all moving through the streets in choreographed routes, individually, in small groups or together. Quietly infiltrating the everyday noise of the city, like spiders, all in unison, maybe unnoticed, maybe coming together at some street corner to play some weird music or hear a story. Imagine that those sound pieces are made by you.”


Radio Cycle Highlights

A riverside opera of mermen, fishergirls, love and pollution.

'Opera fiXi' is a bicycle opera written and directed by Kaffe Matthews and made in collaboration with theatre company Visões Úteis, with location based software by Dave Griffiths. Made for Porto, it was commissioned by Serralves em Festa 2013, and was a Serralves production curated by Pedro Rocha.

This is a recording of a sonic bike ride, heading west along the river Douro. The song 'Egg cells growing in our testicles' is heard playing out from the bike's speakers, along with the sounds of the environment passing by.

MORE: http://sonicbikes.net/opera-fixi-2013/

Opera fiXi: 'Egg cells'

Temperature rises, tone rises, location plays sample, hydrophone amplifies the underwater world. 
Sonic Kayak early stage testing from Penryn harbour, Kernow July 2016
http://fo.am/blog/2016/08/10/sonic-kayaks-building/

Sonic Kayak paddling, Penryn Harbour test 3

Temperature rises, tone rises, location plays sample, hydrophone amplifies the underwater world.
Sonic Kayak early stage test paddling from Penryn harbour, Kernow July 2016. 
fo.am/blog/2016/08/10/sonic-kayaks-building/

Sonic Kayak paddling, Penryn Harbour test 4

For this last challenge I unleashed the awesome bugle bike upon London traffic. Sounding out both a signal of attack and a warning of hazards ahead, the bugle fog horn served as a practical response to the car noise monopoly.

Attack of the Night Bugle

The Bicrophonic Research Institute (BRI) is an organisation that makes music with people and places to play from bikes ridden by you the cyclist.

Over ten years of international projects we have developed the sonic bike to do this. A bike with two mounted speakers on the front and GPS receiver and Raspberry Pi computer on the back. With our bespoke mapping software, different sounds are linked to different places meaning that the interactive music played by the bike changes dependent on where the cyclist goes and how fast they pedal.

Not an app and free of the internet, the sonic bike creates an outdoor listening experience for everyone – reaching new audiences on the street or hillside, far beyond the confines of concert halls and galleries.
Established by Kaffe Matthews and Dave Griffiths in 2014, the BRI works collectively from a London lab, undertaking multiple projects annually, each one realising new site-specific music made through residential collaborations with producers and communities. Politics, time, cycling possibilities, architecture and finances all bare on each project, making them utterly contemporary. Alongside, we run local workshops in sonic bike making and open source development, all information of which is shared online. These projects are resulting in the growth of independent sonic cycling hubs worldwide – currently in London, Finland, Houston, Brussels, Berlin and Magdeburg.

http://sonicbikes.net/

Opera fiXi: 'Egg cells'

Sonic Bikes

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