A series of audio tracks for an interactive exhibition on the island of Örö  in the Finnish archipelago. Sounds will be triggered by QR codes placed in the environment.

Örö  08 Shanty Leaver Her

Örö  06 Hiila's Darja Islands 01

Örö  04 Sailor's Song

Ars Memoriae Mexicana is the result of an Audio-Journey through Mexico in which these questions of location, memory and identity were very much in my daily thoughts as I traveled through a landscape saturated in sound, music and voices.

In the recording you listen to the voices of :- the sound artist Charlie Fox as he claps rhythmically, facing the steps of an Aztec Pyramid; the film maker Mike Buckley sitting on a balmy evening surrounded by crickets; acoustic ecologist Hildegard Westercamp talking in the garden of the villa once owned by Octavia Paz; the artist Juan Gonzales de Leon recalling a childhood walk in the alien landscape of a Primrose Hill park in London; the journalist Miriam recounting her favourite Mexico City sounds.

These voices float in a bed of ambient environmental sounds and street-scapes that for the most part I have chosen not to edit or sanitise, preferring to leave in the noise, the glitches and the occasional less than perfect recording ~ that’s the way the world sounds and Hollywood is a long way away both geographically but especially philosophically!

Ars Memoriae Mexicana

A small sound piece derived from the tracks left in the bark of a gum tree by moth lavae - reproduced on a 30 note music box.

KezScribblygum

One of the installation tracks for the exhibition "The Past is our Future; The Future is our Past"

Balance Sheet Mix 2

A short radio work to accompany the exhibition "The Past is our Future; The Future is our Past."

B.Hill Short Radio Mix For Interview.

The Work:
Take a Deep Breath ~ Breathless, is a new work commissioned by the Sound Reasons, Sonic Cities Festival due to take place in Delhi, India under auspices of the SARAI new media foundation. Take a Deep Breath ~ Breathless, is a development of my current research into the sonification of environmental data and the installation of the resulting sound works into public or architectural space. Conceptually the work is similar to VoxAura in that it is structured in two parts, one originating in a social and cultural context, the other ecological and environmental ~ the aim of the work being to integrate and interrogate the relationship between these spheres, and present them in an outdoor urban environment.

Concept:
Take a Deep Breath ~ Breathless, concerns the atmosphere, the breath and the act of breathing. Breathing as meditation, as respiration, failing breath in respiratory diseases, the breathy sounds of our voices, of song and flute ~ the metaphor of breath as life itself. Hence the audio library which I shall establish in my one month working visit to Delhi will embrace and record a wide range of ambient, vocal, environmental and musical sounds, establishing what I term as an AudioPortrait of the environment.

Breathless _take a deep breath (sample of multi track installation)

In Helyer’s giant machines there is the echo of human presence. In Mute for example the oversized saxophone may look more like a powerful and threatening rocket motor but it retains its associations with a more biological heat as in the hot breath of a black jazz musician. These contradictory readings reveal yet another paradox which underlies many of the pseudo-scientific forms in his work.

Mute in TalkTown; The Sweet warm breath of Science

Cultivamos Cultura Sonic Workshop 2024 - Capi

Cão A Ladrar

Traditional singing in the Sao Luis Community Hall

CC songs

Sonic Workshop

Cafe gabriela (rua do comercio)

Cafe gabriela (rua do comercio).mp3

We are neurologically predisposed to seek patterns in our surroundings pattern recognition is our core cognitive ability, vital to our evolution and survival as a species—as it affords the capacity of prediction.
In life, as in art, we take delight in the symmetries, growth patterns and morphologies of the natural world as through them we recognise our formation. However, there is a constant flux between the regularity or predictability of a pattern and a counter-current of instability or turbulence that might threaten to render it indecipherable. This is embraced in creative practice as we always require a twist to a narrative; a dissonant metaphor in a joke; or an unpredictable note to conclude a melodic series. This is the sweet spot, the point at which our expectations of regularity in a pattern are disrupted, but not too much, just enough to throw the brain into mild confusion. It is the fissure, the reveal, and the punchline that reflects on the narrative arc and plays with our assumptions. To walk this tightrope between order and chaos is one of the central techniques of art. By contrast, the task of Science is to distil clarity from chaos; to disambiguate the signal from the noise.

Sonus Maris Concert

Part of the Biosphere/Datasphere exhibition

Critter Menu Mix

Long Nosed Fur Seal DNA ID

Short Tailed Shearwater DNA ID

Shy Albatross DNA ID

Part of the Biosphere/Datasphere exhibition, mix based upon sonified DNA from prey species.

IMAS/TFMP Critter Menu Mixes

Australian Fur Seal Prey DNA_Menu Mix

Long Nosed Fur Seal Prey DNA_Menu Mix

Short Tailed Shearwater Prey DNA_Menu Mix

Shy Albatross Prey DNA/ID

800,000 Short-Tailed Shearwaters are taking off in the pre-dawn by running downhill and launching themselves into the air over huge seacliffs. Recorded on an iPhone.

BioSonics/DataSonics

800,000 Short Tailed Shearwaters pre-dawn take-off on Maatsuyker Island, Tasmania.

An interview with artist Dr Nigel Helyer and scientist Professor Mary-Anne Lea about the exhibition BioSphere/Datasphere at the Mawson Gallery in the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies (UTAS) Hobart.

Biosphere/Datasphere/ ABC IV.WAV

Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, daß er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. Und wenn du lange in einen Abgrund blickst, blickt der Abgrund auch in dich hinein.

He who fights the monster should be careful lest he thereby becomes a monster. 
And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will gaze into thee.
Frederick Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil.

The Sea and superstition go hand in hand. For centuries sailors unwittingly sensing the song of the Whale through their wooden-hulled ships thought them Ghosts of the deep, and despite the thousands of close encounters in the Whale hunt they remained ‘mute’ until the middle of the 20th Century.

It was a team of US military sonar operators based in Bermuda, charged with identifying Russian submarines who initially identified and documented the singing of whales thus enabling the entire debate about their sentience.  The Song of the Humpback Whale (produced by the biologist Dr. Roger Payne) was released as an L.P. Record in 1970 (and subsequently re-released as a soundsheet in National Geographic’s January 1979 edition selling 10.5 million copies making it the most popular commercial recording of all time and instrumental in turning public awareness against the cruelty and avarice of the Whaling Industry.

The Sonic Whale

Hydrophone recording made near Villa Nova Milfontes, Alentejo, Portugal. Incorporated in the installation "CultCult - audio illumination form the Ocean."

Hydrophone 07

An UnRequites Space form Working in Public/ABC National Radio

An UnRequited Space 01

GhosTrain MP3 01

GhosTrain MP3 02

GhosTrain MP3 04

An interview with Nigel Helyer and Jon Drummond from The Constellations series.

BeeTalk

Ambient recordings from the island of Kokar, Finland 2011

Sailor Song

Dr. Nigel Helyer is an internationally prominent sound artist who’s interdisciplinary practice combines art and science to embrace our social, cultural and physical environments.   He brings these concerns together in poetic art projects that prompt the community to engage with their cultural histories, identity and sense of place; inviting us to examine the abstract conditions of our world and our complex relationships to it.
Principal web archive - http://www.sonicobjects.com

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