In Collaboration with Harry Smoak

Stereo Excerpt of 8-Channel, Site Specific Sound

“Your Participation Not Required” is a site and event specific installation system for augmenting a social environment with dynamic light and sound. It is born of the artists’ shared interest in interrogating the impact of architectural infrastructures and ambient media on our sensorium. YPNR’s shifting colors and spatialized audio dynamically alter the audience’s sensation of the scale and character of the space.

For Pixilerations [v.7], YPRN created a liminal space for an audience to engage uncommon color and acoustic phenomena as they entered a concert of experimental music. The sound included recordings of audiences entering and exiting Grant Hall and synthesized sine waves chosen to activate the room’s resonances. Sound was distributed through an 8-channel speaker system that shifted between two primary states. In the first, each speaker acted as a voice reproducing a single sine tone or a recording made from a microphone placed at that speaker position. In the second state, each speaker reproduced a single band of the frequency spectrum for the playback of either a composite recording of the space or of a composite of the eight frequencies. The sonic configuration was inspired by the idea that in one mode, the audio system filters a sound and the room mixes it, and in the second mode the system mixes the sound and the room filters it. This version explored the impact of different styles of recording and reproduction on listeners’ experience of audio immersion. Shifting between the two states and including a mixture of field recordings from unrelated sites continuously alters the acoustics of the room. Changes in sound were choreographed with changes in color and quality of light as manipulated by custom LED instruments.

For more information on YPNR’s compositional light, contact Harry Smoak (http://harrysmoak.com).

Excerpt from "Your Participation Not Required" for Grant Recital Hall, Pixilerations [v.7]

An interview with <a href="http://matthewwarne.com">Matthew Peters Warne</a>, a faculty member in <a href="http://vpa.syr.edu">VPA</a> at Syracuse University, about his students' engagement with intonarumori as designed by Futurist Luigi Russolo and built by SU's <a href="http://vpa.syr.edu/directory/zeke-leonard">Zeke Leonard</a>. 

Students in Warne's course "Experimental Audio" recorded experiments with the instruments and are composing fixed media pieces featuring the sounds. The work is being done for an upcoming workshop sponsored by <a href="http://artsengage.syr.edu/"> SU Arts Engage</a> and featuring the <a href="http://www.kronosquartet.org">Kronos Quartet</a>. On Tuesday, February 25 the Kronos Quartet will visit Warne's class to discuss their experiences working with experimental musical instruments and critique student work. 

Kronos Quartet will feature Leonard's version of the intonarumori at a public workshop at St. Paul's Catedral in downtown Syracuse on Wednesday, February 26 at 7pm. 

Visit the <a href="https://www.facebook.com/events/1459092127643028/">SU Arts Engage Facebook Event</a> for more information. 

[Associated image is in the public domain — its copyright has expired: <a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/deed.en">Public Domain Mark 1.0</a>]

Interview with Matthew Peters Warne about a workshop with Zeke Leonard and Russolo's Intonarumori

When the water returns
for sound recording and multi-channel electronics
11 minutes

When the water returns presents a sound recording of the onerous process of refilling a home’s water vessels after they’ve been drawn down by a week-long water outage in Luanda, Angola. Running, filling, and pouring water into a variety of vessels creates a series of long, rising pitches and a meditative rhythm punctuated by stochastic bursts of activity as air trapped in the pipes works its way through a decaying urban delivery system. As the recording plays focused through a single channel, the sound is analyzed and resynthesized into a diffuse series of bell-like tones that sound through additional speakers surrounding the listener. Together the sounds create an environment to contemplate the role of city infrastructure in contributing to our sensations of stability and disruption in daily life.

When the Water Returns (Stereo Mix)

Awakening by Matthew Peters Warne
for clarinet and electronics (9 minutes)

Featuring the improvisation of Joseph Butch Rovan on clarinet.

Recorded in concert on 05 November 2010 at Grant Recital Hall, Brown University, Providence, RI, USA.

Awakening presents a sound recording from the Bairro Popular, a middle class suburb on the edge of Luanda, made in the morning as my neighbors make the short transition from private activities to more public ones. In live performance, the primary compositional action in this piece is spatial: the sound recording and the lightly processed sounds of the clarinet start focused at the front of the concert hall and gradually expand throughout the piece to become increasingly diffuse and fill the concert hall.

matthew_pw