A recording from a water slide whistle making workshop at Blind Low Vision Aotearoa in 2020.

Blind Low Vision Aotearoa water slide whistle making workshops 2020

making tin can aeolian harps at Waitangi Park bridge on a windy, rainy day.

Aeolianharp-bridge

Blind Low Vision Aotearoa 2021

broken-fence-pole

a workshop working towards a sound sculpture

Smoke On The Sawter

The sound I posted is a recording I was lucky enough to get of two kākā walking along a leaf littered path, picking up sticks and pulling bugs out of them. The pops and cracks you can hear are the kākā twisting the sticks and cracking them open. Towards the end of the recording, a tūī and a riroriro (grey warbler) hung about in the canopy. As this track progresses, I slowed the play rate of the tūī call down incrementally by cutting it into
a smaller soundbite and adjusting the playback rate. I put the riroriro sound on another track and kept it's playrate the same as original. You can hear the deterioration of the bitrate in the tūī sample as the playrate allows spaces to
appear in the bitrate. This is the glitchy Neo-from-the-Matrix sound you hear at the end. It's an example of the "cold"
sound of digital as opposed to recording to tape. To create some contrast and a slightly ritcher texture, I added a low/mid level of mid-sized room, plate reverb on the tūī track and a little slap back delay->studio room reverb on the riroriro. I boosted the stereo width on the riroriro and sent it further to the back by rolling off the low and high end frequencies. I didn't want to spend a lot of time doctoring it, it's more just to show some things that you can do with a short recording.

Kaka Eating

Kia ora rā koutou!! This week on the Pablowvolume sound art 
programme is the inaugural Pablowvolume Podcast !! Composer,
and sound artist, Kerian Varaine, shares some of his experiences 
making sound art as well as tips and processes for making sound
art. Kerian has won numerous awards for his compositions, 
performed sound art around Aotearoa and abroad. He is a member of the Composers Association of New Zealand.

Please see the links in the event thread and Pablos Sound Art Facebook page where you will find more examples of his amazing works. 

For now, sit back and enjoy the first episode of Pablowvolume!

Pablowvolume Pāhorangi Episode 01

I used a chance method to make a score for this track. I collected five pairs of seeds from the forest, I then pressed each type of seed end-to-end into a sheet of paper. I coloured in the marks the seeds made so they were easier to see. I counted how many times the seeds fitted on the piece of paper and that was how many times I had to sound my instrument. For example: the tawa seeds fitted on the paper 16 times, but the tertragonia seeds fitted 45 times.  The peice of paper was 210mm wide, so that is how many seconds long the piece of music is. in this first attempt, I tried to play each voice of the instrument (Electronic piano -> synthesizer) in equal intervals. I am going to try again with acoustic instruments and multiple performers.

Electronic Chance 1

A game played with two decks of cards and five players.

pablowvolume