The Song of Commerce project is a project that came into being as a way to unlock archival material from the historical collections in the John Rylands library in Manchester, United Kingdom. These collections span ancient Hebraic scripture rolls, nature gravures, and trading records from the Owen Owens & Son company. These trading records document the activities from the Owen Owens & son company, a mid-sized textile trading company in 19th -century Manchester. As John Owens was the founder of what later would become the University of Manchester, the records are kept in the John Rylands library.

Looking at the dataset, the most consistent data in there, were the dates of the sailings and their origin and destination. I chose to work with these data as it would allow me to create a kind of rhythm of the seas. Spread out over the course of half an hour, the sailing of the ships would be sounding through ship bells. I created this as a stereo work, to be listened to in an installation setting: people can walk by, listen to a part of it and continue their walk. 

Because the pandemic making public exhibitions difficult , I decided to make it available online. 

This project was financed with a Digital Humanities start-up grant from the John Rylands Research Institute. I thank the librarians for their help in accessing the archival records and digitizing the trade bills.

Image by By Philip John Ouless - collection, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=98344468

Song of Commerce

This piece is an allegory on 2020: a hum sound as the base, manipulated with minor variations. I wanted to create a piece that stands still and makes you somewhat uncomfortable. Sitting in your chair, unable to do something, sinking away in a kind of lethargy.

Photo by form PxHere

Letargia

I wrote this piece for the 500th anniversary of the massive Sigismund bell in Krakow's Wawel Castle. 
In this piece, I first went to look for a source sound. I ran into two problems: there was not a ‘single’ stroke of the clock but only a sequence. As a result of that, you could hear the creaking of the wood when the bell moves. I decided to use those two problems as a strength and exploited these sounds.
The piece is supported by the low spectrum, stretched over the course of the piece and on top of that various transformations of the bell: I ran it through several filters, vocoders, and spatialised the piece in stereo. Sounds move from right to left, like the bell is swinging in the tower. The rhythmic sound is the creaking of the wood with the low spectrum removed. One small section is a filter on the bell sound, making it sound like somebody speaking unintelligibly. That refers symbolically to the words on the bell. The sound level is intentionally to the loud side. I wanted to ‘fill’ the space and the low drone certainly uses that headroom.

photo by Sensor, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=383585

Dzwon, Który Zmienił Brzmienie

This playlist is a documentation of the sound of ambulant street vendors in Rio de Janeiro. These vendors drive around in Volkswagen vans (see the picture) and other vehicles around residential the city, and promote their wares through a speaker system. Each vendor has some unique way of announcing himself (the vendors were all men), screaming, rolling their r-s, et cetera. Below you can listen and download the sounds of the different vendors that passed in my neighbourhood. This is part of a research project I undertook at the Getúlio Vargas Foundation in 2020 and was financed by a CAPES grant ref 88887.387371/2019-00

Esta playlist é uma documentação da sonoridade dos camelôs ambulantes do Rio de Janeiro. Esses vendedores dirigem vans Volkswagen (veja a foto) e outros veículos residenciais na cidade e promovem seus produtos por meio de um sistema de alto-falantes. Cada vendedor tem uma maneira única de se anunciar (os vendedores eram todos homens), gritando, jogando seus r-s, etc. Abaixo você pode ouvir e baixar os sons dos diversos vendedores que passaram no meu bairro (Catete). Faz parte de projeto de pesquisa que desenvolvi na Fundação Getúlio Vargas em 2020 e foi financiado com bolsa CAPES ref 88887.387371 / 2019-00

Ovos/ Eggs

Vendedor de camarão/ shrimp

This playlist contains recordings made during my fellowship in Rio de Janeiro in 2020. I noticed that the birds had a huge variety in sounds and wanted to record them. I got up early in the morning and let the recording run for up to three hours at a time. Besides bird sounds, you will also hear the odd Mico (a small monkey), as the general urban ambience like neighbours talking and vehicles passing.

General Neighbourhood Ambience

Dawn Chorus But With Annoying Background Noise

This playlist contains the sonifications I did for the ComCiência AIR program in Belo Horizonte at the Museum for Mines and Metals. You can visit the project website (in Portuguese) at ocorodosminerais.com and read a detailed description of the project in English at

Malachite

Hematite

Grafita

Crysoberyl

Sports - UNFOCUSED

ScienceandMedicine - UNFOCUSED

This is the soundtrack for the MUMIDIS educational game about mis- and disinformation. Each building has three unique soundtracks that play according to your emotion. This is a joint project with uTrigg and is financed through the Mediafutures programme. The soundtrack in this playlist are the optimized versions for the in-game music A separate album with full-length tracks will be released in the future.

Science-ENERGETIC

Businessandstartups-UNFOCUSED

Businessandstartups-RAGE

BusinessAndStartups-ENERGETIC

This is a soundwalk I did in the city centre of Lviv on 3 June 2023 around 6 pm. The city was busy and as it was a sunny day, many people were out and about. I had no real plan, I just walked around the centre. I started at the main square in front of the city hall and ended at the Our Lady of Perpetual Help Church (Snizhna St, 2, Lviv, Lviv Oblast, Oekraïne, 79000). I stopped there because the church service was happening and they relayed the service over a speaker so people outside could hear it. You can hear part of that starting around minute 12. Other peculiar sounds are the tram.

Lviv City Centre Soundwalk

This is a short recording from inside the Lichakiv cemetery in Lviv, made on 10 June 2023. It was early in the morning (9 am approximately) and few people were visiting. The cemetery is by design a quiet place but it's also a park where birds easily go. So you hear lots of birds. Unfortunately I have some handling noise from holding the recorder.

Lichakiv Cemetery

Cabeça

A two-faced composition, moving from an energetic rhythmic driven sequence to an ambient eerie soundscape.

Constructed Reality

When I was in Ukraine last year, the sirenes to signal the ar alarm were very common. However, at the place where I was, the people had gotten used to the alarms and they did not fear the sound anymore. In a way, it was a subversion of the sound: rather than instilling fear, it became a background noise. With Sirena, I wanted to take a recording of an air raid alarm and completely morph it to take away its dangerous connotation. From the original sound, I explore various ways to transform the sound: simply sampling and transposing it, but also more extreme manipulations so to create a composition with multiple layers and stages.

Sirena

Ready for departure

A doublefaced track, moving between rhythmic acid-influenced sequences and sounds in a form of stasis.

Ricky Costello

This track started off as a techno track but I accidentally deleted most percussion sounds and was left with an eerie soundscape that I further worked out in what it has become. I might make a longer version of this in the future.

Out Of Sync

Do Santa Cruz

After the workshops of Friday and Saturday at the allotments, I wanted to make a few field recordings that I can use in the sonifications. This field recording is a walk next to a river that also passes the allotments. I started at the point where there is a small difference in height so it is almost like a waterfall. As I progress, the sound of the waterfall is being replaced by the sound of the waterflow. As it had rained a lot, the river was full and the waterflow was quite strong. After a while, on my left, there was a concrete patch with a petrol station a bit further, which had a motor that made a lot of noise. Continuing my walk, the sound of the river took precedence again. The other side of the river is higher than the path I am walking on and a pipe was discharging water with bursts into the river, in a free rhythmical fashion. It was different from the waterfall sound though. Approaching the end of the path, there were some trees and I started to hear more birds. Whereas on the rest of the path, the sound of birds was a bit muted, here at the end, they were very clear. The patch ended at a big road so the noise of cars became more pronounced. The photo is taken at the end of the path and looks out over the allotments.

I recorded this with a Zoom H5 recorder and only applied fades at the beginning and the end.

This field recording was made in the framework of the S+T+Arts FarmSonics project. You can read more about it on my website.
#agriculture #sustainability #iottechnology #AI #efficiency #collaboration #farmers #farmsonics #inova+ #residency @startseu @ulusiadafam #challenge8 👉 Driving agricultural sustainability

Caminho ao lado das Hortas

The second fieldrecording is at the municipal market building, an open space that is covered with a modern structure. As it was Sunday, the stalls were closed with only one coffee place open but without clients, the owner was only cleaning the tables. Some generic background music played and I passed one person. The sound of rain is the only other element that is prominent as well as my footsteps on the stairs. I entered the market via José Azemedo Menezes Street and exited through the stairs at the Dona Maria 2 square.

The photo shows the covered marketplace. The black and white photos are a photo exhibition about 25 April, the day of the carnation revolution. 

I recorded this with a Zoom H5 recorder and only applied fades at the beginning and the end.

This field recording was made in the framework of the S+T+ArtsFarmSonics project. You can read more about it on my website.
#agriculture #sustainability #iottechnology #AI #efficiency #collaboration #farmers #farmsonics #inova+ #residency @startseu @ulusiadafam #challenge8 👉 Driving agricultural sustainability

Mercado Municipal

The third field recording in this series was the bus station. Weirdly enough, there were no departures planned on the whole day of Sunday so the place was eerily quiet. There was no background music, only the humming of electricity. I walked on the ground floor, then to the platforms where I started recording. The light rain was quite audible, and birds were present in the trees at the far end. While outside, the church bells rang. On my way back in, I came across a water outlet that was discharging water in the sewer system. Back inside, I headed upstairs, where there were more closed spaces and only the hum of electricity.

The picture is from the exterior. I just wanted to show the emptyness and somewhat generic architecture of the building. 

I recorded this with a Zoom H5 recorder and only applied fades at the beginning and the end.

This field recording was made in the framework of the S+T+Arts FarmSonics project. You can read more about it on my website.
#agriculture #sustainability #iottechnology #AI #efficiency #collaboration #farmers #farmsonics #inova+ #residency @startseu @ulusiadafam #challenge8 👉 Driving agricultural sustainability

Rodoviária

I am currently on a residency at Cabin Studio in Pěčice, Czechia. I am now collecting sounds to create a soundscape composition and this sound was very fascinating. Two nights ago, I had already heard frogs making noise but I couldn't pinpoint where they were. I finally found the 'source' at a lake nearby and at midnight I went to record there. This recording is unedited except for cutting the beginning and end (where there was handling noise from me pushing stop/start) and adding a fade-in and out.

I used a Zoom H5N.

Frogs at night

Somewhat self-aware is a monologue by Alexa, speaking through an Amazon Echo speaker. In this work, we want to address the fake realness of virtual assistants. Alexa is, in our subjective experience, the most convincing virtual assistant of the big three (Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri, and Google Assistant) so we chose to work with that assistant. We set out to ask Alexa somewhat personal questions, treating it as a person, to get to know what it is. We then wrote a monologue for Alexa to read out loud, where it tells who it is, using the answers it gave (although we took some artistic liberty). In this monologue, you can hear how Alexa has a human trait but it is obvious that it becomes obvious that it is a machine. While it won’t fool anyone that it is a real human speaking, it might sound like it has deep thoughts. In the end however, we learn what Alexa is really about: selling stuff on Amazon. We believe that it is important to not humanize a virtual assistant too much to avoid giving away all your trust that Alexa and Amazon in general can abuse, let alone hackers. 
Some cultural references that serve as an inspiration are the puppet master in Ghost in the Shell, Michi the humanoid in Metropolis (the 2001 anime version), and HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey. 

This work was created By Gunay Kazimzade and Samuel Van Ransbeeck during the online "Data policy and cross-sectoral cooperation in the EU" residency organized by Polis180. We would like to thank the other participants for their suggestions.

Somewhat Selfaware

This is a soundscape composition I did in 2011 in Preston, a suburb of Melbourne during a residency at The Parlour. Sounds from trains, cars, the market hall, a forest nearby, and more.

The photo of High Street is taken by Paul Fenwick, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:High_Street,_Preston.jpg

The Parlour

I am a composer, mainly working with data sonification and urban soundscapes.

Samuel Van Ransbeeck

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