Circuit Bending

Week 2 has been a steep learning curve for me. Circuits are something that I have next to no experience with so it has been very satisfying for me when I mange to accomplish a working circuit.

We have all started by making the same two circuits, one is a microphone and the other is an amplifier. Bread-boarding has been a really good introduction into the subject as it has been relatively achievable and all in all a really satisfying introduction, the challenge I think will be in creating a noise making circuit that is different from others in the class.

Sound Palette

I have included only the sounds that I have actually used in my composition as we took over 40 field recordings and displaying them all would be too much data.

Click here to get zip file of sounds used in my individual composition.

There was a wide variety of sounds that interested us and I think we did a good job of getting out there and satisfying our need for aural experimentation. Although the large number of recordings made their processing difficult in the limited time-frame I am glad that we followed the impulse through.

Finished Audio Compositions

We were asked this week to create two compositions from our field recordings, one as a team composition and one as an individual composition.


Group Composition

Our Group composition has not been as effective as I might have hoped. We got quite enthusiastic with our recordings and have in effect recorded too much to process in such a short time. We have two major themes in our recordings; one is dark sounds, that we created in the structures at North Head while the other is a steep contrast and is domestic sounds captured from within our own homes.

To process this much information and to deal with the opinions of an entire group we decided to randomly select a number of recordings and combine these with the aim of working with exactly with what each recording contained and and not trying to control their content. This idea stemmed from the idea that all sounds are vibrations and thus cannot be right or wrong although conventional music would have us believe otherwise.

While I think it was a nice notion to combine different sound and allow their content  to speak for themselves I do not think it produced a particularly effective result. There was a lot of pollution and accidental sounds that were used and this non selective process didn't really encourage cohesion within the piece.


North Head Composition (Individual)

For my individual recording I have used sounds exclusively from the North Head location. These sounds stood out to me for their dark quality as well as the fact that they seem to work together as they were either created or recorded while in one location, this helped me with the idea of a 'sound picture'.
There is quite a wide range of sounds in the clip, although I wanted to stay largely away from making it a musical piece I did decide to include a beat as it was the darkest and deepest sound in my palette and there was a large amount of resulting reverberation that really sets the mood of the piece.
I have also included voices captured from others touring the caves as they are usually of children and are high and thus give maximum contrast (as well as inspiring a level of concern in the listener in hearing children in such a dark setting.)
I have used the beat centrally in the composition while the voices play solely in the right ear and other sounds gravitating towards the left

My individual composition is quite different from our group composition in that with the group recordings we had such a range of contrasting recordings that we dealt with the composition by random selection. As a result the composition was made up almost entirely of domestic sounds and on reflection is a little lackluster, I think that a bit more critical reflection and educated selection could have produced a more conjusive piece of work.

Recording Adventures Day 2

On Day 2 Anneke and I returned to North Head to perform some further experimentation with using the decaying structures to produce sound.

What really drew me back to the tunnels was the eerie sounds that we got off the first day's recordings and the amount of natural resources that were there that could be used in the production of sound.

Creating Sound at North Head Tunnels

As I have progressed with this week's assignment I have become more interested in the production of sound rather than recording sounds at random. Initially we were trying to see what sounds we could observe without our own interference but now I'm looking as it more as each area is a type of instrument that has the ability to make sound but it requires a catalyst (ie. us) to bring out its potential. I find this quite a valid way to tackle the assignment and think that as our interaction level has increased with the production of sound so has our creativity and our engagement with the assignment.

I think the hardest part will be to refine the amount of audio we have recorded and chose just the key sounds to compose our pieces out of.


As shown on the map on the left we recorded at many locations over the 2 days that we went out. In hindsight we probably could have condensed the areas that we chose and got a similar results but we did enjoy the process and learned a lot over the course of the week.

Sound Recordings Map

For a quick run down:

At the pink location I recorded the beach from within a cave.

At the orange we recorded domestic sounds inside a home.

At the red location we recorded traffic on the harbour bridge.

On the purple we recorded inside the ruins at North Head.

And finally at the yellow we recorded inside a central city carpark.

Office Sounds

During this weeks experiments I began thinking about the sound effects used in this song, towards the end they cleverly use a selection of common office products to supplement the music (approx. 1:38 onwards).

The song itself isn't what we are trying to produce but it does really demonstrate the variety of sound that can be collected from day to day sources and manipulated to make it musical or in the least pleasant to listen to. 

Radio Aporee

My Radio Aporee contribution at red arrow

 This is the location that I choose to record and upload my field recording to Radio Aporee from. The recording is taken from within a cave at Ladder Bay, Toroa Point, Auckland.

This location is interesting to me because this particular area is constantly in flux, I have lived in the Torbay area for my whole life and the cave is constantly appearing or disappearing because of the effects of erosion on the cliffs.

I found the recording quite soothing as you can hear bird life, waves and dripping water. The tranquil nature in the recording really is quite characteristic of the area, you get a slight removal from the weather outside causing a muffled effect on all the outside elements.

Recording Adventures Day 1

Today we have been exploring the greater Auckland area in a quest to satisfy all our initial recording concepts. The below photographs were taken at North Head one of the locations that we visited over the course of the day. This day for us was about experimenting with gathering any recording that the group was curious about.

Underground

One big thing that I noticed change through experimentation was our practice, my initial idea of recording underground at North Head was quite popular with the group once we got started, something that developed from that was a level of creating our own sound.

North Head proved a great venue because of the many broken or wrecked elements that were around to be experimented with, there was also a nice acoustic quality that came from recording in combined spaces. We have tried to stay away from being too 'musical' a lot of the sounds are rhythmic but I feel this does act to create a dark mood that suits the recorded sounds.

On review of the sounds we got I really like some of the starting elements, I do however feel that some of them are overdone as if we have tried to record too much at once and thus lost any purity of sound. I would be super keen to head back tomorrow with a bit more purpose and record some purer sounds as I think the location has some wonderful potential and a really dark ambient sound.

Interestingly the tunnels were also full of visiting families for the school holidays and we have found that a lot of high pitched children's voices have got into our recordings. Far from being a problem I actually really enjoyed the contrast between the high pitched child enthusiasm and the low pitch sounds created by us underground, I really want to experiment with combining these two when I come to editing my field recordings.

Our happy group (and Chris in a daisy chain!)

Location Location

View Larger Map

I am really interested in going to record sound at North Head in Devonport, Auckland.
North Head is declared by the Department of Conservation to be "It is considered the most significant coastal defence site in the country because of the size and variety of its defence installations and the fact that it includes elements from all periods of New Zealand's coast defence history spanning nearly 120 years of military history. "

For me however the fascination is in the potential for echo, reverberation and the creation of sound from the variety of rough textures left behind in these deserted structures.

Aural Terrains

For the first week of working on the Aural Terrains Project I will be working as a team with Anneke, Dylan and Chris A to produce a set of field recordings to create compositions from.

There are several things that I'm really interested in. I want to go explore the underground structures at North Head, try recording some interesting everyday sounds from round the house.

My concept with this will be to try recording sounds that are quite dark and ominous in nature and contrast them with warm, homely sounds that we are quite familiar with and comforted by. I hope that by playing around with very different types of sound I will find something that appeals to me either in one genre or in a synthesis of two or more.

STOP/ GO

This is the final experimental film I have submitted, I feel that it still requires a lot of work before I am happy with the final result but I do feel that it is a step in the right direction.

Our group concept was exploring the role of time in the lives of 'city goers' and asking the question are they a slave to time? Expanding from that I have explored common city signs that control the flow of people through the environment

Experimental Film Critique

On critique day our team was the first to present

Flaneur Rig CAD Animation

This is an animation I created in Solid Works to show our rig in action. Solid Works has been a good tool during this project and as the CAD operator for our team and has allowed me to create engineering drawings, 3d renders and this animation. Which in comparison to photographs of our rig are more similar than I expected.

Experimental Film Review 2 - Connected

Connected by Selina Shah has been featured in several exhibitions and festivals since being first presented in 2008, these include: SKIP INTRO, TRANSFORM, YIVF#4 Screening, Open Source Festival, Astronomical Frontiers, Selina.Shah:CONNECTED, the EYE_KEA project International Video Art Event and Video Art and Experimental Film Festival 2010.



The experimental film 'Connected' depicts a cyber-relationship between two parties and explores the paradox of "intimacy without being intimate". The visual content in the film is made up of several small screens that show a variety of seemingly trivial and irrelevant clips. The main focus however is made up of the sounds of typing and the conversation unfolding in text at the bottom of the screen, it is this text that serves as dialogue in this short narrative. Shah's use of audio and choice of video effectively disables the viewers senses and leaves them feeling somewhat helpless.

I think that the way that Shah has presented her theme is quite intelligent, she explores the ins and outs of cyber-relationships through the visual element of her film. The seemingly trivial video presents to us a challenge to rethink just how little we know about the stranger that we find ourselves sharing with.

The typed text that makes up the conversation is the driving force behind the film, it presents us with the would be first time cybersex relationship between two individuals. By letting us into this private affair Shah places the viewer in a uncomfortable place, this is accentuated by the audio made up of typing sounds and seems disjointed and inferior next to the intensity of the conversation.

Shah manages to create in the viewer a feeling of awkwardness and and a sense of disjointedness. To an outside observer there are many pointers in the film to risky or ill advised behaviour. This feeling is continuously built upon as Shah using a multitude of techniques, the one character by typing in caps immediately takes on the role of dominance in the mind of the viewer, even before the subject is broached in the text. Other warning signs include the reference to one person being seen on webcam while the other remains faceless, this coupled with a reference to the 'seen' character "look(ing) young" gives a distinctly predatory feel to the dialogue. The viewer cannot help but develop a sort of concern for the character that is unseen by us, this is even more disturbing because we know that this character is being observed by the dominant character that we are continuously more wary of.

By the way of experimental techniques I liked the way that Shah used sound effects to make up the audio for her film, I think it was somewhat spooky and allowed the viewer to fill in their own gaps. I was also a fan of the video content, and how the ideas of the director were conveyed without showing anything literal. The text acted as the only form of narrative and was justified as it drove the film from beginning to end.

Shah presents us with a branch of the popular world of social networking that most would still feel uncomfortable about. This pushing of our comfort in relation to online culture challenges our current thoughts on the virtual world. Shah aims to make us consider online interaction and if it is a constructive advancement in our society, proposing that this may be the age that we neglect our bodies. In her essay on cyber discourse Shah explains some of her theories and those of others on the virtual age and our activity around it. Shah claims that ‘Virtual culture is a culture of retreat from the world …the loss of the senses of the reality “out there”.'

Reviewing footage and the Editting Begins

We have collected all the footage together and distributed it to all members of the group to work on our individual films over the weekend.

We have all taken different sub categories that interest us based around the role of time in the city. Personally I am going to look at signs, signals and warnings; I find these things really interesting because of two factors, the interpreted meaning of a sign and the action we take when we register one. Signs are instructions and in the city they serve to govern the flow of people, vehicles and some types of information through a city.

I want to experiment with signs and challenge what makes an effective one; usually the obedience in the presence of a sign is instinctual, they are often there to keep us orderly or safe and we obey without much thought. My aim is to present signs in a way that may alter their meaning or make them in some way chaotic or different from the signs that rule us every day in our travels. I am quite fascinated by the concept of seeing how far and what elements of a design can be changed while leaving it still recognisable and able to be obeyed.

Initially when we presented our ideas to the class we didn't want to take to firm of a stance on whether we thought the clock controlled the average city-goer but I think I will for effect probably take a polar stance and suggest that we are ruled by the clock. A clock is a man made device that can cause relief, panic or a great number of other emotions from one glance and the recognition of the time that follows, this to me creates an order but a rather artificial one, with my movie I would like to encourage room for interpretation in the city's seldom considered fixtures.

Experimental Filming Day 1

Today we began filming for our experimental film. We have all brain-stormed what we would like to explore with our individual films and I am taking the direction of looking at patterns within the city, specifically the STOP/ GO flow that seems to be present in many assumed systems within the city.

We have been filming as a team of 4 but are keeping our footage separate so that we will have a greater amount of variation between our 4 group films. We have however been discussing using a certain sample of universal footage to increase the ties between our four sub-themes.

Filming has been interesting so far, we have had a multitude of problems on this first day including webcam brightness issues, overwriting footage and an increasing unsteadiness in the rotating camera on the pivot. Being in the experimental genre these things haven't been too badly hindering we have just adapted and continued and are happy with the certain level of randomness that has been achieved by this.



I would however like to encourage an increase in public interaction and participation so I am planning to create a sign or some props that make it clearer to the public that we are open to their participation in our film making process. Currently we have a lot of people staring but a lot very few interacting. I have noticed though that when you do manage to get one person engaged then the people around increases exponentially.

Tomorrow I want to do a lot more planned filming at locations and timings of prior choosing. This way the film will have a little more continuity than today's wandering.

SlitScan Experiments Berchem from zerolmzero on Vimeo.

This particular film is the one we have decided to share with the class when we do our presentation, it is the most exciting film and it hasn't been edited, it does however have some fabulous natural colours coming through in the footage and it is an excellent example of how the slit scanning technique can be used to full advantage.

Slit Scanning is something that Charlotte has been researching into during the past week and we are planning to set the top camera on our rig to run the code for the slit scan as it films so that we will produce the effect as we film as opposed to recreating it later in an editing program which is far less experimental because we are controlling the outcome in that case.

I like slit scanning for its potential to monitor one pixels width at constant intervals and update it to create a time graph of sorts of the city that is highly visual. When the slit scan is run from a stationary observation point there will be coloured lines that wipe horizontally across the screen from where is observes other stationary objects, however when an object moves past the slit it will create a new component to the image as long as they are in the range of the slit. This is really good for creating time visualisations as the bigger the object and the slower it goes/ closer to the camera it is bigger change will be perceived and vice versus. I am excited about using this in my film and seeing the different patterns in the city that I may be able to expose with it.

Rig Test Run

The below video was created during the making process by Christine and Theresa, it shows the footage as it will appear from the rotating on-board camera. I am quite impressed by the different effects that can be created such as a spin, a sway and a rotate. I feel that the rotate is much more noticeable when it is in close proximity to what it is filming and therefore for maximum effect I think it would be best used close to what it is filming.

time from Rebecca Glasmacher on Vimeo.

Some videos that I came across in the search for an experimental film on time. I found most films quite literal in their portrayal of time but I did really like some of the soundtracks that were created from clock sounds as I thought it really drove the film forward and could be sped up/ slowed down to create the effect desired by the filmmaker.

Time and Texture from Zeno Films on Vimeo.

New CAD Drawings

This is my re-editted

CAD Drawings

These are the first CAD drawings I have produced for our experimental camera rig. I am quite happy with my drawings as these are my first attempt with Solid Works. After they are evaluated by my team members and the lecturers/ 3d lab staff I will possibly redo them to incorporate any suggestions.