Cultures of Sound - April Events

The sound art installation Star-ts sat at the interface between art and science, presenting two sonic compositions generated from astrochemical data and processes, integrating the voices of three female astrophysicists and science communicators: Julieta Fierro, Catherine Walsh and Teresa Paneque. 

Compositions investigated the idea of ‘starts’ or beginnings in stellar evolution, following different methodological approaches.  On the one hand, Ángela Hoyos Gómez, music researcher, collaborated with Amy Chen, researcher in e-textiles and knitted textiles, highlighting the presence of women in astronomy through immersive textiles and processed vocal sounds from their talks on stellar evolution, in her composition Es-Tela Est-Toile Confab; on the other hand, Juan Hernández, music researcher, collaborated with Inês Rebelo, visual artist, on audible and visible mappings of the helium burning stage in a red giant star, a stage our Sun will reach.  His composition Helium Burning implements techniques of transformation of microsounds such as granulation of sound files, pitch-time changing and cross-synthesis by convolution, to explore the bisociation between nucleosynthesis and sound synthesis.   

Click here for the residency website where the artists have documented their research and process.

Colin Frank is a percussionist, field recordist, installation artist, improviser, and multimedia composer. His works range from investigating found objects to machine noises, theatrical absurdity to site-specific performance, and audience interactivity to DIY electronics. Colin creates installation and gallery pieces which are often interactive, from playing common objects to exploring virtual environments.

For this residency he collected sounds from around Sovereign Design House; the electronics, the plumbing, the cafe, the people, and transformed this material into an installation that was open to the public from 20.4.23, followed by a Resonant Structures on 21.4.23.

 

Humming, Vibrating Architecture

Quadrophonic sound installation

Machines pervade urban environments, yet their sonic performances are little considered. Everything from air conditioner units to electrical boxes continually hum, clunk, and sing everywhere around us. They create sonic landscapes that are often ignored or given little attention to, even though they underpin the psychogeography of the spaces we live, work, and travel in. By considering the sounds of machines as posthuman performances, then we can reimagine the spaces around us as living and breathing environments.

 
This installation takes the sounds of the machinery, ventilation and electrical units spread throughout the Sovereign Design House, amplifying them in the lower gallery. Microphones are distributed throughout the building, mainly in the patch rooms and storage cupboards, to collect the hums and drones of the systems that keep the building running. Recordings are made throughout the day and night on a continuously rolling basis, which are then played back to overlap with one another in no consecutive order. The dates and times of the recordings are projected on the wall, providing context as to what is being heard. Extensive drones and continuous white noise are occasionally punctuated by the sudden clunk of a machine turning on or the gushing of water running through pipes. On other occasions remnants from distant human and animal activity can be heard, be it a car on the ring road or part of the dawn chorus.  

In this extended workshop researcher, singer, choir director and medieval harpist Leah Stuttard invited groups from the communities of Kirklees and the University to learn about the music that 15th century visionary and writer Margery Kempe might have heard during her pilgrimages across Europe, reaching as far as Jerusalem.

On the evening of Monday April 3rd participants were invited to chant, an ancient singing tradition found across the world and still part of our vocal vocabulary today. Leah lead the group through gentle physical warm up exercises, and then they learnt chants from different traditions including some pilgrim songs from medieval Spain, exploring how both singing and walking can produce wellbeing now just as they did for people in centuries past. 

On the afternoon of Wednesday April 5th the group left the University campus for a guided pilgrimage to the nearby Greenhead Park and Gledholt woods, with renditions of the songs learnt on Monday by those who came along to both parts of the workshop.

Resonant Structures was an evening of performance curated by Colin Frank as part of his residency in the Bath House Galleries.

Performances were staged throughout the building, exploring how the different spaces function with a public audience. 

Programme:

Edgework – Colin Frank [for solo snare drum, in open area of gallery 2 by stairs] 

Purl Ground – Hywel Davies [for marimba, in open area of gallery 2 by stairs] 

Tetrahedron – Desmond Clarke [four channel, live electronics, 3 video projection, in my side room] 

New Work – Colin Frank [four channel, live electronics, in my side room again] 

Intermission 

Ulrica Duo (Angela Hoyos Gomez & Juan Harnandez) perform St-arts 

Electricity, Sound, and Textiles is a project that explores the intersection between sound, textiles, and electronics. How can textiles be used to generate or control sound? How can we use electricity as a material? What are the possibilities for hands-on electronic sound creation?

Participants for the workshop on April 27th joined Dr Amy Chen and Dr Eddie Dobson to experiment with textiles and electronics to generate and control sounds in unusual ways. They explored the sounds generated through textile craft and controlling sounds through electronic textiles. They had the opportunity to learn how to use a Micro: bit microcontroller and how to create a contact microphone as part of their material exploration. 

The workshop took place at Dai Hall  and the works created during the workshop were later exhibited alongside the Cultures of Sound Collective 'Sound Installation Premiere' and the 'Submerged: natural dyes and stitched sounds' residency in the Bath House Galleries, Sovereign Design House.

Delivered in in partnership with YSWN Huddersfield Makers this workshop was intended for women and people of minority genders. If you would like more information about this particular positive action on gender please contact e.d.dobson@hud.ac.uk