8 PM this (Thursday) evening at Spectrum: Nick Didkovsky and Rachel Golub give us the next impactful chapter of Guy Barashs Eavesdropping series. The Liminophone steps out, featuring Rachel Golub and Nick Didkovsky. Visuals by RG. Hosted by Guy Barash on his Eavesdropping series at Spectrum: 121 Ludlow, second floor. spectrumnyc __________________________________________ About the Liminophone: What you will hear on the 13th will all be *in real time*. The sounds one hears from the Liminophone are generated at the moment the performance happens. In other words, one experiences firsthand the conditions of New York Harbor, in musical sonification. Limen, archaic Greek for ‘harbor’, describes the shelter of a shoreline indentation; the commerce of a seafaring marketplace; the liminal space, created or natural, in which we transit through ways of existing. Phone, greek for ‘voice’, or a human sound, recognizes that this sonification of oceanographic data-- the liminophone-- is a means to sonify ocean data, in real-time, to give voice to the waters: the Singing Harbor. We encounter not just another element, but the wild, the unknown, the surreal, and the great certainty of change. ...so what exactly is the Liminophone? The Liminophone is a product of my seemingly incompatible passions for music and urban swimming. The first germ of an idea came to me when I was preparing to swim the 17.5-mile stretch of New York Harbor, from the Battery to Sandy Hook, New Jersey: what if I could perform a musical simulation of this six-hour watery sojourn— a Singing Harbor? I reached out to Nick Didkovsky, whose algorithmic compositions I had performed, and asked if he could program a real-time composing instrument that would pull data from the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)’s storm-surge site, which I continue to rely on for meteorological and water-temperature data. It was my intention to travel with this instrument, swimming urban waterfronts around the NOAA network and then performing live with the water data afterwards. The following winter was my first round of regular swims in a surreal, frigid winter ocean, and it was clear to me that this experience, sonified, would be a fascinating way to share my exhilaration and fascination with a landlubbing audience, raising an awareness of—and, potentially, a collective interaction with— the waters that surround us. how does it work? Real-time oceanographic data from the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) stations around New York Harbor is pulled from a website and turned into the Liminophone via Nick Didkovsky’s Java Music Specification Language (JMSL) program. Data is read every six minutes; the program interpolates the data every ten seconds to create a flowing soundscape. The shift from data metric to musical occurrence was generated through translation from scientific to psycho-physiological. A short excerpt from the huge correspondence that generated the Liminophone: Whatever one experiences over a long swim, or an intensely cold short swim, is the result of understanding current conditions, remembering conditions from other swims, comparing the two, and seasoning the result with the unknowns. In shorthand, here are the nine NOAA metrics, distilled down to a swimmer’s experience: -Predicted water level = Scientific/experiential knowledge -Observed water level = Empirical/experiential knowledge -Residual water level = margin of error, expectation of change, unknowability factor -Wind speed = ease or challenge of conditions -Wind direction = mood during swim -Wind gusts = extremity of experience and moods -Barometric pressure = all-around vibe, and/or psych-out factor -Air temperature = mood before swim, expectation of post-swim -Water temperature = changes focus from internal to external. Most dramatic and challenging feature. In short, the instrument creates glissandi between frequencies. Starting and ending frequencies are determined by water-level data; vibrato range and rate are set by water and air temperature; wind gust and direction dictate the wild-card of sound duration, and thus the speed of glissando. There is a lot more magic behind the beauty of how the data is sonified, thanks to Nick Didkovsky. The instrument also generates short phrases for an accompanying live musician to use in structured improvisation, enabling anyone to play a duet with the Singing Harbor. Visuals are a product of my hanging around water for an awful lot of my time: they explore the surreality of the water around us. https://facebook/events/1450159698535198/
Posted on: Thu, 13 Mar 2014 11:14:01 +0000
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