Sound Mirrors at Diagonal Thoughts, “some notes on seeing and being, sound and image, media and memory”.
Archive for the ‘Art and Music’ Category
Diagonal thoughts
Sunday, February 7th, 2010Sonic Marshmallow interview
Wednesday, October 7th, 2009Graphics.com has an interview with Troika Design Studios which discusses the “Sonic Marshmallows” sound mirror-inspired installation at Wat Tyler country park in Essex.
We see Sonic Marshmallows more as a manifestation of people’s desire to interact with each other, rather than with things. Sonic Marshmallows can be used only in conjunction with another user. Sound mirrors were originally used on the coast of Kent to detect incoming enemy planes, not far from the location were Sonic Marshmallows is installed now. We used the same technology in a way that enables people to communicate with each other instead.
More…
Music from the weather through sound mirrors
Sunday, August 16th, 2009Inspired by sound mirrors, someone suggests musicalizing a weather system through landscape architecture.
BLDGBLOG here proposes a series of sound mirrors to be built in a landscape with regular, annual wind phenomena. A distant gully, moaning at 2am every second week in October, every year, due to northern winds from Canada, has its low, droning, cliff-created reverb carefully echoed back up a chain of sound mirrors to supply natural soundscapes for the sleeping residents of nearby towns.
Or a crevasse that actually makes no sound at all has a sound mirror built nearby, which then amplifies and redirects the ambient air movements, coaxing out a tone – but only for the first week of March. Annually.
Sound mirror orchestra in Belgium
Sunday, July 26th, 2009According to Andreas Angelidakis’s website, Artes Musicales is an exhibition on the relationship of contemporary art and classical music
. It is curated by Christophe de Jaeger and Joost Fonteyne, and opened at Alden Biesen castle in Belgium in July and runs to August 30.
Based on Sound Mirrors, the WWII ancient bunker-like radars, we proposed a set of musical buildings for the park surrounding the castle.
These structures, arranged in the park like instruments in an orchestra, would catch the sounds of the trees an maybe people having fun around them, and who knows what it would sound like.
I can’t quite tell from the website whether they have actually been built or not - the pictures just show models, so I guess not.
Abbot’s Cliff hum and gusts
Sunday, June 21st, 2009A 75 second recording of the wind at the Abbot’s Cliff sound mirror on 2 April 2009 by Steven Rowell. Evident in this recording, with mic placed directly on concrete mirror concave face, is a noticeable, resonant hum below 150Hz. Wind gusts on the cliffs were quite strong.
It is from radio aporee ::: maps
an open project about the creation and exploration of public soundscapes. it collects and organizes recordings of daily surroundings and other sonic habitats from all over the world. the sounds are organized within a mashup system of mapping software, databases, telephone networks and the Internet. sites and sounds can also be explored and accessed in situ by recent GPS-enabled mobile devices.
The Devil of Denge Marsh
Sunday, April 26th, 2009I think it must have been a radio programme, or something like that… the picture seems to show an aloe vera plant attacking the 30 foot mirror at Denge.
The Scarifyers return in their second full-length adventure…
A melting minister… a scientific project gripped by madness…
a remote village on the Kent coast where the locals have some strange habits indeed. It’s all just the ticket for top-secret government department, MI-13.Lionheart (Nicholas Courtney) and Dunning (Terry Molloy) are back, to do battle with the Women’s Institute, an old adversary and an inter-dimensional being from the dawn of time - THE DEVIL OF DENGE MARSH.
Source: Cosmic Hobo
Denge sound mirrors feature in prize-winning graphic story
Sunday, April 12th, 2009Julian Hanshaw won the 2008 Observer/Cape Graphic Short Story Prize with Sand Dunes and Sonic Booms, described by the Observer as a “haunting, evocative and beautifully drawn story”. It is set on the south coast, and at the Denge mirrors in particular.
We loved Hanshaw’s sense of time and place - an effect he achieved partly through a series of sepia frames illustrating the south coast. Hanshaw is an animator by training, and moved to Winchelsea, East Sussex from London three years ago. Since then he has become ‘mildly obsessed’ with the area, particularly the spectral and strange Dungeness. The idea for ‘Sand Dunes and Sonic Booms’ came after a visit to one of the south coast’s sound mirrors - primitive devices designed to detect and track military aircraft before the First World War (though the ones in Kent date from the 1930s).
Source: The Observer 2009-11-09
You can read the story here: Sand Dunes & Sonic Booms.
Invaders Must Die by The Prodigy
Sunday, February 15th, 2009On February 23 2009 The Prodigy will release an album called Invaders Must Die, which features a track of the same name for which a video was shot at Dungeness. The Denge sound mirrors feature from about 1 min 15 sec in.
‘Invaders Must Die’ is 40 minutes of having your head battered by future nostalgia, serotonin levels twisted by feel-good horrorcore and your synapses snapped by whiplash attitude. It’s the sound of The Prodigy mixing up genres, contorting the past and rewiring the future, ram-raiding through the tranquility of music’s status quo like a blot on the landscape of England’s dreaming.
Source: Invaders Must Die
So now we know. I just hope no morons get it into their heads to try vandalising the mirrors as depicted in the video.
The mirrors have been used by a variety of musicians, including Turin Brakes, Bass Communion and Blank & Jones.
(thanks to Ken Morrow for letting me know about the video)
The ice mirror cometh
Sunday, February 1st, 2009It’s a bit cold outside — but not cold enough to make a sound mirror out of ice, which is what has been done in Alaska!
The mirror was created as part of the Freeze celebration of Alaska and life in the North
held in Anchorage during January 2009. It was designed by Klaus Mayer, Petra Sattler-Smith and Marisa Favretto, who were inspired to create the ice mirror by the British sound mirrors.
Sound Mirror is inspired by Northern states of change and flux in weather, environment, light and atmosphere. We are interested in emphasizing these juxtapositions, highlighting the states in nature that are significant to states of perception. We are interested in the work acting as a mirror to the elements – light, landscape, passing birds, planes, sounds, while creating a space/form specific to viewer interaction – via size, orientation, composition.
The form is inspired by sound mirrors - a form built around coastal towns in England between 1915 and 1930 to function as an acoustic radar for approaching war planes. The first one was carved out of the chalk cliff on the coast in 1915.
Source: Freeze project
Photographs of the mirror being built from blocks of ice.
The PDF explaining the initial design concept includes a photograph of the Abbot’s Cliff sound mirror near Folkestone.
The completed mirror was praised by Michelle Mitchell in The Freeze Art Show at a Healthy Ten Below at Scribbit:
The most beautiful of the exhibits was a sound mirror that must have been fifteen or sixteen feet high and was built from this gorgeous frosty blue ice that almost looked like it was resin rather than ice. The blocks fit perfectly together to form this giant slab with a concave center so that if you stood on the platform opposite and spoke toward the dish it would reflect your voice back at you.
Source: Scribbit 2009-01-12
There is also a picture of the finished installation on Flickr. Anyone got any more good pictures of it?
Sites of Special Sonic Interest
Sunday, December 21st, 2008Scott Hawkins has been documenting, cataloging and performing at Sites of Special Sonic Interest across the UK. I classify a performance as any kind of physical interaction resulting in an audible product. Here, looking into the eye of the Sound Mirror at Kilnsea on Spurn Head, the wind (persistent ghostly presence) combined to produce and aerophonic ambient extravaganza.
