this edition of framework:afield has been produced by students at the Institute of Sonology, the Royal Conservatory, Den Haag, in conjunction with Raviv Ganchrow’s Aural Tectonics seminar. it is presented as part of the program of Tuned City Tallinn. Tuned City Tallinn is a four day conference / festival that will being held this week (July 7 – 10) in Tallinn, Estonia. The general theme of Tuned City is the auditory dimension of the built environment, with attention to the Baltic auditory context. The event presents art works and theoretical approaches derived from critical preoccupations with sound in the context of urban and architectonic situations. Tuned City places particular emphasis on original approaches to the role of ‘sound’ and ‘listening’ in emergent notions of ‘space’ and ‘place’ with consequent implications for various urban practices in the social, political and cultural domains. The hybrid format of Tuned City: part conference, part festival, includes invited lectures interspersed with artist presentations, performances and demonstrations at coordinated sites (relating to the thematic topics of the symposium) around the city of Tallinn. The event will also include site-specific installations and workshops.

about this edition:

Broadcasting Den Haag, 52’52”, Two channels

‘Broadcasting Den Haag’ is a sound work for radio broadcast that investigates relations between the site of urban Den Haag, subjective recollections of a locale and properties of recording and transmission. Starting with a series of inquiries into the transmittability of ‘place’, the ten contributions offer a diversity of approaches and interpretations, both into recording strategies as well as the aural dimensions of locations / events, all developed with the radio format in mind. The collaborative project was realized in conjunction with Raviv Ganchrow’s Aural Tectonics seminar, at the Institute of Sonology, the Royal Conservatory, Den Haag, 2011.

Participants include:
Martijn Barendregt, Joeri Bultheel, Pablo Castro, Bas Gebbing, Sjaak Jöbses, Lasse Passage Nøsted, Gabriel Paiuk, Chang-Won Park, Sara Pinheiro, PabloSanz, Payam Shahali, Tom Srugo and Jim Zweerts.

00’00” Dark Lady, by Payam Shahali, Martijn Barendregt and Jim Zweerts >> 11’08” Diffuse, Open, Quiet, by Sjaak Jöbses >> 15’01” ZzzzzsSzz, by Joeri Bultheel >> 18’34” here&there, by Sara Pinheiro >> 22’52” Aeolian Transmission, by PabloSanz >> 30’04” Sunday Morning, by Tom Srugo >> 35’02” The Distorted Moments, by Chang-Won Park >> 39’11” Folds, by Gabriel Paiuk >> 43’16” Untitled, by Pablo Castro >> 47’28” Radio Feedback Study, by Lasse Passage Nøsted & Bas Gebbing

Aural Tectonics course description at Sonology:
http://www.koncon.nl/public_site/220/Sononieuw/NL/ba-onderwerpen/aural-tectonics.htm

Institute of Sonology website:
http://www.koncon.nl/public_site/220/Sononieuw/UK/frameset-uk.html

 

Contribution title, credit and descriptions in order of appearance:

//////////// Payam Shahali, Martijn Barendregt and Jim Zweerts
Dark Lady   11’07”

Concept and recording methods:
For this piece we wanted to explore different perspectives of sounding objects and its environment. We worked in a group of 3, of which each person had a different focus in the recording:
– Payam: environmental spatial qualities, interactions and movements with a Zoom H2 recorder (stereo)
– Martijn: outer spatial / acoustic qualities of the object with a Sennheiser Shotgun Microphone ME 66
– Jim: inner spatial and acoustic qualities of the object with piezo contact microphones and hydrophones
Sites:
Recorded sites: – The Hague Central Station: 2 escalators – The Hague Spuiplein: flagpole – The Hague Atrium and garage (not used in the piece) – On a sailing yacht: Scheveningen harbor and sea
Editing:
Structural and associative relations within varied recording material were expressed in the editing process. No DSP has been introduced to the material, except for very minimal equalizations. For the final piece existing etudes were altered and combined.

/////////// Sjaak Jöbses
Diffuse, Open, Quiet   4’13”

An attempt to translate the experience of a spheric ambience to the stereo broadcasting format. The inherent spheric propagation of sound from one (or multiple) point source(s) is given. In large reverberant spaces, where sound has ‘the time to travel’, this spheric propagation can be experienced, at a certain distance, to be “the ambient sound.” Three different urban settings in The Hague where chosen. All for their, at that time, unique sonic qualities. Specific excitation events enlighten the first 2 spaces, where as the last one is inherently subtle.

////////// Joeri Bultheel
ZzzzzsSzz   3’35”

An exploration of the sound-world located beneath the surface of The Hague-City. Let the overall flow instead of the events themselves guide you through this barren landscape of barely distinguishable yet unique sounds.
Waves of insinuations or plain translations of underground activities? It is up for the listener to decide.
zzZZZzssssSSsssZZZSSS!

////////// Sara Pinheiro
here&there   4’16”

A collection of sounds, somewhere between unplanned and detailed choices, which result in the idea that sound has no borders or physical limitations. From that point, it is about being in different places at once, as in a dream we grab all the memories with more or less definition. Bearing this story in mind, I tried to produce it based on contrast and ambiguity, overlaying spaces and actions, setting them in or outside our bodies.

///////// PabloSanz
Aeolian Transmission   7’12”

Aeolian Transmission is a piece based on the exploration of the action of wind by means of listening and field recording. Since my arrival to Den Haag and the discovery of its weather conditions, I found particularly interesting the strong winds and the effects produced by the interactions with the urban environment and all sorts of architectural elements, objects and  materials present in it. Actually, wind itself seems to be a tricky phenomena to be captured using regular microphones, whose principle is usually based in a diaphragm which moves accordingly to air pressure variations, something which might easily result in distortion when wind blows on them. Here I approached this force in a non-direct way, tapping into it as it flows through other mediums such as water and solids, attempting to reveal what cannot be heard just with our bare ears.

///////// Tom Srugo
Sunday Morning   5’18”

When the peacfull life in the peacfull Hague meets the department of Sonology.

///////// Chang-Won Park
The Distorted Moments   4’14”

My piece is made up of field recordings in Den Haag. I was looking for the characteristic place where can represent Den Haag. Central station, Haagse Markt, Spui- Grote Markt were chosen. Each place has its own characteristic sound, such as construction noise, crowds, singing seagulls, touting merchants, sound of trains, and trams. This piece is for the radio broadcasting. Therefore, I avoided dynamic sound (too small or loud), I also tried to avoid too abstract a structure for the sound montage. I imagined connecting the locations in one place. Central station will be the first and the last path for most of travelers who have been to Den Haag. Recollecting each place in Central station is the basic idea. I used camera shutter sound to express it. Recollection, photograph, camera, shutter, this is good related words. Image can change to sound. I arranged each sound between shutter open and closed, and made distorted transformation and structure at the end of my piece.

//////// Gabriel Paiuk
Folds   4’03”

This work deals with the involvement of the characteristics of the transduction equipment (microphone+storing device) in determining the timbral characteristics of the rendered field recording. It aims at dealing with the inherent collective aural memories of recording qualities to transform their tactile-spatial qualities into a continuum of ambiguous slidings of the focus of perception.

///////// Pablo Castro
Untitled   4’24”

///////////////// Lasse Passage Nøsted / Bas Gebbing
Radio Feedback Study   5’26”

In this collaborative piece we explored the urban space of The Hague by means of radio transmission and iteration. Our original intention was to experiment with transmitting one space into another, in order to investigate the possibilities of feedback between two separate spaces.
To establish this interconnection in between spaces we used two similar sets of equipment consisting of a loudspeaker, a radio receiver, a microphone, a recording device and a radio transmitter, herewith recording the sound present in the space and sending it to the other, forming an iterative process. Eventually, due to technical limitations we encountered, the sound material used consists mostly of “one-way” feedback. The resulting piece is a mixture of the recorded failures in establishing an inter-space feedback loop and the successful takes.

patrick 2011, framework:afield

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