frey

shines nicely on the ceiling, too:

heaps of light :-)

Just got back from a lovely little festival in the Coromandel called the Big Bay Out — masses of geeks, hippies, and geek-hippies, living in tents by a river in the bush at the end of a long gravel road. There was much beautiful music, especially including The Mamaku Project, who in this incarnation were keys/bass, vocals, saxophones/bass clarinet, and laptop beats. The sax player had a soprano sax and his playing has inspired me to pick it up as an instrument.

My own set was running a mixture of pure data patches, mainly a beat-locked phase vocoder, sin oscillator kick, delay-filter feedback loop, and a live-sampling mellotron I call the Damotron. I fed it various samples of music at the start and it digested them and spat out little rhythmic techno-inspired musical bits, all controlled with a MIDI controller keyboard. My new aim for live performance has become to make music using my laptop but keeping the lid of the laptop closed, so my only interaction is with the MIDI controller.

And so many geeks as well — especially the hippie flavour of geek, the super-friendly sociable kind. Every second person I met was an A/V geek who knew how to code, or knew how to do tech stuff, or new how to solder, or was just really into freedom of information and open source software movements. It was really quite wonderful.

Hey everyone, thanks for the suggestions and do keep them coming in. I shall be borrowing the field recorder (AKG condensor mic goodness with 24bit/96kHz recording for delicious downsampling) from Victoria University and running around recording some of these sometime next week. Look out for a dude with some microphones :-)

The space that Sounds Like Light, Lights Like Sound is going into used to be the keg room, way back when the Latinos/Club Garibaldi/Happy building used to be a three-storey pub called the Sticky Wicket. So it’s a little bit gross:

But I like it that way. Most of the junk is going to stay in, as it will provide interesting shapes for the lighting to silhouette…

Anyone know of any interesting, ideally mechanical sounds around Wellington that I could record? I have some wicked recordings from the Interislander coming back from my summer holiday, but anything else anyone can think of would be much appreciated..

Also interested in interesting aural spaces. The railway station immediately springs to mind of course, but any suggestions of echoey back alleyways, chambers, open spaces that just sound cool would be great.

Thanks :-)

Ok. Now that I have seriously got into doing this project, this space is going to become my worklog, and thus it shall fill up with work-in-progress stuff.

The basic idea behind the Sounds Like Light, Lights Like Sound installation is to place a camera in the roof of a space and use it to track visitors to the space. Tracking information is sent to a sound generating system and a light control system to allow the visitor to feel as though they are moving through a virtual space built from light and sound.

Sound is going to be key. The lighting will be very dim, and will black out completely from time to time; most of my focus will be on making a sound environment that works. Although I am aware of other ‘interactive’ ‘immersive’ installations out there, I am not aware of any that push the sound aspect of it to this kind of level. As I wrote earlier, I believe sound is key to a sense of atmosphere; and it is atmosphere I am most interested in evoking.

This word atmosphere, what does it mean? To me it is shorthand for those submissive emotions that only make themselves felt when we are in the grips of a piece of time-based art. It is all of those things we feel listening to the kinds of music in which melody and rhythm play only small roles, if any at all. It’s what makes a particular time of day or a particular place feel a certain way. It’s crucial to our sense of space.

So, in short, this installation is exploring the manipulation of atmosphere in a controlled environment, using light and sound.

Status at the moment is:

• Basic vision tracking software – done . It’s built entirely in C++ using open source libs, mainly GPL’d or LGPL’d, and draws on skills I picked up developing vision-based tracking software for Lumen Digital Studio here in Wellington (who, incidentally, are looking for a programmer to replace me, so send them your CV :-). Libraries used: OpenCV, pthreads-win32, and WOscLib for OpenSoundControl communication with the sound and light systems.
• Basic sound system – in progress. I’m using Pure Data which is a visual dataflow language for sound. It’s another open source project, this one released under LGPL. At the moment I can arrange samples in a grid over the surface I’m tracking, and play particular samples depending on the location of a tracked figure in the room.
• Basic light system – in progress. Lighting will be via a Mac 250 Entour moving head, with a USB-DMX control interface to control it, and a whole bunch of super-bright LEDs. (I shall have to get properly my head around LED circuits, as I managed to fry a whole bunch of little cheap red LEDs last night by running too much current through them. Oops. Fortunately little ones are only 25c each; the super bright ones I’m looking at run to several dollars per piece.)

This is for my upcoming Fringe show, Sounds Like Light, Lights Like Sound:

MEDIA RELEASE
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Media Contact:
Damian Stewart, 027 305 4107, damian (at) frey (dot) co (dot) nz

9th January 2006

SOUNDS LIKE LIGHT, LIGHTS LIKE SOUND
TRANSDIMENSIONAL TRAVEL THROUGH GLIMMER AND RUSTLE

This Fringe, Damian Frey invites you to come to Happy’s back room, enter a breathing, living electronic space made of light and sound, and be taken somewhere else.

Sounds Like Light, Lights Like Sound is a reactive installation built from sound and light, designed as a playable world-creating light and sound instrument with a mind of its own.

“I’m inspired by the feel of computer games like Half-Life, System Shock 2, and Doom,” said Frey. “These games create awesome emotional effect, using sound and light to build an intense atmosphere.”

Sounds Like Light, Lights Like Sound draws on this power of raw sound, light, and darkness to create emotion, transporting visitors to otherworldly realms.

What makes it different from other installations is that it is reactive. Without the input of the visitor, it’s just a room, static and unchanging. But step into it and it comes to life.

“People will enter this space and they will feel like they’re taking themselves somewhere else,” said Frey. “You are in control – most of the time – but just where you end up will never be entirely certain. Imagine moving through a darkened labyrinth with walls that keep on shifting, inhabited by ghosts, phantoms, and portals to other places – that’s what it’s like.”

Sounds Like Light, Lights Like Sound
Happy’s back room
Underground, corner Tory and Vivian St
Open daily except Mondays, 11am-7pm, Feb 16-March 3
Entry by koha/donation

Damian Frey – Biography

Frey has a website at http://www.frey.co.nz where anyone interested can observe the progress and construction of Sounds Like Light, Lights Like Sound. He also has a myspace page at http://www.myspace.com/freyed.

Frey has recently completed his final year studying Sonic Arts at the Lilburn Electroacoustic Studios in the New Zealand School of Music, directed by renowned composer Lissa Meridan. He has worked as a computer game programmer and a designer of interactive display systems for museum gallery installations. He is also a performing musician, playing laptop as a live performance instrument both solo and in groups.

Selected appeances from recent years include: performing as part of the Fringe 2005 Best Music award-winning Ascension Band; performing alongside Norwegian sound artist Biosphere at the Catchpool Found Sound Project (2005) and Canadian techno star Deadbeat (2006), performing with video artist Emil McAvoy at Interdigitate 06 (Auckland, 2006), Soundtracks 7 (Wellington, 2006), Indeterminacy and Interface (Wellington, 2005) and Intimacy and In.yer.face (Wellington, 2006); and composing soundtracks for two short films by Wellington filmmaker Alouis Woodhouse and the feature documentary Father of the House by Simon Burgin and Xavier Forde (2005). Frey is also a founding member of the While You Were Sleeping audiovisual art collective.

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