Basic Electroacoustics II: Electronic Sound in Art

 Music G6602Y
Spring 2003

Professor: Douglas Repetto, douglas@music.columbia.edu
TA: Johnathan Lee, jlee@music.columbia.edu

Our Motto: "Why, then how."

January 23rd, 2003

For our first lecture we're going to take a quick tour of a number of semi-recent sound art/installation shows and performances. The work we'll look at covers many of the main ideas and techniques we'll be talking about in the coming weeks. If we don't get through all of this in one class we'll continue next week.

Your research assignment: Have you created or seen other work like this? If so, tell us about it and show some documentation. If not, what here interests you? Find some other interesting examples of sound art and present them to the class. Which of these pieces are the most successful? The least? Why? How could some of them be made more interesting or compelling? Remember you've only got about ten minutes for your presentation, so prepare something short and complete.

L'Objet Sonore

L'Objet Sonore is showing at the Eyedrum Gallery in Atlanta from January 18-February 21st, 2003. It features ten works by artists from the USA, France, and the UK.

We'll talk about the following works:

Marshall Avett: Tidal Pool
Catherine Bechard & Sabin Hudon: Undertones * *
Xavier Charles: Vibrating Surfaces *
Xan Deeb: Hydration Calculator
Will Eccleston: Green
Kevin Jacques: Co Co: Cube of Constant Observation
John Mallia: Transcriptions * * *
Chantelle Minarcine: Untitled
Douglas Repetto: crash and bloom * *
Charlie Smith: Sculptural Emanations Series: Discombobulator II

From Scratch

From Scratch took place at Gale-Martin Fine Art in Chelsea in early January, 2003. From the press release: "From Scratch is a program of electronically based music, video and installations featuring artists who build their own equipment from scratch. The sounds, performances and images will be noisy and amusingly hard to predict."

We'll talk about the following works:

Cory Arcangel: Super Mario Clouds and a couple other NES hacks. * *
LoVid: live performance setup * * *
Nautical Almanac: live performance setup * * * *

ArtBots: The Robot Talent Show

ArtBots is an international art exhibition for robotic art and art-making robots.

We'll talk about the following works:

Ranjit Bhatnagar: Sketching Device #1
Mira Friedlaender, Stephanie Hunt and Keith Waters: Color Musically Yours. Love, Todd.
Douglas Repetto: do not break anything (after christian wolff)
Gregory Shakar: Patterns of Metric Amplitude
David Webber: AO2000
video: ArtBots 2002

Movement-Sound-Image Interaction

A course offered spring 2001 by the Computer Music Center in collaboration with the Visual Arts Division of the School of the Arts of Columbia University and the Department of Dance of Barnard College. Student groups collaborated to create four live movement-sound-image works.

We'll talk about the following works:

peopletank
Projection
OverTime
Dischord

Masterpieces of 20th-Century Electronic Music: A Multimedia Perspective

In addition to a concert of electronic music classics ("Masterpieces" is a really awful title), this event featured a room full of sound art installations. It took place in the summer of 2000

We'll talk about the following works:

Christopher Bailey and Brad Garton: Concrete Soundspace
David Birchfield: Interactions
R. Luke DuBois and Mark McNamara: Soundspace Navigator
Jason Freeman: The Locust Tree in Flower
Douglas Irving Repetto: BeatyBeatyBeaty
Dan Trueman: the Bowed-Sensor-Speaker-Array