Found Sound

I'm always a bit quiet on the blog when I'm in school, but I'm finally getting towards the end of my program, which means I'm indulging myself and taking classes that I can't totally justify professionally, but that satisfy some of the creative-librarianship tendencies that got me to apply in the first place.

I've had the idea for a found sound archive for quite some time, but I wanted to build a really good interface for field recordings. Something you can touch and move. I'm building a prototype as a final project for my Programming for Interactivity class. Here's the gist:

I bought this cabinet with a built-in radio online:

The ultimate goal is to build in an RFID reader and fill the drawers with RFID-tagged objects, and an SD card with field recordings linked to those RFIDs. When an object is placed on the reader, the related sound recording will play back. It sounds simple, but there are a bunch of intermediary steps that I haven't totally worked out yet. Like how to play back the sound. Ideally, I could just wire the Arduino to the speaker on the built-in radio in the cabinet, but I think I need an intermediary. And all the intermediaries I find seem to output in mono, which is fine, except that it's field recordings, and in a perfect world, you'd be playing with this thing, wearing headphones, and you'd pick out an object, like a little bird, and you'd put the bird on the reader and then you'd be surrounded by birdsong and you'd forget where you are for a split second. Mono is just not going to cut it. But that's okay. This is the prototype, right?

Updates as I have them. My first task is to get the RFID reader to read an RFID tag. Wish me luck!

Marathon clips

The marathon runs right through our neighborhood, and is always a good place for people watching.

Here are a couple of clips from this morning, set to old chestnuts from the Colonial catalog:

(I'm not too sure what the story is with the black border on the videos-- I'm not savvy enough to have put them there myself!)

Party Frog & Lucas T. Ford Make The Halloween Scene

Shamblers Halloween party mix

Sounds best loud.

Happy Halloween!!

Hey Scott NM

There's a new 71-disc Miles Davis box set coming out?


Whaaaaaaaaaaat?

Music I heard on WFMU this afternoon that I think Jess will like

I couldn't find videos for "Peanut" (from our favorite Sonny Sharrock LP, "Black Woman") and "Endlessly Fascinated" (brand new!!) by the unstoppably good Psychedelic Horseshit.

"Peanut" was on Mayor McDowell's "Long Rally." The rest were on "Three Chord Monty" and Brian Turner's Show.

We're in Wine Country

Not a metaphor. We're really here.

"Downtown New York"

I saw "After Hours" for the first time last night and, noticing that Rockets Redglare was in it, I started snooping around the internet for stories surrounding his involvement.

What I found instead was this link to clips from "Downtown New York," a then-contemporary public access show with which I was otherwise unfamiliar.

Watching clips of Soho from the latter half of the 80s reminded me of this Glenn O'Brien article (to keep the NY public access theme going), about his realization that the neighborhood had become "too hot" for his handling. The gallery scenes from "Style Wars" come to mind as well (fast forward to 2:53)-- the time around which the neighborhood replaced its art makers with art buyers.

Things change, I'm not saying anything new, but it's been on my mind recently and is one of those facts that manages to surprise me whenever I'm reminded of it.

Eucalyptus - our new roommate