Acoustics of Shells

The seashell has an inside of which has many hard, curved surfaces great for reflecting sound the ambient noise. The air moving past and within the shell, the blood flowing through your head, the conversation going on in the next room—is resonating inside the cavity of the shell, being amplified and becoming clear enough for us to notice. Different sizes and shapes of shell sound different because different resonant chambers will amplify different frequencies.

Whispering walls

St Pauls

Ideas for Listening devices for the Tidal Thames

Wartime listening device, Capel

A concrete 'ear' on the cliffs near Capel-le Ferne, similar to that on the Dungeness marshes. The idea was to pick up the sound of approaching aircraft, but it was superseded by radar- and faster aircraft.


More Info

Tides - What causes them? How do they work?

Clear Information about Tides

Tide is defined as the vertical movement of water and only goes up and down

Current is the horizontal or sideways flow of water. It floods in which makes the tide rise and ebbs out which makes the tide fall. 

The difference between the high tide and low tide is called the range of tide. For instance, if the water depth at high tide is 20 feet and at low tide is 18 feet, the range of tide is two feet.
There are two types of currents that you can expect in regard to tides.

• Flooding current is experienced when the tide is rising.

• Ebbing current is experienced when the tide is falling.

When the tide has reached it highest and lowest points there is a brief period where there is no current ebbing or flooding, this is referred to as slack water.

The length of time that it takes for the earth to rotate around so that the moon is in the same position is actually a little over a normal 24 hour day. It is 24 hours and 50 minutes or a tidal day. That is why the tidal cycle starts approximately 50 minutes later each day. As the earth rotates, the moon’s gravitational force continually mounds the water and that fluid mound moves around the earth. The actual height of the tide is influenced by the shape of the coastline and depth of the water.

Thames at 4am Sound Recordings

Sound has become recognised as a medium that can make people question and reflect about many things including their own autobiographical experiences and narratives. As well as how movement and interaction in urban environments is partly influenced by the built environment, and temporal dimensions of the everyday.

Listening to sound whether that may be through field recordings (selected individual pieces of audio) and/or soundscapes (audio compositions created from a range of recordings) sheds light on how sound can both be an investigatory tool and an emotive medium. Stopping and listening can engender an experience(s) making the subconsciously known and mundane a revealing and surreal encounter of the world that we live in. Consequently the ordinary can become the extraordinary
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Sound Mapping

Link to Sound Mapping of The Thames (Kent + Essex)

Something a little interactve: PLAY Orchestra at the Southbank

PLAY.orchestra is our virtual orchestra, which was based outside the Royal Festival Hall on the South Bank of the Thames during the summer of 2006.

56 plastic cubes and 3 Hotspots were laid out on a full size orchestra stage, each cube containing a light and speaker

Sitting down on the cubes or standing in the hotspots turned on an individual instrument and with the addition of 58 friends you could hear the full piece.

The installation was also Bluetooth enabled - allowing participants to receive a ringtone of the piece they had created as well as other Philharmonia Orchestra ringtones.

The orchestra played two different pieces each week - one a new commission from a young composer and one a piece from the classical repertoire.

The music played when the seats were activated was made using samples from our free sample library - you can download the samples here.

Time After, Time Along, The River : Marie Jose Burki

The video artist and photographer Marie José Burki produces pictures and modern-day frescos, whose protagonists are captured undertaking activities that are far from spectacular: a woman lying in the sun, people sharing a picnic or dining together. In her videos, the artist loves playing with ponderous movements, cuts, stills and repetition in order to distort any notions of space and time. In this way she generates suspended moments in time, glimpses of an eternal present, which might be anywhere, which have no distinctive qualities and where the subjects seem like prisoners, forever waiting. Occasionally, her images take on a theatrical quality in their artificiality and this incites the spectator to question his own position somewhere between accomplice and voyeur, somehow doubting the reality of what he is contemplating.


In 2000-2001, her work was projected in an outdoor exhibition in New York - Time After, Time Along, The River (Hudson) and in London - Time After, Time Along, The River (Thames), an outdoor projection accompanied by a radio programme.


The Audio CD which accompanies the book, consists of many voices of local inhabitants repeating their names in a repetitive fashion, sometimes overlapping in cannon. This is reflective of the tidal movements and also highlights the number of people the river effects the daily life's of.

Frenzy

Finding a direction: Research: Tschumi

Working with sound and the site closely I feel is causing my findings to come further and further away from architecture within film and spatial design. I have begun to read into some theorists to try to see my project in a different view, and to hopefully reign in and pinpoint exactly what I am wanting, and needing to achieve. Starting with Tschimi: 


Tschumi's critical understanding of Arcitecture remains at the core of his practice today. By arguing that there is no space without event, he designs conditions for a reinvention of living, rather than repeating established aesthetic or symbolic conditions of design. Through these means of architecture becomes a frame for "constructed situations" a notion informed by the theory, city mappings and urban designs of Situationist International.

The ScreenPlays explore the relation between events ("theprogram") and architectural spaces, on one hand, and transformational devices of a sequential nature, on the other.

"There is no architecture without Action, 

There is no architecture without Event, 

There is no architecture without Program."

Instead of designing seductive shapes or forms, one would post an action or principle from which everything else would derive. 


Tschumi felt different means of expression should be able to exchange frames of reference, theoretical or technical progress, theoretical or technical progress, modes of production and distribution, they should cross their aesthetic concern, question and examine each other, let their peripheral zones be occupied, their no-mann's land explored, their borders transgressed. 


He explains that, from spaces of the past, a notion that should be treated with caution. It is often a departure point for conversation and nostalgia. 


Tschimi theories are particularly interesting to read as his views on cinema an film, can be directly drawn from expanded cinema. 

"Its the in-between that really matters, and it takes on an immense presence at Le Fresnoy. A space where anything might happen, a place of experimentation, a place located on the margins. This in-between space quickly becomes a fundamental condition of the project." 


A shelter for the set - the invertible relations between architecture and cinema bounce back in Le Fresnoy with Tschumi's "hangaring" of the existing structures, which are actually cinemas, edifices of distraction. The misunderstanding of cinema is that is it a projection system,the display space or frame, for cinema to happen on a canvas and not in a decor. 


I believe the following paragraph explained Tschumi's work, 
"The drive to create unprogrammed events reveals inventive and astonishing possibilities for the use of places. Isn't the very fact that we now visit the chapel as a museum a demonstration that its function has already changed? What we see is the matrix of a shift in the sacred. Tschumi goes even further: He claims that one can dissociate places and theory uses, thus allow unfitting practices in revised and corrected places.


The most stimulating forms are the ones that permit a variety of uses, sometimes unexpected, born of a user's sudden urge and not of the program that presided over the building construction." 


Through looking into Tschumi's work I have begun to understand what I am trying to do within the space and film; 


To think of the tide as a performance piece (the Action) having a huge effect on the atmosphere of the space and I feel in hand it reflects, literally and in some ways abstractly, the site. By recording the constant systematical rhymic change in tides, but emphasising the beauty and magical quality its holds. I hope to use both the visual and aural documentation and manipulation taken, within the site and through cinema to accentuate this fundamental element which is so often ignored. My intentions are to produce a environment which frames and adorns this performance, englufing the viewer into a transe like state, both healing and informing. 

Further drawing of site

Morning Tides 4am - 7am

Test Effects from April Hudson on Vimeo.

Morning Tides from April Hudson on Vimeo.

Drawing of site

Testing

Test one - Thames Tides from April Hudson on Vimeo.


This video shows a compilation of short films taken a different times along the Southbank. It shows the beauty and diversity the Thames brings to the space. It is a known fact that the aural experience of water, especially tides relaxes the body, this is due to the water hitting the shore having the same cycle time as the human respiratory cycle. By slowing parts of the video down, I believe it creates an almost hypnotic  footage, which allows you to experience the beautiful currents and draws you into the aural experience.


I have ephazised this below:



Test: Slowed from April Hudson on Vimeo.


I now plan to take these test further by using different waterproof and suspension devices to help produce films by immersing and floating the camera. 

Roni Horn: Thames project.

Roni Horn: Water.

Tides and Times

TIDES and TIMES:
As I am interesting in enhancing the Southbanks inhabiters awareness of the Thames ever changing state and how it can effect the atmosphere of the area, I began researching previous work involving this idea. I can across the BBC and RIBAs attempts to celebrate the Thames creating platforms for short films to be played and interactive software to be used by visitors.




A SONIFICATION OF THE THAMES

Flood Tide is a live musical performance generated by the flow of the River Thames. A sensor placed in the water registers changes in the current's strength, which is then converted into musical notation and performed by professional and community musicians, including an orchestra, vocalists and taiko drummers.

The music starts off gently, lilting as the low tide begins its imperceptible transformation into the flood. As the water's flow intensifies, the tempo, rhythm and tonality are amplified. At full strength the music pulsates with a passionate, dynamic turbulence.

First performed in 2008, this production of Flood Tide is the most ambitious yet, with a record number of musicians performing for the duration of a tide cycle.

By John Eacott, presented in association with the Centre for Young Musicians, Southbank Centre's Voicelab and Tomorrow's Warriors

RONI HORN
Still Water (The River Thames, for Example) is an installation of photographs of the River Thames in which the photographs are interwoven with text in the form of footnotes to convey ideas Horn’s had about the river. Water is an enduring motif in Horn’s work, whether it be the “palpable nature” of Iceland’s pools and hot springs, or the seascapes of the Arctic Ocean: “Going into water is going into yourself. Water is a mirror. When you see your reflection in water, do you recognise the water in you?”.

Sea Room, Budapest.

The final video shows an excerpt of a letter from Carlos Mourão Pereira to Juhani Pallasmaa after finishing the first phase of the project Sea Bathing Facility, presented in the exhibition Sea Room Budapest. The simultaneous visual image, soundscape and descriptive narrator heightens the experience of the viewer as they gain a fuller understanding of the space, and perhaps appreciate it more. 

David New - A composer talking about listening.

"A soundscape is any collection of sounds, almost like a painting is a collection of visual attractions," says composer R. Murray Schafer. "When you listen carefully to the soundscape it becomes quite miraculous." David New's portrait of the renowned composer becomes a lesson unto itself, gracing viewers (and listeners) with a singular moment of interactive subjectivity. This film was produced for the 2009 Governor General's Performing Arts Award.


"I think if you listen carefully your life is enhanced, It becomes much more interesting, its the same as looking carefully. If you can use your senses properly, in art we try to get people to use their senses to listen carefully and look carefully, which enriches your life."


"The world is a huge musical composition. We are the composers of this composition... We can add more noise's or more beautiful sounds, its up to us."


I feel this video explains what I am aware of and the drive behind my work.

Bernhard Leither

HörSaal. A Wave Field Installation
In the static hearing space (sound material: speech) the listener wanders through various places in the hall, which are indicated visually by the installation of staves, 2 m high and painted red. Out of a diffuse noise pervading the total space and assembled out of twelve different speech channels we step into precisely defined sound sites, extremely individual hearing spaces, where we experience the sound-world of words spoken by the physicists Planck, Schrödinger, Einstein, Meitner, Hahn, Pauli and Heisenberg.

SPACE REFLECTION MZ

sound/body/spaces

Exhibition Kunsthaus Mürzzuschlag (Austria)

SPIRAL SPACE 1973/2008

Nationalgalerie Berlin, Hamburger Bahnhof. 2008

Circles of sound at equal distance from each other move transversally to the direction of the sound tube. The spiralling acoustic space is generated according to one’s own walking speed: at a slow pace it is a confined, forward-rotating acoustic space; at a fast pace, the space is stretched and spirals its curved lines of sound around the person.

Bernhard Leitner Films

Royal Festival Hall Accoustics

The Royal Festival Hall was a landmark acoustic design within the 20th century. The Royal Festival Hall was one of only a few large concert halls in the world to be designed in the first half of the 20th century. It was a key component of the 1951 Festival of Britain. The opening and dedication of the hall, in the presence of the Archbishop of Canterbury and the King and Queen, marked a resurgence of national optimism and confidence following the end of the Second World War.


In recent years the building has attracted much interest, both in its own right and as part of the general redevelopment of London’s South Bank area. Many of its interior spaces have recently been restored to their original appearance, and there is now in place a further refurbishment programme, in which particular attention is being paid to the acoustics of the auditorium.


Acoustic Design at the Centre
At the time when the Royal Festival Hall plans were developed, it was most unusual for the acoustics of a hall to be considered from the outset of the design process. The acoustic consultants formed an integral part of the design team. The Festival Hall was one of the first concert halls in the world to be built using the application of scientific principles, both theoretical and experimental. The acoustic behaviour of the seats were measured and tested in a laboratory to enable more exacting design. Careful consideration of external noise problems was undertaken. Many of the procedures used in the design of this hall now form an essential part of modern concert hall design.
The acoustic consultancy team responsible for this pioneering work consisted of Hope Bagenal, a highly respected architect and acoustician, and consultants from the Building Research Station, Henry Humphreys, Peter Parkin and William Allen.


Following the opening of the hall, there was some criticism of certain aspects of the acoustics. The problems reportedly arose as some of the original specifications for room surfaces determined by the acoustic consultants were ignored in the building process. This led to the introduction of a new electronic system of ‘assisted resonance’, the first time that the acoustics of a concert hall had been improved electronically.


Without doubt, the sound is warmer, fuller, all over the hall, and there is greater physical impact — a quality essential to true musical experience, as Berlioz argued when he wrote that music in mid-19th century Paris was habitually performed in spaces too big for it: “You hear but don’t vibrate [on entend, on ne vibre pas] — and one must vibrate with the instruments in order to experience genuine musical sensations.” Impact and performances of exceptional force and vitality - Times, David Carns.

BioAcoustics

Sound as we know has a emotional effect on all of us, but the vibrations from sounds have also been applied to medical science in the form of Bio Acoustics: 

What Happens in a BioAcoustics session?
A typical BioAcoustics session consists of taking a voice print (speaking 45 seconds into a microphone attached to a computer program). The voice print is then analyzed to determine:
1. what things are out of balance in your body, and
2. what frequencies would be of benefit for you to listen to.

The next step is to apply the frequencies to your body. This is done on our special sound table. This table will give you your frequencies through your whole body by acupuncture points, bone conduction, skin, ears, and energy fields. At the same time, a CD is being made for you to take home and use.


The National Sound and Light therapy centre provides children who are autistic, who have learning disabilities and or communication disorders help through sound and light. 45% of all patients show a major improvement, 26% show changes and only 9% have no reaction to the process. 


The Southbank is a pocket of space which balances open space with leisure activities. This quality means that a large amount of the cross section of inhabitants go to the site to release stress and escape from the outside world. Looking into the methods used in Bio Acoustics I can see how sound can be used to reduce stress levels on the site.