This piece was presented in a live performance at EMS 2011 in New York City. The audio is based on hydrophone recordings of waves washing on Duxbury Beach in Duxbury, MA, USA. The portion you see in the example presented here is an excerpt of a pre-recorded audio-video piece, which accompanied with additional live audio based on the same hydrophone recordings.

I wanted to create a video piece that reacted directly to the cyclical events of the waves heard in the hydrophone recording. I wanted to visual part of the piece to represent the rising and falling intensities of the wave events, as well as the complexity of their sound.

The visual music for this piece, as well as the other two examples, was created using VDMX, a modular platform for live video performance developed for Macintosh OS X by Vidvox. VDMX is capable of taking audio input, analyzing the frequency and intensity content of that input in realtime, and generating control data from the intensity levels of several user-determined frequency bands.

I chose to analyze 4 frequency bands for each piece (different bands for each piece), and to coordinate the resulting control data to the red (R), green (G), blue (B), and Alpha channels of a gradient video synthesizer built into VDMX. I also applied delays to the R/G/B/Alpha channels to slow their rate of change somewhat, so their changes would be rendered more visibly, if less accurately. My intentions were inspired by data visualization, though the works are not intended to be a strictly accurate representation.

I created the piece using a handmade analog synthesizer from Flower Electronics and a Eurorack-based modular hybrid audio/video synthesizer of my own design. I drew additional audio material from the aforementioned zills as well as a set of children’s toy handbells. The video source was a small security camera aimed out the window, down to a darkened street in Boston’s Fort Point. The audio and video processing was controlled entirely by control voltage, and the two synthesizers passed control signals between each other.

Here is a video clip of the first performance, where you can see a portion of the live video being generated.

Here is the complete audio, recorded directly from the board onto a Sony PCM-M10.

Intuition Triggers 1 for improvising solo contrabass – Performance Notes
by Mike Bullock

Each name on the score represents an artist whose solo instrumental work represents a significant influence on the composer’s own solo work. Other performers may substitute names of their own choosing prior to the performance. The names are abbreviated to keep their significance on an informal level.

The performer should allow his/her eye to move intuitively over the score, concentrating on the various connections among the names more than the specific names themselves. The drawn connections suggest varying fields of gravity exerted by the names, and the performer should allow those gravity fields to pull his/her improvisation in various directions. When the eye settles on a certain connection (real or imagined), the performer should restrict his/her playing to this area. Once this area is done, there should be a brief pause before intuitively following the next connection.

The idea is to externalize certain major influences and offload some of the mental process of structuring these influences for the sake of clarity.

The full names belong to the following composers:

John Lely
Erik Satie
Iancu Dumitrescu
Iannis Xenakis
Morton Feldman
Oren Ambarchi
Greg Kelley

michaeltbullock at gmail dot com

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I have always found improvisation to be the most productive zone for me in my artistic practice; I use improvisation at various stages of the creative process, and complement it with process-oriented actions, phonographic/videographic investigations, and indeterminacy.

My long personal history of live performance informs the rest of my body of work as well, whether it be my drawings about (or made with) sounding objects, my installations with performative aspects, or my writings about non-standard performance practices.

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« Sound thresholds : indoors and outdoors » « Seuil de son: à l’intérieur, à l’éxterieur»

This workshop will explore the overlaps between outdoor and indoor sound, both how we make it and how we receive it. We will start with sound recording excursions to the environments around Mulhouse, as well as the inner sound environments of the studio. Particpants will work in small groups to develop sound pieces for presentation, using a combination of their recordings and sounds made live using a variety of means.
Participants will be encouraged to seek sites that blur the line between indoors and outdoors: crumbling buildings, tents, patios and other thresholds. Weather and other factors permitting, the final pieces will be presented in these unusual places.

In preparation for the class, I built several small piezo-electric contact microphones, which became the property of the class.

Among other things, students amplified and performed the sounds of a concrete and steel stairwell on campus.

Listen to the full audio recording of the stairwell sounding:

The student on the left applies a contact microphone to a metal strut in a hallway on the UMass Boston campus, while his classmate on the right operates a battery-powered speaker to amplify the vibrations.

A student nestles a microphone among the leaves of an outdoor potted plant.

Dropping gravel on an amplified wooden board clamped to a contact microphone.

Discovering the hidden sounds of the pier and harbor.

Suggested reading/listening for “The Unheard World: Microphones and Listening.” This is an informal list to get you started, arranged somewhat intuitively. 

R. Murray Shafer

• The paper-passing exercise was drawn from his book A Sound Education.
• The Soundscape is his best-known work, and lays out his philosophies.

Annea Lockwood: check out CDs The Glass World and A Sound Map of the Hudson River.

Pauline Oliveros

• Deep Listening: A Composer’s Sound Practice and Deep Listening Pieces

John Cage

• Wrote many books on his philosophies, including Silence
• Cartridge Music: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3aKT2kDJSng&feature=youtube_gdata_player

Pierre Schaeffer – French composer who coined the term musique concrète for music composed of recordings of objects and environments.

- Étude aux Chemins de Fer (1948), music made from recordings of trains. The earliest example of musique concrète.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9pOq8u6-bA

Voice Crack: cracked everyday electronics

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4GCYhTLWXo
• My article on Voice Crack: “Cracked Everyday Life”  http://www.intransitiverecordings.com/sound-art/cracked-everyday-life/

Jana Winderen: Norwegian nature recordist and composer, makes extensive use of hydrophones. http://www.janawinderen.com/

Toshiya Tsunoda: Japanese artist who works extensively with contact microphones, recording vibrations in solid matter, often at maritime locations.  http://www.frameworkradio.net/rootedition.html#tsunoda

New England Phonographers Union: An open group of people interested in field recordings and the use of unprocessed field recordings in performance.   http://nephono.wordpress.com

Michael T. Bullock (hey, that’s me):

• Vagues/Ondes, based on hydrophone recordings http://vimeo.com/26180710

Audio recording by MTB; video and stills by Cat Mazza.

You can download the text-based instrumental score: PDF

Blowing A Round by Mike Bullock is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

My radio show for Framework on ResonanceFM, part of the Team:Afield series, 2010

Composed of field recordings from various points in New York and France. Composed at the request of Patrick McGinley of ResonanceFM.

A electracoustic piece I made for an installation at the Sonic Fragments conference at Princeton University in 2008. Participants used mp3 players to listen to Prequel in the basement at the Woolworth Music Building at Princeton, as part of a walking tour of pieces intended for specific places on the Princeton campus. Based on a cassette recording of a solo piano piece I composed while at Princeton in 1994.

Later installed as a listening station piece for the show “Lost & Found” at the Nave Gallery, Somerville MA, 2009.

A portrait of a commercial shipping district in Boston.