Installations & Controllers
Sounding Landscapes—Bee Conservancy
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Description of Sounding Landscapes—Bee Conservancy
Sounding Landscapes—Bee Conservancy is a collaborative installation by mother and daughter Chris and Leah Reid. The installation brings together visual and sonic artforms, combining a painted landscape with an immersive soundscape composition. The work highlights pollinator gardens and the important creatures that live among us. The visual portion of the work was painted by Chris Reid and consists of a large, life-size 3-panel plein air landscape of Chris’ gardens. The work is filled with an explosion of vibrant floral colors and textures. The sound portion of the work, composed by Leah Reid, comprises a 20-minute composition that encapsulates sounds of Jaffrey center—the historic meeting house’s bell ringing in the distance, the sound of bees, hornets, and insects humming and buzzing, geese flying south, birds, and trees swaying in the wind. In the piece, these sounds are combined with Chris speaking about her inspirations, garden, and the sounds and rhythms of her painting en plein air. The listener hears Chris’ unique stroke work and the process of completing the piece from underpainting to final touches. The work is about taking a step back and observing the beauty of nature. The installation brings together both Chris and Leah’s love of gardening, New Hampshire, and their awe of the bees that visit the garden year after year. The work enables others to experience the beauty of this scene and be immersed in the sounds that surround it through two artists’ eyes. It's not simply art with music—the work explores sight, sound, and environment--taking the senses to a level that reveals the bees, the wind, and all the ambient sounds adding to the visual expression of movement, texture, and emotional expression that takes place in painting. For information about the artist, please visit www.chrisreidstudio.com. |
Click the image above to read about Chris & Leah's collaboration in the Monadnock Ledger.
Photo by Ben Conant courtesy of the Monadnock Ledger.
Chris & Leah Reid
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Mobile Music
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Description of Mobile Music
Mobile Music is an installation and hanging mobile “score” that is continuously in motion. It can be interpreted as both a visual art piece or as a physical musical score. The installation is comprised of three elements: the physical mobile, the mobile’s shadow, and 14 hanging score fragments. Each element can be interpreted individually or in conjunction with the other visual elements of the piece. The score fragments were created using an anamorphic system and were designed to mimic the visual mobile through an analogy of turning and rotation. |
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Bubble Interlude
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Description of Bubble Interlude
Bubble Interlude is a piece that explores the concept of “play” through the act of blowing bubbles and popping them. In this piece, bubbles take the form of both literal soap bubbles and metaphorical “sound” bubbles. Similar to the soap bubbles, sounds are formed and extinguished through a game of virtual “bubble catch.” The piece is designed for two people: one making longer sounds and forming the bubbles, and the other person generating shorter sounds, cutting off or altering the sounds, and popping the bubbles. |
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Frankolin
Description of the Frankolin
The Frankolin was designed in 2009 by Leah Reid, Feifei Xue, and Adam Somers. The current edition of the Frankolin is an electric Yamaha with 11 added sensors. All of these sensors are placed such as not to interfere with normal violin playing so that they can be used both passively for gesture capture or actively for musical parameter control. Of the 11 total sensors, 3 are sonar receivers on the body of the instrument, 3 are from an accelerometer on the violin’s body, 3 are from an accelerometer on the bow, and 2 are force sensing resistors on the bow. A MAX/MSP patch aggregates the data from the three sonar receivers in order to determine bow position, reducing the number of inputs to 9. Audio signals at 40kHz audio signals are transmitted and received using an audio interface operating at 96kHz sampling rate. The three received sonar signals are combined into one and the result is linearized using a lookup table. These nine inputs are interpreted into musical performance data and are mapped onto various DSP parameters in a live-electronics, electro-acoustic setting. Because the Frankolin is receiving performance data directly from the performer, the misconnect between the performer’s actions and the resulting electronic sound is almost eliminated. The received sensor data can either be mapped directly onto the performers own data or can be used as a controller to affect another ensemble member’s playing. Although this augmented violin is not the first of its kind, the gestural data, mappings, and compositional usages of this data are entirely novel as well as cost-effective.
The Frankolin was designed in 2009 by Leah Reid, Feifei Xue, and Adam Somers. The current edition of the Frankolin is an electric Yamaha with 11 added sensors. All of these sensors are placed such as not to interfere with normal violin playing so that they can be used both passively for gesture capture or actively for musical parameter control. Of the 11 total sensors, 3 are sonar receivers on the body of the instrument, 3 are from an accelerometer on the violin’s body, 3 are from an accelerometer on the bow, and 2 are force sensing resistors on the bow. A MAX/MSP patch aggregates the data from the three sonar receivers in order to determine bow position, reducing the number of inputs to 9. Audio signals at 40kHz audio signals are transmitted and received using an audio interface operating at 96kHz sampling rate. The three received sonar signals are combined into one and the result is linearized using a lookup table. These nine inputs are interpreted into musical performance data and are mapped onto various DSP parameters in a live-electronics, electro-acoustic setting. Because the Frankolin is receiving performance data directly from the performer, the misconnect between the performer’s actions and the resulting electronic sound is almost eliminated. The received sensor data can either be mapped directly onto the performers own data or can be used as a controller to affect another ensemble member’s playing. Although this augmented violin is not the first of its kind, the gestural data, mappings, and compositional usages of this data are entirely novel as well as cost-effective.