My radio-based installation Hive had its second outing at the Latitude festival in July. 
50 or more radios, each tuned to a different station and left to run simultaneously in an enclosed dome. All possible radio sources broadcasting simultaneously in one location. 

We are inundated with information all the time. This installation examines how one filters this information.


15,000 people visited the installation at Latitude. It was very interesting to watch how they interacted with it.
There was quite a bit of media interest, including BBC Click and ITN News, and Max Reinhardt from BBC Radio 3's excellent Late Junction show. Here's his Latitude write-up.
The BBC also interviewed me for the Today Programme on Radio 4. I'd never heard the Today Programme before; I'm not known as an early riser.
I was asked to install Hive by Dr Marius Kwint in association with the Wellcome Trust.

The installation connects very closely with the work scientists are carrying out at the cutting edge of auditory research, investigating the ways that we interpret and filter multiple auditory signals: The cocktail party effect and other processes relating to the acoustics of three dimensional spaces, pattern recognition, and familiarity through repetition and cultural experiences.

Marius chaired a talk with me and music psychologist Dr Vicky Williamson to discuss the science behind Hive's immersive acoustic. Vicky gave her insight into the current thinking: We now know that information doesn't simply flow as one-way traffic from the ears to the brain to be processed; as much information passes in the opposite direction, with the brain actively instructing the ears what to listen out for.

Interestingly, closing your eyes while listening doesn't simply enhance listening by denying visual stimuli, it is now understood that the act of doing this physiologically changes the way the brain and ears function, and alters the listening experience at a fundamental level.
The film at the top of this blog is made from stills taken inside the dome at Latitude, manipulated by film-maker and animator Amy Engels. 
Thanks are due to Marius Kwint, Vicky Williamson, Richard Wingate, Tania Harrison from Latitude, Amy Sanders from the Wellcome Trust and Andy James. And especially to Richard and all at Ruark for the kind loan of your great radios. 

And I would like to thank the Guardians of the Portal of Noise - Toni, Ed, Amy and Alex, who babysat the dome for hours at a stretch.

​It sounds like chaos at first, but it's calming once you're used to it. I slept in there one night.
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Preparation for my next project.

Carrying a 70 litre bag of J Arthur Bower's Multipurpose Compost up to a high floor of an abandoned building. This is the final stage of a complicated 3 hour journey carrying 3 bags.
 
Hive has taken place, and I enjoyed it.  A profound experience.

While nothing will be quite like listening to the piece live in the Dome itself, you can still hear the whole of the piece as streamed at Mixlr by clicking here.

Well, almost all of it - the generator ran out of juice 15 minutes before 11am on Sunday, and refilling it and then resetting the computer and interface took quite a while, so I missed the one minute silence on Remembrance Sunday.  It was quite fitting in a way for the broadcast to be silent just then.  Strange how these things work.  

Click here to hear from 11am to 2pm - this recording starts with the bugler at the Cenotaph.  The Mixlr recordings are scrollable, so you can be impatient and go straight to the top of the hours to see how the multiplied news sounds, and check how different it feels at different times of day and night.  Some hours felt very impatient to me, others like the radios just weren't bothering.  Always shifting though.  Some of the audio overlaps were astonishing.

I had a backup recorder running, so hopefully I'll be able to post up the actual 11am silence moment at some point.  Of course not all the radios were silent, but the mood changed instantly.  I have recorded all of the 24 hours of Hive at higher resolution for use in a further representations of the piece.

I was very pleased with the response to the installation.  Thanks to everyone who came by in person, particularly those that made the long trip to the North Norfolk coast, and to everyone who listened live and communicated with me while it happened.  Thanks to Sound and Music for their support with Hive, and to Henry Labouchere for giving me my personal flypast in his 1930 biplane, such a thrill I almost dropped my iPhone.  Thanks once again to Bevis Bowden for another 24 hours.  And most of all many thanks to Patrick Allen, the Friends of Langham Dome and the North Norfolk Historic Buildings Trust for making me so welcome and permitting me to install Hive in their remarkable building.
 
Click here to go to the live audio stream of Hive - this will run until 2pm on Sunday 13th November.  Occasional video too.  It's working, which is a relief.  The audio stream sounds quite mad, but in a good way - in the Dome it's much more comprehensible.
 
Click here to go to the page which explains more fully what I'm doing this coming weekend at Langham Dome.  And what Langham Dome actually is.

Hive

1/11/2011

6 Comments

 
Hive is my latest sound project, taking place in Norfolk on the weekend of 12th / 13th November 2011.  I am very pleased to be working with Sound And Music to present this installation, and rather than trying to think of a slightly different way of saying exactly the same thing, here is the blurb from the Sound And Music website:

"Following his 24-hour Theremin marathon on The Manhattan Bridge this summer, Nick Franglen’s latest sound installation will see the experimental musician holed up for 24 hours in a remote WW2 concrete gunnery dome in the company of fifty radios, each tuned to a different station.

Franglen is inspired by the urban landscape and other found spaces, from London and Manhattan Bridges to a submarine, a mine and jet engine test bed. His work contextualises its environment, providing an often spontaneous, improvised reaction to time and place. Sound and Music is delighted to support this latest work at Langham Dome. On Armistice weekend he uses this WWII anti-aircraft training dome as a unique place for his installation and testing site for his concept: ‘Hive’."

Hive is an open event in an unusual location, so the curious are more than welcome to attend to experience this piece for themselves.  Click here for location and times.  I will be recording the audio inside the Dome using moving microphones, and I'm going to stream some of that audio live so those that can't make the journey will be able to hear what is happening inside a concrete dome in North Norfolk.

Coming to this site very shortly is a full explanation of what I plan to do, and why.  It's all about filtering information.
 
I am delighted to present the film of Hymn To The Manhattan Bridge.

On June 21st 2011, I played a theremin under the Manhattan Bridge for 24 hours, starting and ending at midnight.  Sensors on the bridge above me registered the passing of each cyclist, creating a moment of silence for everyone who cycled over the bridge that day.  This film is a record of that day.

I have been looking at photos of DUMBO, this area of Brooklyn, preparing for the approaching hurricane Irene.  I am struck how different it all felt when I was there, only a few weeks ago.
 
I thought I was going to do a quick retrospective of Hymn To The Manhattan Bridge, but I haven't - mainly because it took me quite a bit longer than I'd expected to get back to normal after the excellent but exhausting New York experience.  And then other things came along that had to be dealt with first.  However... the good news is that one of those things has been the film of Hymn To The Manhattan Bridge; it's finished and ready for public perusal.  It's a big file that's uploading now, so once that's happened I'll put it up here, most likely tomorrow.

In the meantime, here is a short my-eye experience taken during my 24 hours playing music within the Archway under the Manhattan Bridge.  

The road digger had an air horn alert thing that killed all sound around it - it was quite painful to walk near it.  Someone said it was my nemesis - how can you make slowly developing textural music with that racket going on? - but it really captured something of the manic buzz of the area for me - the trains, the trucks, the roadworks.  Here's a little two-part film - the digger doing its skraaark! thing, then my theremin-created musical response.

This phone camera video is in no way a taster for the full film.
 
I'm going to upload some audio from Hymn to the Manhattan Bridge over the next couple of days.  The internet feed carrying the live audio stream was very intermittent and then failed completely after around 6 hours, so only those in The Archway will have heard what happened as the piece progressed.  

It's all about trains.
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Click here to go to the Hymn to the Manhattan Bridge connectivity page, where you'll be able to listen live to the piece as it runs, and even see what I'm looking at from time to time as well.  If I remember to turn my phone camera on, that is.


The piece is going to run from midnight to midnight Eastern Daylight Time throughout June 21st 2011, which is 5am on June 21st until 5am on June 22nd in the UK.  Connections will come online close to midnight in New York.

It's a noisy, buzzy place, New York.  Going to be interesting.
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franglen.net