What makes Erica Iris Simmons’ talent so great is the way she sees hidden potential within objects. A quick visit to the gallery in her website will reveal her deftness at working with analog materials. She deconstructs banal objects and uses the pieces to recreate them as works of art. As she describes in her artist statement, she looks for “worlds within worlds” as she uses familiar materials to draw in a new way:
I find objects fascinating. Have you ever picked up something in a charity shop and thought about the life its lived? What’s the objects history? Who has held it, loved it, lost it; how has its meaning changed over time? I try to take all of this into account when envisioning a project. I also think about the viewer. What does this object mean at a cultural level? I try to keep as much of the object intact – and I attempt to honor its character as much as physically possible in the final manifestation. I love finding a world in a world.
Her work with sheet music and cassette tape demonstrate her statement beautifully.
In more than 900 pages, the Cambridge history digs up ancient Greek panpipes made of reed and wax; conjures up medieval incantations; considers the metallurgical innovations of the late 14th century and their effect on the production of trumpets; and tracks the widening distance from stage to last row in auditoriums, an expansion that eventually forced singers to belt out top notes with their chest voice.
Easing her full-throttle delivery down to a shivery whisper, she moaned over and over into the microphone, “Ooooh, aaah, love to love you, bay-bee…” Summer would later boast of simulating 22 orgasms, but whatever she did, it worked…
In The Geographic Flow of Music (arxiv), researchers Conrad Lee and Pádraig Cunningham propose a method to use data from the last.fm API to track the world’s listening habits by location and time, showing where shifts in musical tastes have originated and subsequently migrated. Results show music trends originating in smaller cities and flowing outward in unexpected ways, contradicting some assumptions in social science about larger cities being more efficient engines of (cultural) invention.
Minute of Listening is a creative learning project through which Sound and Music hopes to enable every child in the country to gain access to a huge diversity of music and sound and, for sixty seconds each day, to focus on the richness and enjoyment of the act of listening.
The video shows an application that allows a conductor to control the music with different hand gestures. Waving to the right, left or front can have different results such as triggering cues, causing ring modulation and changing the frequency. We don’t have much details on how it was constructed but its obvious that this one takes advantage of the Kinect’s motion sensing abilities and links it to some type of audio system. It’s cool watching her perform with an invisible orchestra and hear those disembodied voices follow her command. Check out the video and experience it yourself.
The poster functions as a target- if a song comes on that you don’t like, just throw something at it (like a piece of paper), and the playlist skips to the next song.
The popularity of music streamed on-demand is to be measured in a new weekly chart. The top 100 rundown will be compiled by the Official Charts Company (OCC) using statistics from audio streaming sites such as Spotify, We7 and Deezer. However, video streaming services, including YouTube, will not contribute to the new chart for the time being.
Product designer Nick Ross’ views on noise pollution aren’t exactly clear. But given the nature of his “Confession” furniture series, he comes off as a guy who values a bit of quiet. Maybe even a man who’d shush you while talking in the library. The lightweight design of these new pieces, modeled after the Catholic confessionals where sinners embark on the Sacrament of Penance, allows them to be mobilized to whatever location would benefit from a private place to chat – a crowded bus terminal, say, or an office in which coworkers flood the zone with food-crunching and laughter.
This week’s episode comes to us from our friends at Art Practical, whose current issue delves into the rich history of sound art in the San Francisco Bay Area. The included essays and interviews constitute a fraction of the rich and varied world of experimental sound. Here, Art Practical’s contributing editors Catherine McChrystal and Kara Q. Smith offer an all-audio version of that issue with samples of work by the artists profiled in that issue
Sheet music fromthe late nineteenth through the early twentieth centuries was, shall we say, the record cover art of its day. Before 78 rpm records were bound into albums with illustrated covers, sheet music was the primary platform for home entertainment. And early on, music publishers understood the virtue in adorning the “first page” with attractive art and appealing typography. These examples (c. 1922) are uniquely poster-like. Hand lettering dominates, and the litho crayon and watercolor brush is apparent. Curiously, despite the virtuosity, the designers’ names and signatures are unknown to me.
![What makes Erica Iris Simmons’ talent so great is the way she sees hidden potential within objects. A quick visit to the gallery in her website will reveal her deftness at working with analog materials. She deconstructs banal objects and uses the pieces to recreate them as works of art. As she describes in her artist statement, she looks for “worlds within worlds” as she uses familiar materials to draw in a new way:
I find objects fascinating. Have you ever picked up something in a charity shop and thought about the life its lived? What’s the objects history? Who has held it, loved it, lost it; how has its meaning changed over time? I try to take all of this into account when envisioning a project. I also think about the viewer. What does this object mean at a cultural level? I try to keep as much of the object intact – and I attempt to honor its character as much as physically possible in the final manifestation. I love finding a world in a world.
Her work with sheet music and cassette tape demonstrate her statement beautifully.
Erica Iris Simmons
(via Artist Hacks Sheet Music To Create Musical Portraits [Pics] - PSFK)](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m3gqz5tLkJ1qc55vfo1_500.jpg)
