Akusmata

AKUSMATA presentation at Resonanssi!

On Saturday October 6th 2012, a selection of Akusmata artists will be presented at Resonanssi event. The event will be held at Arthouse Cinema Niagara, Tampere. Professionals and students of film sound and music will meet each other in this third annual seminar. This year’s theme is ”Active sound”.

Akusmata program:

1. Dennis Tan: Harmonize (2012)
2. Kacper Ziemianin: Around the clock (2012)
3. Charlie  Morrow: Sound Glass Space (2012)
4. Janne Särkelä:  Ambient² (2012)
5. Petri Kuljuntausta: Black Groove (2012), video: Random Doctors & Klaustrofobia

All works in this concert were originally presented at Sound Art Gallery Akusmata. Many of these works are originally multichannel installations, so for this concert the artists reworked their piece and composed a special version of the work. Sound Art Gallery Akusmata is a gallery for Sound Art, Sound Installations, and sound-based Media Art and Video Art. The gallery also presents radiophonic, acousmatic and soundscape compositions. Akusmata opened its doors in February 2012 in Helsinki, Finland.

Dennis Tan
HARMONIZE

The works in the exhibition Sound Kinesis, deals mainly with the kinetic properties of sound. Low frequency sounds, not audible to the human ear, are used to visualize the characteristics of the modified loudspeakers. In this piece Harmonize, these sounds are remixed where ghostly frequencies appears out from the inaudible.

Kacper Ziemianin
AROUND THE CLOCK

In our everyday life and routines we don’t notice the ordinary sounds around us. Whether we are in the city or in the park there is always an acoustic space around us, but most of the time we filter this out from our consciousness. However if we record these sounds and put them outside of their everyday context we can listen to them in a new, acousmatic, way and they might take us to other places, times and memories.
All the environmental sounds used in this work were recorded during Kacper Ziemianin’s stay in Helsinki and Espoo in early August 2012. These sounds represent different moods and time of day and night in the Helsinki metropolitan area.
For this concert Kacper Ziemianin made a new version on the work. The stereo mix is realized from multichannel sound installation. The central point of the installation is a clock. Visitors at Akusmata Sound Art Gallery can bring to life and explore sounds from various times of the day by moving their hands around the clock. This way they create their own journey through the time and soundscapes.

Charlie  Morrow
SOUND GLASS SPACE

Four glass works by Harri Koskinen are sonified by custom sonic activators in a MorrowSound True3d spatial environment created with eight Koskinen-designed Genelec loudspeakers and subwoofer.
Morrow’s sound is heard in the True3D sound space and close-up through the glass objects.  The soundscape is four seasons of Finland in natural sound winter spring summer and eternal autumn.
The project is the first in a series of collaborations growing from Morrow’s sharing of Koskinen’s Helsinki atelier. The stereo remix is 3 minutes 50 sec.

Janne Särkelä
AMBIENT²

In AMBIENT² the sound landscape of Harakka island (Helsinki) is turned into music – into another language through a computer-abled generative process. We are born into a sound landscape, which we learn to be the familiar foundation compared to which everything is strange and peculiar. The question is about interpretation. When the soundscape is repeated as music something weird and unexpected is revealed.
Music created by the AMBIENT² does not conform with any existing tuning system. It re-creates the frequencies of the source material with synthetic instruments as a spectral music application. The composer is the observed space and the resulting piece never quite exactly repeats itself. The music thus created is not aleatory but determined by its own rules.
The form of the music is defined by ambient aesthetics, and in this case ambient sound creates the ambient music and the borders of music and the world are seamlessly intertwined.

Petri Kuljuntausta
BLACK GROOVE

Few years ago I found from flea market two old Siemens sound test records from the 1930s.  In Black Groove these records are used as the basic sound source. At first the records were digitalized at the Sound Restoration unit of Finnish National Library. This was necessary as you can’t play this old gramophone records with modern record players. At the Finnish National Library they did a special job to me: at first, they digitalized the records, and next I wanted them to remove all information out from the records. What was left was clicks and pops, surface noises, noise of dirt, mechanical noises and electrical noises of the records and record player.  These sounds were distributed over the multichannel loudspeaker system in the Akusmata gallery space. Thus the visitors could move in the “space of groove” and spatially mix these vinyl noises together.
The video of the Black Groove is sound reactive and it follows the groove noises in real-time. When there is no sound, the line is straight, but it becomes active immediately when the noises appear. In the gallery we used five invisible curtains that were hanging in the space. These multiplied the line five times and visitors saw the lines in the air. Thus the 3D space was created with digital and analogical means. The video showed in this concert is edited version of the gallery work.