Last weekend (15&16 Aug) I attended a sonic bike workshop at the
Bicrophonic Research Institute, lead by
Kaffe Matthews.
Together with 8 other artists and groups I learnt how to use the sonic bikes from a compositional perspective in order to be able to create my own sound work for the Summer Pedalling Games in September. We learnt about the mapping software, the capabilities of the mapper when working with the Raspberry Pi's and the practicalities of the composition on a musical bike out and about in the streets.
The Mapping tool.
Is brilliant. You draw shapes over a map where you want sounds to be heard. It all feels very simple and powerful. You suddenly have the ability to create new soundscapes on any street anywhere, laying over new sound spaces with a simple shape drawing tool.
Its not that simply though, and its easy to screw things up. You name the shapes exactly as you name your sound files, sound files must be saved and named in certain ways and of a certain size and length. Get any bit wrong and your bike might not boot up, or you wont hear your file, or in my case you get played noise at, very loudly instead of hearing your sounds. In short I ran from laptop to bike wielding a tiny usb stick until I get it right. And that was most of my Sunday morning.
Composing.
Kaffe made us ride, sound free, around the park and nearby street to first get an idea of how long the streets are in cycle time, what the acoustics are, how easy it is to cycle and really to pay attention to anything else in these spaces that we might not have spotted on foot. How incredibly useful. My small test street that I had been focusing on in preparation, suddenly became just a 12second ride. So although you can map sound to things, points, objects, it's more appropriate to think of locations in a broader sense - spaces and streets.
My idea.
My proposal was to sound out the built environment, using the bike as the 'Bicrophone', amplifying the streets and the spaces around the bikes as it moved. I wanted to focus on how the built environment sounds, the bricks, the windows, the doors, the railings, shutters, hubcaps, lampposts, rather than the sound of inhabitation and social activation of these spaces (designated use). I had in mind Harbour performances, where boats and vehicles use engines, whistles and bells to create a spatial performance, but was converting this to a city symphony in my mind, where people opened and closed windows, rattled shutters and slammed doors. While I also had in mind the silent and often unseen infrastructure of our urban spaces - the hubcaps that give sign to underground tunnels, cables, pipes and utilities, the lampposts that we reply on for lighting but look past, overhead electrical cables etc - e.g all the signs of planning and purpose for the space that we look and listen past. Plus deconstruction, building in the local area being demolished, road works and dismantling. I wanted to create this work with field recordings and let the layout of the items on the street create the composition.
However, learning and testing how the system actually works has changed things slightly, and so my work will take a slightly different course now... let the composition begin!
