I’m planning to make a hydrophone. A quick search on Google and I’ve got an interesting document entitled “A cheap sensitive hydrophone for monitoring cetacean vocalisations“.
A piezo ceramic disk, 2 polycarbonate sheets, a ‘o’ ring seal, a few nylon screws, a coaxial cable, some epoxy adhesive and you’re done! The critical step is definitely the soldering of the cable to the piezo disk.
Toronto-based filmmaker Jennifer Baichwal followed the photograph Edward Burtynsky in China and Bangladesh and made the documentary “Manufactured Landscapes”: interview on PingMag.
Post in french today!
Difficile exercice que d’écrire sa biographie, quand bien même celle-ci ne doit faire que quelques lignes. Je m’y plie pour le dossier de presse d’un (merveilleux) festival auquel je participe en juin. Voilà ce que j’ai pondu jusqu’à maintenant (après quelques conseils de personnes avisées):
L’objet musical tokoloten est né de l’esprit d’un musicien apatride influencé par le free-jazz jusqu’au-bruitiste d’un Otomo, l’humour grinçant d’un Zappa, les syncopes saturées d’un Aaron Funk… Comprenant rapidement qu’il serait vain de tenter d’approcher leur génie, tokoloten ne se prive cependant pas d’explorer le matériau sonore à travers l’essorage viril de programmes informatiques, le maniement sans précaution d’objets divers (moteurs électriques, hydrophones, contrôleurs de jeux vidéos…) et une petite pointe d’auto-dérision. tokoloten envisage chaque performance live comme une pièce unique, aidé en cela par les accidents qui la parsèment continuellement. Le thème des Digitales étant WASSER, préparez-vous à une immersion brutale!
Je dois également fournir une image. Plutôt qu’un pseudo-portrait peu engageant j’ai pensé à ça:
Finalement je crois que je vais reprendre mon dugong fétiche:
Next month I have a concert that is being planned at Le Bourg in Lausanne. Le Bourg was a cinema that closed some years ago and was transformed into a Café-Théâtre. I’ll say more about the upcoming event soon.
As it was a cinema, it’s a great place for projecting visuals and I want to take this chance to setup my first “visual installation”. I use Processing so I’m coding in Java… and I realize that my code starts looking like a piece of crap. I’ve been focused on visual rendering rather than modelisation I guess.
I’ve got different renderings but the main process is simple: I get the frequency spectrum of the incoming audio signal (using the Sonia library), it returns an array of values which correspond to the amplitude of frequency bands. For each value I draw an object for which the shape, position and transparency change depending on sound. The color is picked from an image so it’s easy to control the set of colors. It never gives the same results thanks to some random settings.
I hope I’ll manage to complete that work before the event. At least I have a friend who’s ok to give me his laptop for running the Processing patch during the concert.
In January I went fishing in Akashi, close to Kobe. Don’t believe I’m a good fisherman, it was the first time I fished and I only managed to catch one very small fish in 3 hours! While I was fishing I started hearing a strident sound… I wondered who the hell was doing it… the Yaki Imo man!! “Yaki Imo” means baked sweet potato. During winter the Yaki Imo man drives a light truck with cooking equipement carried on the back. The strident sound comes from the log-fired oven. And normally the vendor sings “ya-ki imo…ishiyakiimo” to announce his presence (actually it’s a tape recording that loops). People run to it as they hear it!
food japan recording travels
I still have some old k7 tapes at my parents’ house. Some I recorded 15 years ago and some older from the 60’s which belonged to my parents… This medium is completely obsolete nowadays.
I even found some recordings I did with my best friend when I was around 14 years old. We used a Revox tape recorder and recorded many instruments: drums, piano, african percussions and even synth sounds using midi program on a Mac. We were trying to do hip-hop! And the result was quite… bizarre.
The way we record music has dramatically changed. We’re now in the digital age and the production cycle is getting shorter and shorter thanks to computers. But I’m sure some people are still using vintage tools… just because they love them. For instance Jérôme Noetinger uses a Revox on stage, not as a recorder but as a mechanical object for making electro-acoustic sounds.
The photo I submitted to “We Are All Photographers Now!” was projected on March 23, 12:32.
But nobody to see it!
Mario is an international icon and it’s funny to see how people reinterpret the myth. Here is a beautiful drawing of Mario (with the Princess who’s been giving him a lot of work through all these years!) by José “Emroca” Flores.
Mario is a source of inspiration musically too. XOC, a guy from Sacramento, has covered the complete sountrack of Super Mario World. Excellent stuff! I chose a track that fits the image above.
XOC: Castle Medleydrawing geek music
