Rowena Easton  

artist, Brighton (UK)

Mike Blow

electronic engineer, Brighton (UK)

Machines for Singing - Reinterpreting the Built Environment

Keywords: Audio Installation, Architectural Interpretation, Urban Media Experience, Surround Sound, Art/Science Collaboration

We describe Machines for Singing, an installation piece that ran continuously for 10 days in June this year as part of the UK's Architecture Week. Machines for Singing is an audio installation that plugs into the fabric of a building, using real-time feeds from accelerometers and microphones as the raw audio material for a sonic composition. The transducers are attached directly, or via studs, to various sonically relevant parts of the structure so we are in effect hearing 'what the building hears'. In addition some of the sources are pitch shifted up, making audible sounds that are normally of too low a frequency to hear, allowing visitors to appreciate the forces and processes occurring around them of which they would otherwise be unaware.

The presented piece is composed in real time using data from sensors placed around the building which sense the structure's reaction to its environment and the rhythms of the occupants' use of the building. Machines for Singing enhances our appreciation of the function and construction of our buildings by reflecting the responses of the building to our own use of the space and to longer-term stimuli such as the diurnal cycle. We conclude by discussing some typical visitor reactions to the piece, and by considering the phenomenological implications of this unexpected representation of the built environment.

Rowena Easton graduated in 2000 from the University of Brighton, UK, with a degree in Critical Fine Art Practice. Her practice explores ways to evolve new narratives and create disruptions. She constructs a poetic space, which investigates the interplay between formal and organic systems. In recent years her work has become increasingly concerned with the built environment, a direct result of her involvement in the restoration of an architectural landmark of the English Modern Movement. Rowena exhibits internationally, and in addition to developing and promoting Machines for Singing is developing a body of written work, including a series of texts about absurd and improbable buildings (her " Beautiful, Useless Machines ."), from which she regularly gives readings.

Mike Blow   graduated from the University of Sussex in 2004 with an MSc in Evolutionary and Adaptive Systems, and the University of Brighton in 1992 with a BEng in Electronic Engineering. Mike has worked as an electronic engineer, programmer and musician. His practise is an exploration of the area between science and art that provides a rich environment for new creative expression, and in the past has explored this territory with evolutionary art and robotic exhibits. Other interests include architecture and design, artificial life, evolutionary systems, computational creativity, and complexity and self-organisation in natural systems.

http://www.artificiallife.co.uk
http://www.machinesforsinging.org