A few months back I was invited down to Wales to build a sound sculpture for Bangor Sound City. I hand built a series of solenoid-triggered glockenspiel notes mounted onto cherry wood from the Hicksville Planing Mill in western Maryland. These hung from an alcove on the Garth Pier in Bangor, North Wales. Small propellors mounted outside the alcove were designed to spin in the wind, and control the rate of playback. Here are a few photos from the building phase:
The only problem was that I overestimated how much wind there would be! The propellors didn’t spin like they were meant to. The hanging notes worked really well, though, and the opening day was blessed with glorious sunshine. Here’s a video I’ve made showing it in situ:
The installation was up for several days, and I had a wonderful week in and around Bangor, Llanrwst, and Nebo. I played a super awesome gig in Conwy, spoke to some wonderful students at a school outside of Bangor, and I even managed to catch a very exciting Llanrwst United FC match. Many thanks to northern bloc and Datrys for supporting this project. A very special thanks also to Dominic Chennell and his beautiful family who hosted me during my time there and to Jacqui Banks who drove me all around the countryside!
Posted 7 months, 2 weeks ago at 3:47 pm. 2 comments
This blog has seen many many posts about my Secret Sounds of Spores project over the past nine months or so. It’s been an incredible journey and I certainly hope we’ll be able to take it even further in the near future.
In the mean time, here is one more video showing the installation as it happened at Inspace in Edinburgh in January. I thought it worked really well in the gallery space, and we got extremely positive feedback. We’d love to show it at other galleries or shows, so please get in touch if you’ve been looking for a fungi-based sound installation.
Posted 9 months, 2 weeks ago at 8:56 am. Add a comment
Wow. In my wildest dreams I never imagined that the Secret Sounds of Spores Spectacular would be such a success. I’d like to thank everyone who came down, and apologize to anyone who got turned away. It was a brilliant night, and I was so pleased by all of the feedback and amazing discussions I had throughout the night. Special thanks go to musical guests The Dyad, whose swirling improvisational electrojazz combined with the mushroom-spore-triggered instruments with astounding results.
It will take me a while to go through all of the video and audio for the night, but many thanks to all of those who have sent or posted things already. This includes Mark, whose photo is above and has posted a number of videos to YouTube, and Andy and Chris, who posted these photos to Flickr:
Thanks also to all the people who have come into Inspace over the past few days to see the installation. I’m afraid we have to take it all down today, but fear not! It will be back up in Glasgow in a few weeks at the Arches for the Sound Thought Festival, and then again for Maker Faire Newcastle. Much more documentation to come, but a big thanks once again to everyone who helped make last Friday such an overwhelming success.
This week I’m very excited to present the Secret Sounds of Spores at Inspace in Edinburgh. Please come along and see it for yourselves! I think it’s going to be totally gorgeous, I can’t wait to get it all finished up. Just in case you haven’t been following this project at all, you can learn all about it here. In a nutshell: lasers, mushrooms, and handmade electro-mechanical instruments. Sweet.
Patrick and I are busy installing everything in the gallery space today and tomorrow, and starting on Wednesday the show will be open to the public. The installation will be viewable between 4-8pm on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday this week only, so be sure to come on by!
As if that weren’t enough, we will be holding a very special event to celebrate the Secret Sounds of Spores, on Friday night at 8pm. There will be drinks and merriment, and musical guests The Dyad will join me to play music with a live mushroom or two. I am pretty sure that this will be the world’s very first human-fungi live musical collaboration. At least, the first one with a Fender Rhodes and a laser.
Inspace is part of the University of Edinburgh (and is the headquarters of New Media Scotland, who funding this project) and can be found at 1 Crichton Street, EH8 9AB. Hope to see you there!
For the past few months I’ve been quietly working on a gigantic project with an amazing team of people, and last week we finally went public. The Love Music Festival is a brand-new series of musical events happening in schools all around Scotland. It is comprised of a series of exciting workshops in September and October and culminates in two weeks of concerts in venues from Shetland to Peebles, and everywhere in between.
My job is to build custom software, musical installations, and run creative sound recording workshops in schools…so far I’ve been to Peebles, St Andrews, Barra, Benbecula, and Kilmarnock, and next week I’m off to Shetland and Inverness for a few more. You can follow my adventures on my dedicated Love Music page, where I’ll be blogging and posting software and videos. There is some software for download there already, give it a try!
On a side note, the Western Isles are amazing. I’m glad I got a new raincoat, though.
Posted 1 year, 4 months ago at 10:03 am. Add a comment
Thanks to everyone who came down to the Botanics last Sunday! Patrick and I had a drop-in session to show off our Secret Sounds of Spores installation, and we both felt that it went really well.
We got lots of great video and photos, which we will be going through in the coming days. In the mean time you can see this video (featuring a glimpse into a fascinating tangential conversation I had with Paul Stamets) that Patrick put together showing everything in action:
Posted 1 year, 5 months ago at 12:47 pm. 1 comment
I’m posting this from the Edinburgh Royal Botanic Gardens, where I’m busy installing my latest installation, The Secret Sounds of Spores. Followers of this blog and my twitter feed will no doubt be aware of this project, as I can’t seem to stop talking about it! In a nutshell, I’m working with mycologist Patrick Hickey to make a musical installation using mushrooms.
I’ve made yet another video about it all, this time going into more detail about how the software works:
The installation is part of a whole show about mushrooms – From Another Kingdom: The Amazing World of Fungi. It is opening tonight at the John Hope Gateway of the Edinburgh Royal Botanic Gardens.
Maybe I will see you there! Don’t worry if you can’t make it, the installation will be up for a few weeks at least, and it’s free. Let me know if you happen to find any mushrooms that you want to stick in the installation, we’re going to need a lot of them in the coming weeks!
Posted 1 year, 6 months ago at 12:46 pm. Add a comment
For the past few weeks Patrick Hickey and I have been working more and more on our Secret Sounds of Spores project, which is coming together nicely. For those of you just joining us, we are building an installation for the Royal Botanic Gardens in Edinburgh which will create music from falling mushroom spores. You can see these spores if you shine a laser underneath a live (or recently deceased) mushroom, and I’m building custom software that will analyze them and trigger a series of strange musical instruments that Patrick and I are building. My previous post explains the concept a bit more, and here’s a new video that shows some of the instruments in action:
Patrick and I will be giving a demonstration and explanation tomorrow night, the 15th of July, at the Apple Store in Glasgow. The event is free and begins at 6pm. We will be showing off a few of the instruments, I’ll be explaining how I’ve approached the software, and if this rain continues we shouldn’t have any trouble finding some mushrooms!
edit: as I’ve said in the comments, thanks to all who came by! I’ll post photos as soon as I get them from the Apple Store, in the mean time here is one of the mushrooms set up with the laser:
Posted 1 year, 6 months ago at 1:53 pm. 3 comments
I’m working on a project right now with Patrick Hickey, founder of Nipht Technologies, which involves building an installation that will create music from mushrooms.
This all came about when Patrick showed me some videos he had made using closeup footage of a laser pointed underneath a protected mushroom – as you will see in the footage below, it’s absolutely gorgeous. I loved how shining a laser revealed a whole hidden world that to me had an intrinsically artistic and musical quality.
Anyway, we decided to collaborate and make an installation that would turn the patterns of those falling spores into music. We were awarded an Alt-W grant from New Media Scotland for the idea, and we have been working on it for the past few weeks. This video gives a bit of an introduction to what we are doing:
One interesting (and unexpected) outcome of tracking the spores to make music is that you end up with a really fascinating data set. This image represent the notes on a piano roll being triggered by three different mushroom spore video feeds – you can see the different patterns created by the different mushrooms.
It’s a big project, and it will take a few more blog posts to explain it all, so if you have any questions please let me know and I will address them as well as I can!
Posted 1 year, 7 months ago at 3:03 pm. 6 comments
Anyone in Glasgow over the next week can drop the Centre for Contemporary Art on Sauchiehall Street to say hello to the Gelkies! It’s all a part of the leadup to this Thursday, when I’ll be showing work and performing at Cryptic Nights at the CCA. I’m sharing the night with film artist extraordinaire Rachel MacLean, and we’ve got lots of wackiness planned. We’ll both be showing some of our videos, and I’ll be premiering a brand new performance called “Exercise Magic!!”, which I’ll write about more soon. It involves Wiimotes, an exercise video, and spandex. A screenshot of the Max/MSP/Jitter patch I’m working on, for those of you into that kind of thing!
Posted 1 year, 11 months ago at 2:57 pm. Add a comment
The Amazing Rolo is Edinburgh-based sound designer, musician, and digital artist Yann Seznec. He specializes in interactive installations, ragtime piano, custom music software creation, and sound art. He is founder of Lucky Frame Limited, a small company that makes fun digital things, and teaches occasionally at various universities.
A few months back I was invited down to Wales to build a sound sculpture for Bangor Sound City. I hand built a series of solenoid-triggered glockenspiel notes mounted onto cherry wood from the Hicksville Planing Mill in western Maryland. These hung from an alcove on the Garth Pier in Bangor, North Wales. Small propellors mounted outside the alcove were designed to spin in the wind, and control the rate of playback. Here are a few photos from the building phase:
This week I’m very excited to present the Secret Sounds of Spores at Inspace in Edinburgh. Please come along and see it for yourselves! I think it’s going to be totally gorgeous, I can’t wait to get it all finished up. Just in case you haven’t been following this project at all, you can learn all about it 
For the past few weeks Patrick Hickey and I have been working more and more on our Secret Sounds of Spores project, which is coming together nicely. For those of you just joining us, we are building an installation for the Royal Botanic Gardens in Edinburgh which will create music from falling mushroom spores. You can see these spores if you shine a laser underneath a live (or recently deceased) mushroom, and I’m building custom software that will analyze them and trigger a series of strange musical instruments that Patrick and I are building. 
RSS feed
