Project Context
Home is a place where a person lives, perhaps spends much of the time, or where a person is comfortable to be. While a house (or other residential dwellin) is often referred to as a home, the concept of “home” is broader than a physical dwelling. When people migrate to distant/unfamiliar lands, they often carry memories and their belongings (photographs, music, familiar objects) to create their make-shift-home.
One of the most central home building idea is often the food culture (along with language). Taste of food is difficult to forget or change.
Most often, Italian home-space or cultural memories are made again in distant lands with the memories of food. Recipes, herbs, seeds and plants are carried along with us when we migrate, to rememeber home.
Perhaps one could even say that large scale mass production and world wide distribution of pasta has a lot of influence from the migrants, their taste preference and consequently their influence on other communities for the consumption of pasta.
The proposed soundscape event (installation) takes its working metaphors from Farfalle. One among many reasons is its formal association that suggests movements, migration over long distances. Children were taught stories around farfalle at home.

Farfalle as a sound installation / soundscape event.

As an idea
In its translation to a musical or more precisely as a soundscape idea, the installation intends to generate a diverse and clustered pattern of sounds (similar to the visual dynamics of butterfly image as well as a pack of butterflies) for a short period of time of 30 minutes, created by the largest-possible collective body of musicians from Luxembourg and around. The primary idea is strictly not to make a cacophony of noise, instead a colorful (sound pattern based) sounding space, that praises the myth of Babel’s tower itself. One of the central ideas behind this work draws inspiration from Ezra Pond (one of the Poets of the 20th Century). According to him, a piece of written idea in a specific language is a broken Babel image… or one of the broken parts of the Babel’s tower. Through different translations the idea of the resurrection of Babel comes in to our desire to build the tower again. However, Ezra Pond is just an initial momentum for this work.

A large crowd of musicians playing together as an Image.
As a musician / sound artist my primary desire is to build a listening experience from a minimum of 100-200 musicians, playing together in a defined space of 10 x 10 Sq.mtr. with a few (two or three) instructions/options, which could be an infinite source to musical interpretation as well, for any skilled musician. These instructions I shall explain later, based on the confirmation reply from the participants. Indeed, these instructions will not occur as constrains at all to any one.
It also began amusing me as an image of 100-200 musicians with acoustic instruments, sitting together, physically extremely closed to each other and playing towards to build a collective pattern of sounds.
A large number of musicians are already on the list. They are Cellists, Guitar players, various phones, Contrabass, percussion etc. The idea is to form a crowd rather than any restricted number of musicians/ performers.
The idea is to generate a metaphoric event that represents the colorful visual dynamics of the butterfly image through soundscape/sound pattern filled with a large amount of sound textures from various acoustic musical instruments.

Installation site:
The space where this real-time-installation happens is an old steel factory in Dudelange now transformed into a public cultural space for the delivery of various kinds of information (visual/audio) on migration, called Retour de Babel.
There is a large amount of metal structures, rusted and still ready to resonate. An architecture from the electro-mechanical age (I have not yet decided, if I use a couple of shot gun microphones to high light these resonances). Acoustic design is still under a kind of process..
The main entrance has a restaurant/pub like space with tables and chairs to sit. The event will occur in this restaurant area. Once the performance is over, there will be food in order to conclude the event.

A sound-field formed of an array of 16 – loudspeakers, is the main interface. Each loudspeaker provide a sound location. forming 16 – localised mono fields,  to listen simultaneously 8 field recordings from Mithi River Walk. Visitors could move free in this field, be close to the speakers or traverse across the sound field. The sound field has invisible zones  that  triggers two behaviours:
1. skip- next, next archive set of 8 field recordings with a common sound subject in all recording)
2. go in- go right inside the sound and stay with micro movements through varying granular widths.

This sound field is also conceived to be a cyclic space; where a sound recordist could come again with preferred microphones, boom poles and reflectors and walk or dance around choreographically composing another set of re-coded sound walks.

>

support:

SOAK authors & Trapez design studio
Fireflys post sound
Matsuo Kunihiko
Christ Burchel
Bhaskal Pal
Godly Thomas
Shajith Koyeri.

© Bruno Baltzer 2010

VEDANZA, TRAFFO, Centre de Création Chorégraphique Luxembourgeois (TROIS C-L)

‘Project O’ is a 40 minutes choreographic performance for children conceived and designed by VEDANZA Artists International, co-produced by TRAFFO and TROIS C-L. It aims to provide a unique ground for a sensorial experience from seeing, hearing and feeling; a delightful contemporary dance performance made of games and surprises.

The performance is based on a modern fairy tale – The Moon and the Castle:

the Moon disappeared for months; nowhere to be seen.
even in the silent ocean, tides were not seen or heard,
ships wandered their ways not finding the shore.
dogs and wolfs went restless, whining days and nights.
where did the Moon go?  did someone snatch the moon?

From another perspective, ‘Project O’ explores a basic geometric form – the sphere; an object typically used in games for children, an archetype-toy; a form that suggests complex motion patterns. The ball (sphere) is the protagonist of this performance.
Three dancers along with two musicians explore this shape as the primary resource for choreographic and musical fabrication.

Direction/Concept : Rajivan Ayyappan / Choreography : Emanuela Iacopini, Yuko Kominami / Dancers : Yuko Kominami, Emanuela Iacopini, Matsuo Kunihiko / Musicians : Ganesh Anandan, Rajivan Ayyappan, Emre Sevindik, Tomas Tello /Interactive media : Matsuo Kunihiko/light design: Nico Tremblay

Age : 5-99
Duration : 40’

Open performances:
Sun 18.04.10 – 11:00 + 15:00
Tue 20.04.10 – 15:00
School performances:
Fri 16.04.10 – 10:00 + 14:30
Mon 19.04.10 – 10:00 + 14:30
Tue 20.04.10 – 10:00
Wed 21.04.10 – 10:00 + 14:30

Venue:

Tickets:
Under 26: 5€
Over 26: 10€
Groupes of 10+ people: 5€

Bookings through www.luxembourgticket.lu

A sound installation as part of the larger exhibition SOAK, at the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA), Mumbai in May 2009.
SOAK is an exhibition and book project by Anuradha Mathur and Dhilip De Cuhna who have focused their artistic and design expertise for the past decade on cultural and ecological issues of contentious landscapes.

Sound mapping Mithi River as an independent sound installation was designed to to compliment the SOAK discourses. It is a sound creation based on field recordings; a kind of projection of the acoustic environment of the Mithi River, as a sonorous data, perhaps musical in an eclectic sense.

The project had two phases:
a series of walks (14 days) along the Mithi river terrain in mumbai as the first phase then the design of a physical interface to re-listen the field recordings from the walk.

The interface was built to offer a sound-field formed of an array of 16 – loudspeakers.
Each loudspeaker providing a specific sound location. forming 16 – localised mono fields.

visitors could move free in this field, be close to the speakers or
traverse across to listen.

Within the sound field, there are interactive – zones  for the listeners/visitors:
SKIP (next, next archive set of 8 field recordings with a common sound subject in all recording as different events)
HOLD the grain and go right inside the sound and stay, move through varying granular widths.

The sound field is also conceived to be a cyclic space; where a sound recordist could come again
with preferred microphones, boom poles and reflectors and walk or dance around
choreographically composing another set of re-coded sound walks.