Orchestras generally sit in place, safely contained in a hall. Speakers are arranged in twos, fours, and sixes in fixed positions. Audiences sit and listen, and players play. In “Of Sleeping Birds,” those boundaries are all erased.
In “Of Sleeping Birds,” dubbed “a geo-locative multi-speaker symphony,” mobile speakers held by participants form a chorus of sound. Location is everything: it spreads the music through a city, and, with the aid of GPS satellites, determines the music that the speakers play. That same mobility also gets an audience on their feet, participating in the performance.
All of this aside, the work both sounds quite lovely and adds some drama with all the people roving about with their speakers in hand.
Composer Duncan Speakman explains the work to CDM:
We call it a “pedestrian symphony.” (When we’re feeling arty and trying to come up with cheap terms for new forms…) Basically, we had 40 Android phones placed in 40 portable speaker boxes. Each one was running geolocative software and played a different element of our composition (e.g. one might play a lead voice or synth, another a violin) and all synced/triggered by their physical location.
Details:
‘Of Sleeping Birds’ was created and composed by Circumstance, http://productofcircumstance.com / @ofcircumstance
with additional performances by Chloe Herrington (Chrome Hoof), Chantal Lewis Brown (Do Me Bad Things, Invasion) and Alex Thomas (Air, Squarepusher)
The locative audio software was built using Appfurnace http://appfurnace.com
The speakers inside the boxes came were Minirigs by Pasce http://minirigs.co.uk
The phones were Samsung Europas http://www.samsung.com/uk/
Camerawork for the video by Geoff TaylorThe project was commissioned by Anglia Ruskin University + Futurecity as part of Visualise – a public art programme for Cambridge, UK 2012
Really brilliant work. I see they’ve made the film extra arty by de-saturating all the colors so everything in the UK looks gray.
What do you mean, you didn’t use a de-saturation filter?