Magnetic Tape

Magnetic Tape is interesting to me. On reels or in cassettes each recording (or potential recording) is like a little curly drawing that pulls the sound through space, Only one position on the tape is read and so the linear nature of the tape allows the signal to vary the output is attached to over time. I messed around with wire recorders along time ago because I liked the fact that the sound is concentrated into a tiny line like space with the heaviness of the mark being replaced by the amplitude of the waveforms encoded as magnetic information. Here are some of my diy wall mounted ones, winding the pickup heads was a long day.

I also like Nam June Paik’s 1963 work Random Access allot, tape is attached to the wall as a drawing with the playback head made available as a mobile stylus so you can retrace his steps and listen to the recordings using the same gestures he used to stick them down. A kind of playable graphical notation

A good friend Dale has gone way further with visual tape based work and kindly sent me some photos of slightly insane pieces he is putting together at the moment. He selects tape based on it's visual tonality and creates geometric slightly illusory patterns building a second information set encoded in the the recording medium. I don't know if Dale does, but I find these relate to visual music and graphic notation practices too. Ill probably try to convince him at his art show at here in london on the 10th of April at six, come if you want to hang out we will probably drink beer after too.

another interesting artist I found using tape in a slightly different
way is Terence Hannum, I like the areas of ground left visible. pretty black!

There are loads of other examples I'm sure I would really like to find a graphic score where the composer has stuck down tape, creating a kind of instrument,notation recording in one, it must have been done. If only VHS was as easy to read without a moving head, pixelvision cameras hacked might be the only answer!

http://www.dalealexanderwilson.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wire_recording
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tape_recorder
http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/random-access/images/3/
http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/collections/collection-online/artwork/9536
http://arts.brighton.ac.uk/study/fine-art/fine-art-performance/case-study/analogue-tape-glove
http://anatlas.wordpress.com/2013/10/11/52nd-william-anastasi/comment-page-1/
http://www.terencehannum.com/
http://rhizome.org/editorial/2008/jun/26/less-lossy-more-glossy/?ref=archive_post_title

Margaret Watts-Hughes and the Eidophone

Back many years ago now when I was beginning to research drawn sound work more heavily Rob Mullender very kindly let me look at the Oramics machine up close in his workshop (I think Mick Grierson who let me look at the Oramics archive also had something to do with it but I am a sieve brain) Rob makes some very cool work which deserves it's own post (and will get one some day soon) but I couldn't resist re blogging and adding to his post on Margaret Watts-Hughes a very early cymatics pioneer. Please visit Robs blog and check out his links as he plumbs some really interesting audio visual depths and returns from the mines with some rare gems!

http://silentlight.blogspot.co.uk/

https://vimeo.com/user3179219

Margaret Watts-Hughes was a Welsh soprano who gave up singing when she married, to concentrate on philanthropy and scientific research. Her Eidophone images developed in 1885 resulted from experiments with measuring the intensity of voice through vibration of seeds on a membrane, she then developed this process to enable her to capture images and as Rob points out also created some early time based media as she began dragging the Eidophone's membrane across the glass as she sang creating a sort of "proto optical sound recordings; although admittedly not in an analytically useful sense like the 'Phonautograph's', but rather more beautiful" Very Pioneering work. 

Other sources:
https://sites.google.com/site/appliedbiophysicsresearch/sound/cymatics/margaret-watts-hughes
http://www.cymascope.com/cyma_research/history.html
http://www.lumen.nu/rekveld/wp/?p=438
http://www.frankperry.co.uk/Cymatics.htm
http://www.gwrando.org/FindingRhayader.html
http://www.unz.org/Pub/Century-1891may-00037
http://timberwolfhq.com/cymatics-sacred-geometry-dna/
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=zMXwMgEACAAJ&dq=Margaret+Watts-Hughes&hl=en&sa=X&ei=I8gkUq2cLuP17AbuqoCQDQ&ved=0CCQQ6AEwAA

Sounding The Body Electric

I went to the opening of this exhibition Sounding The Body Electric (Experiments in Art and Music in Eastern Europe  1957-1984) the other day at The Calvert 22 Foundation, It was pretty interesting including some work by practitioners I was well aware of and some from artists I had never heard of before.
here is a shot of the Experimental Studio of Polish Radio

Especially of note was some work being shown by
Bulat Galeyev of the Prometheus Institute  whose site I have had bookmarked (and linked on my secret drawn sound/visual music blog) for a long time now, the work clearly used oscillographics and colorization techniques, here is a still form 1982 THE SPAСE DANDELION

There were also some nice Graphic Scores from various eastern european practitioners 

here is one form 1972 by Boguslaw Schaeffer, I have been teaching for a while about the realtion ship between video synthesis, visual music, drawn sound and graphic scores so it's nice to see these kinds of work be interpreted as related and exhibited together.

The only small shortcoming of the show (and it is a small one) is that it doesn't explain how much of the work here is influenced by the influx of western ideas and how much were from home grown ideas put on hold due to the political situation from the 20s onwards, having just finished reading the mind blowing Sound In Z by Andrey Smirnov whose research I have followed for years and seen speak many times, I imagine that some of the work and artists from the early 20th century in Russia could have provided at least a distant memory of and age of intermedia experimentation to the next generation, there is small mention of the influence of Léon Theremin and Arseny Avraamov arguably the two most influential players in early Russian electronics, visual music, drawn sound and experimental music however there isn't much discussed about any direct connections. For instance the ANS was still in development right up to 1957 when this exhibition begins to look at work however were any of the Russian and Eastern European Intermedia artists influenced by it's development?  arguably it is the last and most complex of the Russian drawn sound projects that I am aware of. However to be fair all of this research is fairly new and this is a tiny exhibition, I'm just glad it has found it's way to London at all! As Gagarin once said Let's go!

PS I picked up these exhibition Catalogues and books which perhaps go in to greater detail about context