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Naked Ear

Day 1

Section One: Overview

Listening Exercise: Tristan Perich's One Bit Symphony Viv Corringham

Introductions

- Name, where are you from, favorite dessert

Rules for Basic Human Decency

- Borrow from Jer Thorp/Punk poster

Why are we all here?

Why am I here? Because this is what I do and I wan to teach peolpe about my passion! (...)

  • Introduce Good Vibrations here? I want to get their hands on it early...

Go over outline of course

  • some lecture, lots of (listening) examples, mostly building and making, doing and exploring, talking and listening

What is Sound Art?

Carve out definition through examples

-. Performances

..* _Hair Hymn_, A Pure Apparatus (Xuan Ye), 2014-2015 - [Artist's website](http://a.pureapparat.us/hair-hymn/)

  • Architecture

    ..* Estonia forest project

  • . Something in between

    ..* viewKoma, Tetsuya Umeda and Kanta Horio, 2006 - YouTube

Formal definition?

- Look in a book

What is sound?

Without thinking about the "art", lets examine the sound in sound art

A bit of a physics lesson...

Sound is vibration

  • Vibration can be described as waves

  • Show what waves are, with simple description of features (wavelength, amplititude)

Sound is vibration perceived by our ears

- Audio-vision: earliest sense
- Seth Horowitz, vibration being one of the first external stimuli organisms experienced

- Explain how this translates to sound (Frequency, Intensity (vs. Loudness/Volume) )

Sound is perceived vibration by our ears within a certain range

  • Show diagram of human hearing range

  • Show range of volume

Why think about sound? Why is sound important?

Sound is everywhere, literally.

The absense of sound is almost impossible

- John Cage's Silence

- Anechoic Chamber

It affects our psychology

- Look at noise psychology studies

It affects our environment

- Whales and noise pollution underground

- Sound as indicator of biodiversity

In an arts pratice, its ripe for explorating and expression, very much overlooked and can be a powerful tool when used thoughtfully.

- Janet Cardiff: Her Long Black Hair, 40 Part Motet, Murder of Crowes

So within all of this, what are we talking about today? What are we going to be looking at? Making?

A basic sound system with one input, one output, and a mediator in between

We're going to look at small sounds, and how we can amplify them for listening pleasure, artstic expression, and scientific investigation

Introduce Good Vibrations

Pass around and show everyone what we will be making

Explain 3 main parts, and transition into the first part we are going to focus on making

"One part is already done (headphones)! Just two parts to make"

Section Two: Microphones

Play sound sample: Night Passages

Explain how microphones work

In general, microphones take in vibration and translate it into a signal. How that is used depends on the application. For our purposes, we will say the microphone moves or gets excited due to vibration, converts its own vibration into an electrical signal, and recreates that signal at the other end through speakers or headphones

The microphone doesn't do all of this, but it is the input for this application.

Explain different kinds of microphones work

  • Dynamic

  • Condenser

  • Shotgun

  • Directional

  • Ultrasonic: Eisuke

  • Hydrophonic

  • Boundary

  • Binaural microphones

David Dunn's Rolling Your Own Microphones

Micro Listening Workshops

We're going to look at piezo microphone, for surface vibrations. Wildly powerful, inexpensive, easy to use for a variety of applications.

Explain parts of microphone

  1. Piezo

  2. Audio cable

  3. Standard audio jack

  4. A little flair

Begin to assemble microphone

Cut wire to arms span length

Quick introduction to soldering!

  • Solder pizeo

  • Keep track of power vs ground

  • Solder 1/4" jack, keeping in mind

  • Look at Nick Collin's videos for soldering and pizeo prep references

  • Plasti dip ends and wait to dry!

Section Three: Speakers

- Inverse of microphone

- Explain briefly, explain that we won't be building one

Section Four: Amplifiers

Listening exercise: VLF recordings? David Dunn's beatle recordings

Explain that while we have a microphone we need to make it a little louder for us to hear those small sounds!

So we're going to build an amplifier, a pretty basic one:

- Diagram of circuit we are going to build

	- Ask if anyone has seen a circuit diagram before

- Explain a bit what the circuit does/how it works

- Build circuit together

	- Explain breadboard

- Test out circuit so they know what they have built, and prepare them for tomorrow

Day 2

Listening exercise: APA and jø - Cloudbursting

Section Five: Assembling Part 1: Amplifier

Explain reasoning:

- Makes it more secure

- Why didn't we just start with this? Makes us iterate again, for learning and practice
  • Assemble PCB with parts from yesterday

Section Six: Assembling Part 2: Enclosure

Listening exercise: TBD

  • Assemble Enclosure and finish mobile listening kits!

Section Seven: Exploring

Listening exercise: McCarren Park

  • Do mobile lisening exercise in McCarren Park, prepare cards for prompts

Section Eight: Presenting

Listening exercise: the world!

  • Come up with prompts for discussion

  • Ask for feedback for the course!