www.field-studies.org

Sound is gaining renewed attention within the context of architecture, the city and the built environment. There are practical reasons, such as the importance for architects and urbanists to be able to create positive, or manage negative soundscapes and noise in the city. The question of where sound ends and noise begins is an interesting topic in itself and belongs to the more poetic side of sound in the built environment. Thinking about sound means to engage with ephemeral aspects of places, particularly the changing character of the built environment over time, which traditional visual media cannot represent. Sound, harmony and music are intimately connected with culture and the question of good and bad sound is politically charged. Each revolution has its own music. If we listen, rather than look, there is a whole new and curious world to be discovered.

Field Studies provides an environment to engage with all these questions starting from a much more practical point of view. How can listening to the city and working with recorded sound become part of the creative process of making architecture? How does working with sound affect the way we engage with places? Can there be such a thing as an ‘aural sketchbook’ and of what value can it be to architects and urbanists? Can sound act as a research tool and a means to represent architectural ideas? What would future urban plans and the built environment look like if they relied on sound as much as on drawings, photographs and models?

Field Studies is for everyone who is interested in learning more about the practical and technical aspects of field recording and the potential of recorded sound as part of a creative and analytical process in architecture and urbanism. The course will be run in the form of masterclasses lead by the three tutors where students will meet different approaches to working with sound, collecting material and recording techniques. Each masterclass will establish a different brief. Students will go out on field-recording trips and learn how to manipulate, edit and present recorded material. A series of talks will complement the programme and the students’ work will be published and documented online.

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The cost of Field Studies is £150.00

Field Studies takes place from Monday 13 to Thursday 16 September 2010 at the Department of Architecture and Spatial Design, London Metropolitan University. The workshop is open to everyone and all ages, and no previous experience is requried. The course will admit maximum number of 25 students.

For further information and to register, visit http://www.field-studies.org

Venue
Department of Architecture and Spatial Design
London Metropolitan University
Spring House
40–44 Holloway Road
London N7 8JL

Invite friends

Join Musarc, the choir of the Department of Architecture and Spatial Design, London Metropolitan University, for an afternoon of choral workshops and a concert with three contemporary composers in one of London’s great acoustic spaces. With Tom Chant, Neil Luck, Benjamin Oliver and Cathy Heller Jones

On air is for anyone interested in singing and making music. It is an opportunity to experiment with new approaches where the audience becomes part of the choir, the rehearsal becomes part of the performance and together those taking part define the resulting work. The workshops are open to all and no previous musical experience or expertise is required.

Workshops

Each of the three composers is given one hour to explain, develop and rehearse a new work with the audience. The given framework will differ from one workshop to the next and will involve elements of traditional choral singing, improvisation, working with speech, timing, real-time sound manipulation, working with graphic scores and an engagement with movement, performance and the effects the sounds create in the space.

The afternoon will start with a brief introduction and each workshop will begin with a short rhythm and singing lesson with Musarc’s conductor Cathy Heller Jones.

Open rehearsal and concert

The last hour of On air will be open to the public. Each of the works will be introduced by its composer, revisited in a short open rehearsal and performed for the audience.

On air
Thursday 1 July 2010

Choral workshops
4.30 – 8.30pm
Tickets: £15.00 (includes concert)

Open rehearsal and concert
8.30 – 9.30pm
Tickets: £5.00

St Stephen Walbrook
39 Walbrook
London EC4N 8BN
www.ststephenwalbrook.net

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Musarc has designed this event to tie in with personal and professional development. Bring your studio or office colleagues and enjoy an alternative team-building exercise and networking event with one of the most cutting-edge creative research and music platforms in London.

Read more about the composers

Tom Chant is from London, was born in 1975, plays soprano and tenor saxophones, bass clarinet and piano and occasionally writes indeterminate music. Tom served his improvised music apprenticeship at Maggie Nicols’ Gathering sessions in London,… read more >

Neil Luck is a composer and performer based in London. His compositional practice focuses on various approaches to non-standard notations, in particular those which implicate either the composer’s own body in construction, or… read more >

Benjamin Oliver was born in 1981 and grew up in Chatham, Kent, in the UK. He left home for Yorkshire and in 2005 graduated from the University of Leeds with distinction in his MMus in Composition. Ben has just completed his DPhil… read more >

About the venue

St Stephen Walbrook marks one of the City’s most ancient sacred sites. In the second century A.D. a temple stood on the West bank of the River Walbrook, a stream running across London from the City Wall near Moorfields to the Thames. A Saxon church was built on the temple’s foundations in the seventh century and re-built in 1439 on the East side of the river which is today culverted beneath. The 15th century church was destroyed in the Great Fire of London and re-built by Sir Christopher Wren in 1672–80.

St Stephen is considered one of Wren’s masterpieces. It is a highly unusual space where classical and baroque ideas collide, crowned by a large dome which floats above a circle formed by arches springing from eight of the twelve columns underneath. In 1987 a round travertine altar by Henry Moore was installed, causing much controversy at the time. It dominates the centre of the church, but has a genuine presence and articulates the space under the dome. The rough exterior, a palimpsest witness to the changes in the fabric of the city, gives away little of the clarity and beauty of the church’s interior.

St Stephen is renown for its outstanding acoustics. Wren intended his churches to be what he called auditories, ‘in which everyone present could see, hear and feel themselves part of the congregation’. (Kerry Downes)

www.ststephenwalbrook.net

Meet architects, acoustic engineers and sound artists Paul Bavister, Ian Knowles and Jason Flanagan from Audialsense at the exhibition who will be giving a talk about previous projects and their installation for Chambers.

Admission free. Please email j.kohlmaier@musarc.org if you wish to attend.

Book tickets >

Saxophonist John Butcher, originally a physicist and a musician whose work ranges from improvisation and composition to the exploration of unusual site-specific acoustics, will be improvising to Audialsense’s installation in the auditorium.

With a performance by wind ensemble Tambourine Trio and the ASD Choir who will perform traditional and experimental works from the 15th century to the present by Guillaume Dufay, William Cornyshe, King Henry VIII, Pierre Passereau, Jan Wuytack and Vaughan Williams, including an arrangement of Cathy Berberian’s onomatopoeic piece Stripsody for choir and Stimmung for voices and radio by artist and ensemble member Sam Belinfante.

Bar opens 6.30pm
Doors: 7.00pm
Concert: 7.30pm
Admission: £5.00

Tickets will be available at the door. Seating in the Forum is limited.
To avoid disappointment, please click here to book your tickets.

Venue:
Department of Architecture and Spatial Design
London Metropolitan University
Spring House
40–44 Holloway Road
London N7 8JL
Directions

“We were to be working alongside a 40 strong choir, so a starting point for the piece was Thomas Tallis’s ‘Spem In Alium’, an early choral work for 40 voices, and of exceptional power. We isolated the wavelengths of the room, the length, width and height, and added the 167hz tone of an especially noisy air duct within the space. With four base-tones to work with, we added nine subsequent chromatic overtones to each of the room tones, giving an output of four banks of 10 tones – 40 sine waves – a similar mapping to ‘Spem In Alium’. The tones were then played back into the space, and held for three days, creating fleeting standing wave phenomena, emerging tonal chords and rhythms.”

Opening times
26–28 March 2010
Friday 10am – 7pm
Saturday and Sunday 10am – 3pm
Venue information

www.audialsense.com

Peter Cusack, based in London, works as a sound artist, musician and environmental recordist with a special interest in acoustic ecology. Projects range from community arts to research into the role that sound plays in our sense of place. His project ‘Sounds From Dangerous Places’ examines the soundscapes of sites of major environmental damage.

He produced ‘Vermilion Sounds’ – the environmental sound program – for ResonanceFM Radio, London, lectures on ‘Sound Arts & Design’ at the London College of Communication and is a Research Fellow on the multidisciplinary multi-university ‘Positive Soundscapes Project’. CDs include ‘Your Favourite London Sounds’ (Resonance), ‘Baikal Ice’ (ReR), ‘Favourite Sounds of Beijing’ (Subjam).

He is the author of Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art (Continuum 2006). Through his work with Errant Bodies Press he has co-edited the anthologies Site of Sound: Of Architecture and the Ear (1999), Writing Aloud: The Sonics of Language (2001), Surface Tension: Problematics of Site (2003) and Radio Territories (2007), along with a series of monographs (Critical Ear series) on sound and media artists.

As an artist he is active in the fields of sound installation, performance and public interventions. His work has been featured internationally, including the exhibitions and festivals Sampling Rage, at Podewil Berlin (1999), Sound as Media, at ICC Tokyo (2000), Bitstreams, at the Whitney Museum New York (2001), Pleasure of Language, at Netherlands Media Art Institute Amsterdam (2002), Undercover, at the Museum of Contemporary Art Roskilde (2003), Radio Revolten, a festival on radio, Halle (2006), Copo da Voce, Museum of Contemporary Art, Niterói (2008), and Tuned City, a festival on sound and architecture, Berlin (2008).

In addition he presented a solo exhibition at Singuhr galerie in Berlin (2004), an experimental composition for pirate drummers as part of Virtual Territories, Nantes (2005), and his Prototypes for the Mobilization and Broadcast of Fugitive Sound was exhibited at the Enrico Fornello gallery, Prato, in 2007.

His ongoing project to build a library of radio memories was presented at Casa Vecina, Mexico City in 2008. He also collaborates within the collective working group, Surface Tension, and within the working team, e+l. He has numerous audio releases on international experimental music labels, and regularly produces works for radio.

http://www.errantbodies.org/

He has performed, lectured and exhibited widely throughout Europe [Sonar, Tate Modern, ICA], USA/Canada, (The Walker, XI, Mutek, Princeton), Japan, and Australia (Sydney Opera House). In 2008 he won the Paul Hamlyn Award for Composers Prize, and The British Composer of the Year Award in Sonic Art for Extended Play (Triptych for the child survivors of war and conflict).