Can you come again next week?

A great big thanks to everyone who came to Edinburgh to the international training and networking event I organised at the start of May. For those who weren’t there, this was a week-long workshop exploring experimental audio, visual and site-specific research methods. It was funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), and hosted by the Institute of Geography at the University of Edinburgh, with support from the Department of Geographical and Earth Sciences at the University of Glasgow.

'Experimenting with Geography' participants and presenters

I think it’s fair to say that overall it was a big success. There was a really positive vibe about the whole thing. Eric Laurier summed up the mood in an email sent to all the attendees the following week:

“Can you come again next week? This one has lacked crackly birdsong, vibrating balloons, soldering irons, city symphonies, anechoic chambers, autumn salmon roe, centrifuges, quarry hammers, avian corpses, men on scaffolding (well it hasn’t, but has in that storyboard way), violin-voices in the foyer, cycle rides to the Wild West and most importantly, the music of your enthusiasm.”

Louise K Wilson giving a contact mic DIY session

To flesh out to Eric’s list, some highlights included:

  • A trigger-happy Matt Rogalsky wandering about shooting a starting pistol, to record the acoustics of various spaces.
  • Louise K Wilson showing people how to build their own contact mics and hydrophones (picture above)
  • Victoria Clare Bernie exploring how storyboarding might work in the context of creative research.
  • Sans Facon inviting people to compose their own sound walks.
  • Nigel Thrift giving us a big dollop of theory in the middle of the week.
  • Perdita Phillips installing mics on the roof of the geography building to record the seagulls.
  • Tansy Spinks conducting an impromptu participatory performance on the main stairs.
  • David Paton and friends presenting audio-visual work about a disused quarry which once supplied much of the stone used in Edinburgh’s grand buildings.
  • Hilary Ramsden triangulating Ennio Morricone, a side street in Morningside, and dogs barking on the meadows.
  • Hayden Lorimer describing the early history of wildlife recording, before the invention of magnetic tape. This included such things as cables running for two miles from mics in the woods to a van full of machines which would cut sound waves into discs of heated-up wax.
  • Murray Campbell from physics showing us round the acoustics labs, and answering questions such as ‘can you make a kettle boil by shouting?’ (answer: in theory perhaps, but not in practice).
  • An evening of experimental films curated by Edinburgh-based film-maker Matt Lloyd, and an evening of experimental music courtesy of Martin Parker’s Dialogues festival.

The result was a week which one participant described on his evaluation form as “by far the most interesting and fun event I had attended in the past few years”.

Eric Laurier, Tansy Spinks and a rather severe-looking gentleman
Sound absorbers in the anechoic chamber we visited

Jonathan Prior has made an audio-visual slideshow which I think nicely captures the flow of the event:

http://12gatestothecity.com/2010/05/17/experimenting-with-geography/

More documentation is available via the project discussion board:

http://michaelgallagher.co.uk/experimental-methods-network/

Special thanks to Eric, Hayden, Jonathan and Andy Wilbur for their help and support with this project, and to the ESRC for funding it.

Can you come again next week? This one has lacked crackly birdsong, vibrating balloons, soldering irons, city symphonies, anechoic chambers, autumn salmon roe, centrifuges, quarry hammers, avian corpses, men on scaffolding (well it hasn't, but has in that storyboard way), violin-voices in the foyer, cycle rides to the Wild West and most importantly, the music of your enthusiasm.

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Experimenting with Geography online forum

An online forum associated with my ESRC-funded Experimenting with Geography project is now live:

http://michaelgallagher.co.uk/experimental-methods-network

In the first instance, the forum will be used to enabled virtual networking between participants coming to our workshop in May.

However, the longer term aim is to create an international network of researchers with an interest in experimental methods for social/cultural research. So if this is you, please have a poke about, register and make a post to introduce yourself.

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In The Labyrinth

In preparation for the Experimenting with Geography workshop, Jonathan Prior, Eric Laurier and I have made a short film exploring the Institute of Geography at the University of Edinburgh. The building is a reverberant, cavernous space which can feel almost haunted at times. It’s full of stairs and doors and empty corridors, so we wanted the film to reflect this. The building once housed a hospital, and something of that former function lingers. Jonathan says that there is a room now occupied by PhD students which used to be the morgue.

The film ends with Jonathan sitting down in G10, where the workshop in May will be held.

I take full responsibility for the dodgy camerawork here. Film isn’t really my medium, as you can perhaps tell. Thanks to Eric for the use of the cameras and the editing.

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Experimenting with Geography applications

I have now been through all the applications for this workshop and have made the decisions about offering places and funding. If you applied, you should have received an email from me telling you the outcome. If you haven’t, please get in touch.

On the whole the applications were pretty high quality. I looked at each application myself and then Hayden, Eric Laurier and Jonathan Prior gave me second opinions and helped to make the final call. So by the end the decisions were pretty solid. Massive thanks to them for helping with a difficult task..

Coffee room

Here’s another composition assembled from recordings of hum from a fizzy drinks machine and the ticking of an old clock, both located in the coffee room at the Institute of Geography. I must be a musician at heart because no matter how experimental I get with my field recordings, I’m always drawn to the ones with stereotypically musical features such as pitch and rhythm.

Drummond Coffee Room.mp3

Coke-machine-web

The mic I’m using, which can be seen in the picture, is a Rode NT4 stereo condenser. I highly recommend it. If you can live with the fixed XY cardioid pattern, the quality is unbeatable for the price. Personally, I find that having the pattern fixed actually makes my life easier as it’s one less variable to fiddle with. You just point and shoot. I see from Janek Schaefer’s website that he’s also a big fan of this mic. It can be powered by a 9 volt battery if phantom power isn’t available, which means you can use it with devices such as minidisc players and cassette recorders. Some of my best recordings have been made with this and an old Sony minidisc recorder..