when flames become music...

ok...so i'm using a title here which references steve roden's airform archives (one of my favourite sites).

today i decided to continue with the original heater recording - to explore the recording further as visual artists do with sketches - different angles, colours, materials.

which lead me to thinking about graphic score, in particular the meshing of what we see with what we hear. this was fuelled in part by the photographic scores of jez riley french and the recent writings of steve roden, particularly his post when sounds become drawings

i have been wanting to familiarise myself a bit more with the gleetchlab programme i have. gleetchlab allows realtime processing of sound. i decided to have a play with some of the DSPs available in gleetchlab and started with spectrfilter.

spectrafilter is a 128 band eq. using the flame photo as a graphic score, i manipulated the spectra by attempting to simulate graphically the shape of the flames in the photo. the result was as follows:


and the sound result...

Heater132 spectrafilter by christinewhite


next i decided to play with the mephisto which is described as a 'step sequenced delay with down sample'. once again i chose the parameters based on a visual comparison with the flame photo.


the sound result is as follows:

Heater132 mephisto by christinewhite

i was on a fun roll by now so next i loaded another heater recording and eq'd it again according to the graphic. this time i was able to have two heater recordings with flat eq and one with flame-eq - this replicated the flame and the gold bars of the heater.

ok so i needed three gold bars on top and two on the bottom...i was having too much fun to check!

i added two more affects for fun - one was a reversing of this particular heater recording, and the other was a stutter affect. the stutter affect may have been overused - it had no direct graphical reference to the 'score' it was my intuitive addition and i told myself it reminded me of the crackings of a natural fire.

what remained was to choose what parameters were used when - and this was largely intuitive at this stage as i was getting my head around using the application. so here is a demo excerpt and the final screenshots. listening back now it prob needs some smoothing out on the ears - mixing not being my strong point...but it is a starting place for me in exploring place and sound and integrating them somehow.





way over in there heat(her) by christinewhite

house study 132 - heater

having now moved from a bach-style cottage-on-a-hill to a modernised bungalow on the flat, i am beginning a series of sound studies for our new home...and it begins with the gas heater.

i actually became aware of some beautiful heater drones the day after World Listening Day (18 July 2010). my partner hinemoana's new poetry book 'koiwi koiwi' was launched on World Listening Day - it has some pretty amazing sound imagery coincidentally. you can find out more about it here.

anyways, i got pretty crook that night (not self inflicted no) and so the next morning was partially spent lying on the floor in the lounge recovering. in rest and stillness we can often hear sounds we otherwise wouldn't, and it was in this state that the heater came alive for me. it possibly was made all the more present because my head was resting on the wooden floor and so the drones of the heater travelled from the floor and in through the bones of my head.

on that particular day it was very calming.

so, with homemade contact mic in tow, i have now recorded the heater. my flatmate marian commented that it sounds like a whole haunted house is residing in there...we could hear metallic booms and banging that aren't always obvious in the living room or that otherwise sound like small creaks. i also particularly love the overtones when the fan is on.

i have added some eq to try and minimise the static sounds and tones which seem to be part and parcel of the homemade contact mic set-up i use.

some sounds are of me lifting the cover to turn on/off the fan or to turn the heater up. it's a right playground.

a whole world right there in the heater.