What if the weather can drive the sonic environment inside? Similar to John Luther Adams’ The Place Where You Go To Listen, Ethan Rose has constructed a locally weather driven sound installation. The piece translates wind speed, temperature, precipitation, and sunlight, into an emergent sound field that mimics what we see outside.
See Ethan’s website for more details: http://www.ethanrosemusic.com/elements
Water comes in. Music comes out. That’s what you’d expect from a “sea organ.” Inspiration today comes from architect Nikola Bašić, and his organ built on the Adriatic Sea in Zadar, Croatia. As noted on Colassal.com, “The acoustic jetty spans some 230 feet (70 meters) and incorporates 35 polyethylene tubes of varying diameter. As waves flood each tube underwater, displaced air is forced through large whistles tuned to play seven chords of five tones. Day in and day out, music seems to emanate from the ground, a playful interplay between nature and design.” Wunderbar.
http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2015/11/the-sea-organ-makes-perpetual-music-with-ocean-waves/
Architectural interview and breakdown (with sketches)
http://www.croatia.org/crown/articles/9359/1/nikola-baiae-author-of-the-zadar-sea-organ.html
Finding inspiration in acoustic properties of objects and work that involves DC motors. In Berghaus’s work, a DC-motor moves a steel file against a stone. A microphone transduces the sound of the filing, which is sent to an array of guitar pedals before being sent to an amp. The sound is “equalized with heavy bass, then run through two layers of two-octave drops and heavy reverb.”
Link: Installation video
The concept is simple. Water spills onto a circuit board, making connections that elicit electrical sound. His work was installed in the 2006 ‘Unsafe’ festival at the Safehouse in Poole. A water feature continuously poured water onto the circuit board.
Link: Phil Archer’s website
Preliminary test to push California weather station data onto a map using Processing. Taking sixteen Western Regional Climate Center (WRCC) stations from 1870-1900 and displaying their location and collected daily temperature information on the map as concentric circles (size and color). Thanks to WRCC for helping with collecting station information.
Reference: http://wrcc.dri.edu/csc/scenic/data/station_finder/
Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water.
Cadillac Desert is a great book for anyone who wants to understand water in the west, and how we’ve created our modern water problems both in California, and in the greater Southwest region of the United States. While the book was published in 1993, the prescient issues echo today’s US water crises. Unveiling the political and economic decisions that underscore many of the choices made about water in the Southwest, helps provide a cautionary tale of the scaffolding supporting today’s water system.
Cadillac Desert was also turned into a TV documentary series that highlight four key components of water reclamation in the Southwest: Los Angeles water, the Colorado river and dams (i.e. water conservation projects), the environmental and political issues of water in CA, and water misuse around the country and the world. Below is the first episode of Cadillac Desert.
Taking inspiration from Shawn Decker’s Prairie (2013), a work that creates a natural system through 432 DC motors, tiny speakers, and relational rule-based code.
The tempescope is an ambient physical display that visualizes various weather conditions like rain, clouds, and lightning. By receiving weather forecasts from the internet, it can reproduce tomorrow’s sky in your living room.
Cornelia Konrads land art pieces contain individualized particles of natural objects. The structures reveal as they defy… Inspiration as applied to water droplets or chunks of dried dirt within the California water crisis.
http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2012/04/gravity-defying-land-art-by-cornelia-konrads/
