Monday, March 24, 2014

Urban Soundscapes and Critical Citizenship

This week the Urban Soundscapes and Critical Citizenship conference rolls into the University of Limerick. Guests from around the world will be visiting our fair City of Culture this Thursday and Friday, 27-28 March.

In this interdisciplinary conference, we explore the intersection of soundscapes and acoustic ecology studies with urban, applied ethnomusicology’s focus on human subjects and with sociological understandings of the cultural restructuring of urban space, through an evocation of "critical citizenship".

Given my ongoing attempt to interrogate this field, it should surprise no-one that I will contribute in no fewer than three ways. An excerpt from one of my pieces is being included in the soundscape collage Echo-Locations, which will be played at various locations in the city.
Tuesday, March 11, 2014

My new album "...between..." now available!


I am proud to announce that you can now purchase the album "...between..." from the lovely people at German label Gruenrekorder. It comes in high quality FLAC files with an assortment of photographs.

Places are made real as we encounter them, through our physical presence, memories, and imagination. This album was created using location recordings and the timbres of musical instruments. These have been transformed into landscapes that are perhaps as fictive as they are real. Birds eat bread from a frost-covered wall. Trains rattle over bridges in the centre of London. A mysterious drone sounds out in rural Ireland. Someone throws stones into a stream. A police siren plays a duet with a piano.
Saturday, March 08, 2014

L-System Garden: Max implementation of Lindenmeyer



Iteration is the act of repeating a task in order to approach a desired goal. This process is at work in many natural phenomena, notably plant growth. Aristid Lindenmayer, a Hungarian biologist), first modelled cell formation using a simple iterative process. He later discovered that the same principles could be extended to larger plant forms: stems, leaves, petals, and so forth. He introduced the L-system (Lindenmayer System) in 1968 and subsequently proposed various geometric interpretations in order to create 2D and 3D renderings of this data. The best source for information is the book he co-authored and in 1990 (shortly after his death). The Algorithmic Beauty of Plants is available as a free PDF download.