Author: Camille Robinson

Memory Walk

Video

This is Memory Walk, a video/audio piece I’m working on as part of my PhD project Listening Music, presented at the Australasian Computer Music Conference earlier this year. It’s one of a set of sound art works that aim to encourage the listener to listen self-critically. Memory Walk aims to foreground the relationship between perception, memory, and imagination of the future.

I posted this a while back on Vimeo but there’s been playback problems from there for some reason. So here it is on YouTube.

Peekaboo

Audio

Peekaboo is all about the pleasure of anticipation, everyone loves a surprise. All children on earth enjoy peekaboo, why not children on other planets?

This is a little conceptual sound art piece made as a submission to the Forever Now project. My page there is:

forevernow.me/artists/artwork/peekaboo/

Memory walk

Video

This is Memory Walk, a video/audio piece I’m working on as part of my PhD project Listening Music, presented at the Australasian Computer Music Conference last week (9/7/2014). It’s one of a set of sound art works that aim to encourage the listener to listen self-critically. Memory Walk aims to foreground the relationship between perception, memory, and imagination of the future.

Winter’s Other Name

Audio

This is a piece I made for Birrarung Marr’s Federation Bells installation. It makes use of the dynamic range made available by the recent refurbishment of the bells. This is an early demo version using samples of the bells. It has been played several times on the bells however circumstances haven’t permitted a higher quality recording (my schedule hasn’t allowed me to get out to the installation with a recorder when it’s been playing).
When making the piece I was trying to capture and compose out from my favourite bell-related sound: when a carillon collapses into dense cascades of notes.

Temporal process models

Writing

Often it can be difficult to come up with a structure for a piece of music (or dance, film, other time based arts) that doesn’t conform to conventional models. That’s not to say that convention is bad per se, but it’s good to be able to choose how you’re going to do something, rather than say “oh, I’m writing something classical, it has to be a sonata or a rondo or a theme and variations”.
Below is a list of processes that occur in time, which processes like the elaboration of sound or movement ideas might follow, to help you generate the form for a piece, or to help you add some kind of structural subtext to other formal ideas of your own, or that are pre-existing.

Storytelling
Learning
Building
Decaying
Growing
Evolving
Remembering
Creating
Speaking
Ageing
Travelling
Sex
Assembling
Unwinding
Hardening
Softening
Moving
Stopping
Heating
Cooling
Revealing
Concealing
Pursuing
Leading
Turning
Metamorphosing
Expanding
Contracting
Accelerating
Decelerating
Crescendo
Decresendo
Changing
Repeating
Reproducing
Gestating

Listening Skin (draft)

Video

This is a draft version of an idea I’m working on for a sound/video/performance piece.

In it I use a set of binaural microphones, and my body, as an instrument. I use the microphones backwards (i.e. facing into my ears as opposed to out of them), exploring the sounds of me touching my head as heard internally, and later in the piece the microphones become directly implicated as an instrument of sound production as I use them on the surface of my head/ears/face to make sounds.

This piece is sort of intended as a critique of the idea of binaural recording, a fascinating but flawed technology, and stereo imaging in general, both being ultimately one dimensional and only concerned with the ears, and not with the body’s other means of experiencing vibration.

Ideally I’d like this to be a live performance piece however I’m kind of terrified of the potential for these mics to produce feedback, having not yet had an opportunity to test them out with a PA system. For the moment it seem to work pretty well as video.

Apologies for my face! I’m not an actor or a model and there’s nothing staged about what my face is doing, although maybe there should be. That’s just how my face looks when I’m making sounds/playing instruments/composing.