Creative Campus

Michelle Agresti ’14 talks to composer and computer musician Jason Freeman of UrbanRemix about MiddletownRemix: Hear More, See More – A Festival of Art and Sound, taking place on Saturday, May 11, 2013 from 2pm to 5pm. Wesleyan University’s Toneburst Laptop & Electronic Arts Ensemble, directed by Assistant Professor of Music Paula Matthusen, will perform the world premiere of “MTRX” (2012) by Jason Freeman on May 11 at 2pm, 3pm and 4pm at the Green Street Arts Center at 51 Green Street.

MiddletownRemix: Hear More, See More – A Festival of Art and Sound may be a one-day event on Saturday, May 11, 2013, but it is in fact the culmination of a project that has been going on since September 2012, fittingly titled MiddletownRemix. This project has had people all over the greater Middletown area recording sounds of the environment on their phone and remixing them into soundscape compositions. These compositions can then be shared, and the project can be joined by anyone here. Each month, there are certain themes: April’s theme was “Forgotten/Lost,” and this month’s theme is “Natural.” And you can listen to featured remixes and sounds here. Since this past fall, people have been creating these unique sound pieces, making what seems to be ordinary Middletown background noise into moving compilations of found sound art. In a way, it could be akin to found poetry—only using your ears, not your eyes. During the day of the festival (May 11 from 2pm to 5pm), Middletown DJ Arun Ranganathan, along with Wesleyan University student DJs Coral Foxworth ‘15 and William Brewster Lee ’13, will remix the sounds of MiddletownRemix on the Remix Sound Stage outside It’s Only Natural Market at 575 Main Street.

MiddletownRemix is made possible with software from UrbanRemix, a program with a mobile phone recording component and an internet platform for recording, remixing, and sharing final products. Its goal, according to their website, is to “design a platform and series of public workshops that would enable participants to develop and express the acoustic identity of their communities, and enable users of the website to explore and experience the soundscapes of the city in a novel fashion.” It’s the brainchild of Jason Freeman, Michael Nitsche, and Carl DiSalvo, all professors at Georgia Tech. I spoke with Jason Freeman, an Associate Professor of Music in the College of Architecture at Georgia Tech, who was instrumental in bringing UrbanRemix to Middletown, and whose piece commissioned for the festival, “MTRX” (2012), premieres at 2pm, 3pm, and 4pm on May 11 at the Green Street Arts Center, located at 51 Green Street. The work will be performed by Wesleyan’s Toneburst Laptop & Electronic Arts Ensemble under direction of Assistant Professor of Music Paula Matthusen.

Mr. Freeman and his colleagues created UrbanRemix out of a desire to get people to pay more attention to the world around them. They wanted people to be able to rediscover and reaffirm appreciation for their hometowns and cities. Being musicians, they chose sound as the means to do this.

“We were really trying to come up with a way to help people become more aware of the sounds around them, to be able to listen to the sounds they might normally ignore and sort of block, and to actually take a moment to search for them and reflect about them—to share them,” explains Mr. Freeman.

But taking “ordinary” sounds from the environment and using them to create a piece is not an entirely new idea. UrbanRemix has its basis in the “fairly old,” according to Mr. Freeman, study of acoustic ecology. This art form began in the 1960s with R. Murray Schafer’s work on the “World Soundscape Project,” where he and others recorded the sounds of different environments and cities by just taking a recorder and listening.

Mr. Freeman and his colleagues, however, did not want to stop here.

“We really wanted to use technology to take this a step further,” he says. “We really wanted to do something more active to put people directly into the sound environment and ask them to identify sound.”

Well, there’s an app for that. They looked to cell phones, and made a program that would turn a mobile device into a recorder. Then, once sounds were recorded, they created a web interface that made the sounds easy to not only remix, but also to share. By using phones, Mr. Freeman and his colleagues made this technology, and therefore this art form, accessible to a very wide number of people. Thus, UrbanRemix was born.

But how did it make it to Middletown? Last year, Assistant Professor of Music Paula Matthusen invited her old friend and colleague Mr. Freeman to give a colloquium to her students at Wesleyan. While here, Mr. Freeman started talking to people in the Wesleyan Music Department, and they discovered that his work with UrbanRemix really fit in with “Music & Public Life,” a year-long campus and community-wide exploration that has included concerts, workshops, gatherings, and courses, all designed to cross disciplines. MiddletownRemix and Mr. Freeman’s involvement in the festival grew out of that collaboration.

The reason that Mr. Freeman’s work and “Music & Public Life” meshed so well together is because the “Music & Public Life” project examines how music interacts with public spheres, such as with public policy, or the digital realm, or even the community at Wesleyan and Middletown as a whole. The project is “celebrating and studying the sounds, words, and spirit of music in public at the local, national, and transnational levels.”  The main goal of MiddletownRemix, aside from getting residents to hear their city in a whole new way, is to let them know and explore their community through sound. The idea is that the project will bring people closer together, and give them insight into the communal, and public, character of Middletown.

“I think it’s a fun way to explore and discover the city in a way they haven’t really experienced it before, and to use that as a basis for connecting with other people,” says Mr. Freeman.

While MiddletownRemix itself is an on-going project that anyone can participate in at any time at www.middletownremix.org, the public presentation of remixes by DJ Ranganathan, Coral Foxworth ’15, William Brewster Lee ’13, and others at the MiddletownRemix festival will expose you to a Middletown you may have overlooked. Come check them out at the festival on Saturday, May 11 from 2pm to 5pm, but in the meantime, you could take MiddletownRemix for a spin yourself—see what sounds you can find!

For the complete MiddletownRemix festival schedule, and to capture, contribute and remix sounds from Wesleyan and Middletown using the free UrbanRemix app for iPhone/iOS and Android devices, visit http://www.middletownremix.org

Take a Deep Breath and Open Your Ears
A preview of “Rainforest IV” and “Lighthouse, beside the point”

Michelle Agresti ’14 talks to University Professor of Music Ronald Kuivila about MiddletownRemix: Hear More, See More – A Festival of Art and Sound, taking place on Saturday, May 11, 2013 from 2pm to 5pm. The world premiere of Professor Kuivila’s sound installation commissioned for the festival, “Lighthouse, beside the point,” will be located in the glass pavilion atop the Community Health Center at 675 Main Street. Professor Kuivila and Wesleyan University music students are also reconstructing David Tudor’s “Rainforest IV” (1973) inside of 635 Main Street.

For MiddletownRemix: Hear More, See More – A Festival of Art and Sound on Saturday, May 11, Wesleyan University Professor of Music Ronald Kuivila will be premiering his sound installation “Lighthouse, beside the point,” as well as realizing  David Tudor’s sound composition “Rainforest IV.” To interview Professor Kuivila, I visited the future site of “Rainforest IV,” which is in an abandoned storefront on Main Street. I watched with curiosity as Ron briskly strode across the unfinished floor, past the roughed up dry-wall, and in between bare pipes stretching from the ceiling, setting up a speaker. While I followed him with my recorder, Ron explained his vision and purpose for the installation.

“[It’s] based on this idea that loud speakers can be themselves instruments,” Professor Kuivila explains. “The idea of ‘Rainforest’ is to take objects from the junk pile, say a door, oil drum, bicycle rim, and turn them into loudspeakers that have their own distinctive voices.”

The way that Professor Kuivila would accomplish this is by attaching a transducer, or the coil and magnet from inside of a loudspeaker, to the part of the object with the most resonance. The way speakers work is by that coil causing a piece of cardboard, or some other light material inside the speaker box, to vibrate back and forth—“Rainforest IV” just replaces the cardboard with a door, or an air duct, or suit of armor. Then, sounds (but not composed music) are broadcast through the transducer, causing the object to vibrate and give off a unique voice.

The abandoned shop front at 635 Main Street will soon be filled with objects like this, all of which will be giving off sound at varying times and volumes. The “performance” is always going on—for hours at a time. People will be let into the room on Saturday, May 11 from 2pm to 5pm, and allowed to wander at will.  Professor Kuivila says that “Rainforest IV” experiences tend to go like this: the first half hour is spent touring all the pieces (“like a science fair,” he says), then it shifts to a “cocktail party”-like atmosphere with people chatting with each other, and finally, about 45 minutes in, everyone settles down and really begins to listen.

“You become acquainted with these objects, which have sculptural properties. It really is like a sculptural installation,” he describes. “You’re becoming aware of them through the sounds they are producing, and becoming aware of their physicality through that sound in a way that you would find difficult to do without the sound. The composer David Tudor described [that] his goal was for a tuned environment.”

This work is “Rainforest IV;” there are also “Rainforests” I-III, all composed by David Tudor, from 1968 to 1973. These works (especially “Rainforest” and “Rainforest IV,” the only two that are recorded) have been re-created and performed at various places.

Even though the production of “Rainforest IV” in Middletown is in the preliminary stages, Professor Kuivila was still able to demonstrate part of the installation. Taking the speaker that he had been plugging in all over the room in search of a working outlet, he feeds the microphone connected to the speaker into a silver tube, which is attached to a long pipe on the ceiling. Discontent with the sound produced, he screws off the silver tube and just puts the microphone into the pipe. The pipe, he tells me, is connected to the outside of the building.

“If you actually listen, you can hear the outside filtered through the resonances of the pipe. It’s generally quite beautiful,” says Professor Kuivila.

Listening to the loudspeaker, the noises of cars honking, trucks driving by, and children yelling are converted to haunting, lingering versions of themselves. Ron is unsurprisingly right: the ordinary sounds of afterschool traffic are transformed into something captivating. I remark that the particular reverberations we are listening to sound like the background to a horror film—but that’s just me. As it turns out, individual experiences with this piece are important.

In fact, according to Professor Kuivila, “the point of the piece is to create a situation where everyone has a very unique and original encounter with the soundworld.” With construction barely started, I was able to have my own, in a compelling way.

As for “Rainforest IV” as a whole, Professor Kuivila says, “it’s really a piece about learning how to do electronic music. It’s a piece to teach people about this idea of hearing sounds not as part of a tonal continuity, but as kind of complete in themselves. It’s a way of thinking of music not based on the voice, but based on the world.”

Professor Kuivila is also putting up his own original work commissioned for the MiddletownRemix festival, called “Lighthouse, beside the point,” in the beautiful glass pavilion atop the new Community Health Center at 675 Main Street. “Lighthouse” is based on transferring some of the phenomena of looking out a lighthouse into a soundscape. He uses “very very” directional speakers, that shoot sound out in very specific streams—you have to be directly in line with the sound stream to hear it, mimicking the very specific sightline of the light of the lighthouse.

“I was interested in this idea of connecting sightlines to particular sounds that would somehow reveal what you’re looking at,” explains Professor Kuivila.

Additionally, in the room, which Ron describes as furnished “like a set from ‘Mad Men,’” there will be old-fashioned telephones placed around. They will ring occasionally, and once picked up, will broadcast half of a word into a person’s ear. The other half of the word will be broadcast by a speaker into the room. While the sound broadcast into the room will sound like a vague noise, the syllables coming through the phone will make it recognizable—if you’re listening with both ears.

“You’re having to listen in this way you never do with a telephone, “ says Professor Kuivila. Instead of just focusing on what is coming through the phone, like we would normally do, you are forced to expand your attention to the environment around you.

In fact, this “direction of attention,” a phrase that Ron used a variety of times during our interview, is very much a part of not only “Lighthouse” and “Rainforest,” but it is a major theme of the entire MiddletownRemix festival. Professor Kuivila describes the event as a way of creating an alertness to the sounds of Middletown, instead of ignoring them as part of daily life. It is using sound to raise aural awareness and lead people to appreciate the world around them more.

“Because we live so much texting and looking at little things here,” says Professor Kuivila, indicating his phone, “we tend to lose sight of the extent to which our giving our attention over to something can become a very powerful and beautiful experience.”

For the complete MiddletownRemix festival schedule, and to capture, contribute and remix sounds from Wesleyan and Middletown using the free UrbanRemix app for iPhone/iOS and Android devices, visit http://www.middletownremix.org