November Tea Party on Basic.fm

Saturday, 23rd November, 1730 GMT

http://www.basic.fm/november-tea-party-benjamin-mawson/

One minute preview of tomorrow's little festival of the banal, insane and wondrous:


Moving around crowded places is like a rapid-cut movie with complete surround sound, of fragmentary tales. Spontaneous capture of where someone’s going, or what they might be waiting for. What brought them right here, at this moment? What’s urgently at the front their mind to express, for just the second it takes to pass them and hear it?

Composing can be like that: if, instead of a formal structure, streams of idea and emotion that occupy the composing process can lead it, the transitions and places we ask the listener to follow us through, we can take you on a walk through real, imagined, simulated, impossibly combined experiences.

I want to take you on a walk through the crowded places of my recent listening and musical thought. It is not a picture of a particular thing: it meant different things as I made it, tells me new stories as I listen to the completed piece while writing this.

I hope you will give yourself to it, climb inside it (with headphones) for the time it takes to run.

There’s a miniature virtual-piano study, on which the piece hangs, with its own distractions and tangents, interruptions and alternative routes taken or just suggested.

I’ve also used tiny voice samples as keyboard notes, fragments of the Victorian composer Cyril Scott, a little moment from a well-known UK rapper (talking about my town) and various voices you will recognise immediately, removed from their context.

It’s a collage, a reconstruction of the pulsing, shifting emotive and geometric forms that the sounds I’ve used here inspired in me.

I’ve tried to make you smile as I did, and to feel some of the empathy, fear and exasperation that the sampled speakers inspired, while also inviting you to look with me through a window at something bluer, beyond.

Sound You Can Walk Inside, #SXSC3, Creative Digifest, Southampton, UK

SXSC3 Creative DigiFest, 19 November 2013

Digital Economy Strategic Research Group, University of Southampton

#SXSC3 Speaker profile: Ben Mawson

Benjamin Louis Mawson, Composer and Virtual Performance Developer‏. 

Working to make music composed in the digital studio come alive through motion-tracked real-time interactivity, using 3DBARE.

Ben’s recent work has included sound effects for a London stage production of

-  Bulgakov’s “Heart of a Dog” (simulating Moscow 1920s streets and domestic interiors) and the

-  Cotswold Motoring Museum (vintage motor racing audio in surround sound in the new exhibition space).

He has composed extensively for chamber ensemble in addition to more recent acoustic commissions including

-  “ROOM” (2011), in conceptual art show “Parallax” at John Hansard Gallery, Southampton (excerpt) and

- “Dreaming at the Circular Ruins” (2012), South Bank Centre, London.

Recent compositional work and his PhD thesis are about how composition in the digital studio can be made to simulate acoustic music impossible for human hands: 

doing things that seem to be happening but aren't, creating music you can walk inside and investigate like a physical structure, augmenting the auditory reality of a place.

He is currently working on a commission from New Dimensions (funded by Hampshire County Council) to build a community-based immersive Audio Portrait of Gosport, South East Hampshire, interpreting, depicting, augmenting the acoustic history and present of this pivotal historic port town.

It uses noTours software to create a geo-located multi-layered musical composition that draws on the contributions of hundreds of speaking, singing and playing residents and visitors to the town and is connected by a complex web of structurally linked fragments of virtual sonic reality. 

The composition will cover several hundred acres of the town, accessible via noTours software for Android.

Recent guest presentations on immersive audio have included Cap Gemini and Google, schools in Southampton and the Landscape Institute.

Interview with Ben on Voice FM about annotating landscape with sound. 

Ben is working on ways to present music created in the digital studio so the experience is continually changeable, impossible to hear the same way twice. These include multi-room speaker installations, GPS-based tracking with noTours software and wireless head-tracking (3DBARE) for listeners in an interior space - Music You Can Walk Inside.

He has a monthly show on internet radio station Basic.fm (Broadcast Art, Sound & Independent Culture) and posts regular articles at http://benjamin-mawson.blogspot.com.

In this event for SXSC3, Ben Mawson will be presenting noTours and 3DBARE, two distinct tools for listeners to walk inside an audio landscape. 3DBARE (under development) is a revolutionary approach to the creation of ‘digital liveness’, making repeated experience of fixed output continually changeable: Music You Can Walk Inside.

noTours software, by Spanish sound collective Escoitar.org is a means to annotate landscapes with audio via a GPS-enabled Android phone handset.

Ben will deliver a Master Class on Annotating Landscape with Sound, using GPS-based tool noTours  at the Avenue campus 65 / 2149 10-4 on December 6:  

“Annotating landscape with sound: an introduction to building geo-located audio sculpture.” 

A practical session on building geo-located sound structures in the landscape. 

Learn how to use the (free) editor software, build soundmaps, publish your work and share it with listeners: 

Watch Ben's video about working with noTours at St Paul's Cathedral here:

“Let the Place Speak to You”

Happy Birthday Charles Ives

Dear Mr Ives

You composed music to be performed from mountain peaks for audiences in the valley between.

You messed with our sense of tonality, harmonic direction and temporal structure.

You created more questions than answers, in the style of a truly great thinker.

Your "Unanswered Question" remains one of the great western musical imponderables.

I dedicate this small foolish greeting to you and hope you are enjoying your birthday, somewhere suitably interesting.

Love etc,
Mawson

A brewery, a gig and Goebbels' secret bunker.

During the evening of my 2nd day at the "Functional Sounds Conference", I walked from the centre of the city, using the paper street map I had fought so hard to obtain on a public holiday. 

Out past Alexander Platz onto Friedrichshain, towards Prenzlauer Berg, I walked for around an hour, absorbing the strangely spacious yet oppressive architectural surroundings, still dominated by the remarkable, absurd 1960s radio tower.

Eventually, at a sudden and unlikely-looking entrance to a newly-built gated community, the street name I sought skulked diffidently in the shadows.

After so long a walk, by six lane motorways, in the rain, this end-of-journey surprise seemed like a kind of practical joke. 

I walked past identical pristine concrete boxes, a mixture somehow of reduced-scale Georgian London and Lego Bauhaus (if it doesn't yet exist, it should). 

At the end of this German Desperate Housewives landscape I did not expect to find an enormous ancient brick warehouse. The numbers were 76 and 78. Seeking 80 as instructed I accidentally strayed into one of the pristine gardens and started to imagine having my legs bitten off. 

I left and stood in confusion as it started once more to rain.

A man on a bike rode past and I called to ask where the studio was. He directed me to a dark corner with a heavy, ajar door, orange light from within.

I entered to a remarkable, huge cubic space with piano, scaffolding towers, an ancient Citroen and people sitting on sofas in the semi-darkness. I asked if this was the studio and they pointed me through a far door. 

I was now behind the fairy-lit bar in a fifteen metre high, square brick, iron pillared hall with Bluthner grand piano, mixers, modules and a Mac on the stage. 

Taking off my wet jacket and fetching a beer and some delicious sushi rolls I looked around to realise I didn't know a single person.

The evening progressed with a series of fascinating conversations with new acquaintances and some extraordinary music. 

Towards the end of the night, when almost everyone had left, I got into conversation with the owner, Jens Reule. He offered to show the only two of us remaining, me and Kevin Logan (Ear of the Duck) the underground bunkers beneath us. 

Down spiral stairs to the basement we followed in the dripping chill of pitch blackness behind Jens' torch beam. The first chamber, semi-cylindrical and around ten metres by forty was lined with rusted rectangular metal frames that had once supported bunk beds. 

A solid-rusted iron chain like an industrial stalactite dripped slowly to the floor by an arched doorway into a chillier, utterly dark second chamber. 

I entered alone, using my phone's feeble blue screen as my only light. Even twenty feet from the others I felt very alone and surrounded by whispering shades, a skin-creeping weirdness to be so close to this strangely silent memorial space.

We were, Jens told us, in the secret air-raid shelter of Goebbels' chosen Nazi-faithful families. The beds were used nightly by over a hundred people, mostly women and children in families working for or useful to the Ministry of Propaganda. 

The former brewery had been requisitioned due to its proximity to the Ministry (now an economics publishing house) and was connected by a number of tunnels to permit safe, rapid access. Goebbels was, according to Jens, not only tiny but a coward. 

Certainly it seemed that the miniature rusty manhole cover under which I stood in the echoing brick well exit was only fit for very young children. How hundreds could have clambered in or out of this hatch in a hurry was impossible to see.

Back to the hall through which we had entered, Jens shone his light into a smaller chamber, through the window space of a locked hefty wooden door. A solid-rusted bike leant against the far wall, next to folded bunk-bed frames. 

In front of these a dozen or so radio transmitters and receivers, the wheel of a tank and, mind-blowing, in a plastic bucket, far to the side, an Enigma machine, in pieces. 

Staring in silence at this mysterious, resonant hoard which Jens has cautiously, lovingly collected through years of local memento hunting, all we could hear was our breath and the quiet, echoing counterpoint of dripping brick.

On leaving, hushed in wonder, Kevin stopped at a thin, rusty iron door, unattached and leaning against a wall by the toilets. What's this, he asked. "Ah, that" said Jens with a proud grin, "is a blast door from the Führer Bunker." 

We ascended again to the empty sound stage, drank another beer with our host, admired the fine piano and played a little to each other. 

Thanking Jens for his hospitality (it was now 2 a.m) Kevin and I left and argued amicably about the way back to town, until the distraction of a kebab shop provided much-needed warmth and meat. Or, in his case, chickpeas.

We photographed the changing colours of the radio tower and discussed poeisis and beer as we walked the long route back. 

More on UFO studios here - its rich and surprising history, their unique approach to audio mastering and studio recording, the engineering team.