Florian Waldner

Sensor Bird for “The Birds according to Oskar Sala”

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“The Birds according to Oskar Sala” is a radioplay by Ammer & Console. The play was staged live at the German Museum in Munich 16th and 18th July 2010. I equiped the plastic crow in the picture above with a G-force sensor using a wireless eowave sensor box. The bird screamed and fluttered depending on how it was moved and was used on stage by the actor playing Hitchcock’s part.

Oskar Sala is a german composer and pioneer of electronic music who created the soundtrack for Hitchcock’s The Birds using his custom built instrument the Trautonium.

Does It Sound Like I Was Here?

cover_3_small Does It Sound Like I Was Here? reacts to the sounds surrounding the listener and incorporates them in the installation. With mobile devices, headphones and a microphone, the installation accompanies the listeners in their everyday lives and creates an extended, acoustic reality. The software is at the heart of this and determines how the composition reacts to conditions and changes in the listeners’ sonic environment. Pics on flickr. Sound on Soundcloud. Video on youtube.

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Processing and the RjDj API

The picture above is a section of a visualization that displays the number of uploaded recordings made with RjDj scenes available on http://rjdj.me/music/. The picture was made using Processing and the RjDj API . The length of the bar indicates the number of uploaded recordings. The scene on the bottom is the oldest, the one on top the most recently added.

A very helpful and well documented tutorial to start using Processing with JSON is on http://blog.blprnt.com.

Here is the link to the source for the RjDj API visualization: http://13bit.at/RjDj_API_Recordings.zip To run this sketch you will need this JSON Processing library.

aware - RjDj Scene

aware is a piece of music that reacts to the listeners sonic environment for the RjDj iPhone app. aware creates a lush and wide musical landscape. The microphone is used to produce swirling electronic sounds. A generative synth plays notes whenever there is an acoustic onset in your environment. Swipe through the pages of the scene to experience different modes! Page one is the generative listening mode, page two fuzzy layers of sound based on the mic input, and page three is made to sing along the harmonies and record. You can get the scene for free on RjDj.

A video of the scene in use is here: (more…)

Unowis - RjDj scene

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I made a scene called Unowis for the RjDj app. It accumulates loud sounds from your environment and plays them back using granular synthesis in realtime. Besides that it features some string sounds that are constantly modulated and filtered in various ways.

Kids on DSP Release Party Bootleg

The Kids on DSP played a live set at their application release party at RjDj on a multiple speaker and microphone setup. Party guests were part of the music! Have a listen here.

Press reactions to the Kids on DSP: NME, The Guardian, MTV, appleblog.com, geobloggers.com.

Check out dizzybanjo’s blog for a post about the release party.

Zaubergarten

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I did some programming in Pd (Pure Data) for a sound installation by Acid Pauli at Grüne Sonne festival 3-5 July 2009. Several microphones and speakers were hidden in trees in the beautiful garden shown in the image above. Sounds from people sitting and relaxing in the garden were recorded, manipulated, and played back on the speakers in various ways.

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Vegaschleife at Raumsonde Alpenblick (Munich)

Vegaschleife is an installation that evloved out of the work I was doing with Acid Pauli for RjDj. It is shown from 16.7.-12.9.2009 at Platform3. Vegaschleife listens to percussive sounds in the environment, records them, and plays them back in rhythmic patterns.

PLATFORM3
Räume für zeitgenössische Kunst
Kistlerhofstr. 70 (Haus 60 // 3. Stock)
81379 München

Flight data visualization

The picture above shows a fraction of a visualization of flight data (click the image to enlarge). It shows all flights that passed Vorarlberg within a year. Each square represents a flight. Rows show all flights that happened during one day according to the time of their flyover. In sum there are 365 rows, one row for each day in a year. The colour of the squares indicate the altitude.

The data used for this visualization was colleceted by Dominik Bartenstein using a SBS-1 Virtual Radar Box and custom build software called sbstools, that reads, cleans and stores the data in a MySQL database. The image was created using the Processing Java API (archive of the processing sketch)

Loss of Rhythm at C17

The Loss of Rhytm Installation was exhibited between January 15th and January 18th 2009 at the C17 gallery in Vienna. Pics: 1 2 ( by C17 - Thanks!.

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Wave Lands II

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This sound installation is based on eight high-frequency speakers hanging from the ceiling and floating free 1cm above the floor. Each speaker plays back filtered sea wave sounds I recorded with different microphone placements on an area similar to that of the installation. Visitors are free to swing the speakers and therefore shape the sounds with varying reflexions from the floor and Doppler effect.

Wave Lands II was exibited at the Mobile Music Workshop 2008 in Vienna and The Essence 08 (annual exhibition of the University of Applied Arts Vienna).

Special thanks to Martin and Thomas at Protozone who did great help in building the speaker cases.

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Wave Lands I

The stones on the Plocica island in Croatia show patterns that are formed by the tide over a long period of time. Photographs of these patterns are reduced to two-dimensional graphical lines. Audio recordings taken at the same place are analyzed concerning their spectral composition. The data resulting from that analysis is used to animate the graphical lines in three dimensional space. Such that movements of the abstracted patterns is dependent on the sound of the sea.

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