Tough Sky

Audio + video installation.

I once heard the term "tough sky" used in a radio broadcast of a baseball game.
It describes the difficulty of seeing the baseball against a white, cloud-filled sky.
I thought it invoked an image of a kind of material texture, as if the sky were a rough surface instead of an almost-empty space. Far from being empty, the sky is filled with animals, signals, and vapors. It's a very busy place. (First presented at ohrenhoch, der Geräuschladen / ohrenhoch - the Noise Shop. Berlin-Neukölln. Photo courtesy ohrenhoch.)

[less-than-full-resolution video here, takes awhile to load]

Steve Roden and Mark Trayle play John Cage's Cartridge Music and Variations II

Phantom Rooms is a composition for a network of computers along with acoustic instruments. It uses the resonant frequencies of an architectural space as essential components of the composition, through the use of filtering and feedback. Rooms appear in other rooms as acoustic phantoms, their resonant frequencies disturbing the acoustics of the rooms they haunt. First presented in a telematic performance in Cuneo and Torino (Italy) in October of 2010. Performers were...

In Cuneo
Alessio Dutto (laptop & bass guitar)
Bruno Fabrizio Sorba (laptop)
Giuseppe Mercuri (laptop)
Marco Chiavarino (electric guitar)
Benjamin Thigpen (laptop)
In Torino
Gianluca Delfino (laptop)
Francesco Torelli (laptop & e. guitar)
Giulio Beccaria (laptop & bass guitar)
Nicola Biagioni (laptop)
Mark Trayle (laptop)

Look for another performance of Phantom Rooms in LA Fall 2012... details forthcoming.

[listen]

Data-driven audio + video installation.

This piece was part of the 40 Years of Speed and Space: Los Angeles - Berlin festival at Ballhaus Naunynstrasse (Berlin), September 2007.It embraces two things for which LA is infamous, traffic and pornography. Looped movie clips travel across the floor from one end of the room to the other. The speed of travel is dependent on the speed of traffic at a single point in the LA freeway system, collected in real-time from the Freeway Performance Measurement System at UC Berkeley. The size of the clip and the sound associated with it exhibit the Doppler effect as they pass by the viewer/listener.

[here's a short video]

An installation for alternative projection surface with sound.

The surface is made out of corrugated sheet metal and sand. The shape of the ripples in the metal suggests a sine wave. The frequency of this sine wave would be 4871.726hz. All the tones in the piece are sub-partials of this frequency, starting at the 56th sub-partial and going up from there in an exponential series. These are mixed with filtered white noise, and the tones and noise are then displayed, visually and sonically, in a semi-random sequence. First installed at The Wave Cave (CalArts) 2007, subsequently at SoundWalk 2008 (Long Beach).

[here's a short (and jumpy) video]

Impulses responding to the ensemble resonate through suspended saws. First performed by ensemble mosaik (Berlin) 4 Dec 2005

Two groups of roving and stationary players explore the acoustics of the performance space with the assistance of electronic compasses and telemetry. Commissioned and performed by Champs d'Action, Brugges, Belgium, 13 September 2002. [listen]

Four players explore the terrain of the performance space using electronic compasses and LEDs mounted on their instruments. Commissioned by and premiered at Pro Musica Nova 2000. Recorded at the Uberseesmuseum, Bremen, by Radio Bremen. [listen to an excerpt]

¢apital magneti¢

¢apital magneti¢ is a network-based multimedia installation that explores the musical possibilities
of the credit card. Participants in the installation use their credit cards and bank cards to compose
pieces of music in cooperation (or competition) with other participants.First presented at ZKM in 1999, various versions for live performance have been performed and recorded since then.

Mark Trayle plays Christian Wolff's For 1, 2, or 3 People