Sarah Angliss is a composer, multi-instrumentalist, roboticist and sound historian
whose work explores acoustics, cognitive science and English folklore.
Some festive, unplugged 70s strangeness: my cover of Popcorn, played on the sampled carillon, with its own pair of binary videos. I fell for the charms of 1-bit video when I was updating an installation that makes music by tracking butterflies in flight. I’d been experimenting with vision algorithms that reduce video to a simplified binary image (i.e. pure black and white, with no grayscale).
This version reduces a moving image to pure black and white blocks (with no grayscale).
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As a thereminist who performs live with robots, the only time I suffer ukulele envy is when I have to set up or strike a show. After years of arm ache and stress before gigs, I’m trying to adopt the carefree life of the ukulele player by re-engineering my equipment so it can be carried on the bus, wheeled onto the stage, plugged into a DI box and played. The life of the ukulele player doesn’t need to be the stuff of fantasy – that’s why I’ve thrown myself into this re-engineering task – a job that’s unglamorous but essential. Currently, you’ll find me obsessing about flight cases and castors and pouring over ebay pictures of old prams.
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“Just got the app. Love it! Thanks!” Lance Burton, Master Magician
My old pal, psychologist, writer and all around good egg Richard Wiseman launches his book Paranormality in America this week. And to celebrate, Richard and I launched a fun and free iPhone magic trick by the same name. Here’s Richard’s video showing the trick in action. The app shows you three spoons on a laboratory table. Ask your friend to choose a spoon and focus their mind on it, willing it to bend. The chosen spoon will bend before their eyes.
I’m delighted to say my new kinetic work, Ventricle, made a brief appearance this weekend in The Story So Far, a new exhibition in the House of Fairy Tales, London.
Established by artists Deborah Curtis and Gavin Turk, The House of Fairy Tales is a child-centred artist led project which draws on an extensive team of artists, performers, writers, educationalists, designers, musicians, film makers, dreamers and philosophers to create magical, parallel worlds where learning is play and play is directed learning.
This small, red leather handbag, around the age of my own heart, continually moves, contracting and relaxing, entraining perfectly to the heartbeat of the observer. In an era where sounds and music can be beat-matched perfectly to machine rhythms, Ventricle moves at a varying tempo, one that precisely follows a live human heartbeat.
Version 1 of Ventricle was displayed at the Kinetica Art Fair, February 2011, as part of the ArtHertz collective. Version 2 is currently under test. Here, users will directly connect with Ventricle by placing a stethoscope on their chest.
This exhibit is an attempt to show something internal, individualistic and affective, by animating a mass-produced object.
Here’s some rough and ready video, captured on my mobile at the Kinetica Art Fair, Februrary 2011 – more luxurious footage to follow. Here, you can also see some fine wearable electronics on the stands behind me – this was created by Rain Ashford. The other exhibit on the ArtHertz stand, by Andrew Back, is just out of shot. It used variations in the frequency of the mains supply to estimate how many people were making tea and drawing power from the National Grid.
For some Christmas fun, I added ten bright, white LEDs to the petticoat 0f this 1950s-style dress so I could move around parties in my own pool of light. You can see the dress in action in this video, taken in Brighton on a very snowy night in 2010. I was inspired by the electric ladies who used to perform in dresses festooned with lightbulbs, at the turn of the twentieth century.
LilyPad Arduino (wearable microprocessor)
How the dress works
The LEDs are controlled by a Lilypad Arduino which lights them up in sequence. I’ve also connected a cheap accelerometer to the Arduino (just like the one you find inside an iPhone or Nintendo wii) so the circuit can tell when I’m moving.
When I move, the LEDs light up in order so you see the light circling. If I’m static, the light circles at a slower rate, then eventually falls into a random pattern (if I don’t move much for 20 seconds or so). That’s the theory – the whole thing could do with a little fine tuning but I was keen to get it finished and wear it out. The electric dress has already survived a couple of parties and was still twinkling at the end of the evening, on its first set of three AA batteries. I’m planning to wear it at some future Spacedog gigs.
The dress is from Vivien of Holloway. The LEDs and Arduino are attached to the petticoat using fine ribbon so they can be removed for washing.
Thanks to everyone who came along to the Arthertz stand at the Kinetica Art Fair. The Ealing Feeder, my new bell rig, survived admirably and is now back in my workshop until its next outing. It’s coming soon to the Brighton Festival Fringe and to Battersea Power Station.
Here’s some fine footage of the Ealing Feeder in action, from video artist Roger Spy. This was taken the night before the show, just before I programmed the doll’s movements. I’ll be posting more video over the next few days:
Ealing Feeder video by Roger Spy (click to view)
You can also see me talking about this bell rig on Rain Rainycat’s blog. Rain’s video, which sweeps around the exhibition, also includes some shots of Andrew Back’s Nixie tubes and Kathy Taylor’s lovely animated teapot. The ArtHertz stand also features in this article from Herbert Wright, Blueprint Magazine.
bells from the Ealing Feeder
If you come along to a Spacedog performance, you’ll see the Ealing Feeder playing live. I use it as a backing instrument while Jenny sings and I play the saw or theremin.
I try to make performances that don’t focus on virtuosity but on getting under people’s skin. After a number of years creating music in software, I realised my stage act had lost a lot of the theatricality and sense of jeopardy it had when I was playing with physical sound-making devices (i.e. musical instruments!) That’s why I started to build robots to accompany me on stage. I wanted to bring some old-school physicality back to the show, without throwing away the high-tech. The Ealing Feeder is the latest version of my robotic bell rig, one of the robots I’ve designed and built for this purpose.
I created the Ealing Feeder with the Arthertz gig at Battersea Power Station in mind. Dennis and Beverley from Arthertz invited Spacedog to participate, after they saw our show Electroplasm in last year’s Brighton Festival Fringe.
Looking for inspiration for the Battersea show, I studied the form of machines at the time of transition between the purely mechanical and the electromechanical age. In London, most middle-class homes were making that transition in the early 1930s, as power stations such as Battersea came on line, fuelling the ‘electric servant’ (i.e. domestic appliance) boom. Homes which used to call up their human servants with bells were switching on electrical machines instead. Oddly enough, my bells are such a throwback (technologically), they look unfamiliar, and perhaps a little eerie, to modern viewers. I hope they give viewers and listeners a sense of the strangeness of people’s early encounters with electrical machines.
The poem around the edge of the work was written in 1930. It’s by a woman who was so intoxicated by the idea of the electric servant, she soothed her baby to sleep by passing an electric current through it (I doubt it worked). You can read more about it here – it’s from the archives of the IET.
The words ‘Ealing Feeder’ come from the control room of Battersea Power Station. The Ealing Feeder was used to vary power to the Ealing district, in response to public demand.
This gig evokes the early days of Battersea Power Station, celebrating this landmark and what it means to Londoners. There’s a great line-up: Alex Paterson (The Orb), Ian Eames (maker of some early Pink Floyd videos), Andrew Back, Andy Boyd and Mike Grierson as well as Spacedog. We’re excited to hear that Bishi may also be on the bill.
We’re waiting for final confirmation of the date of the Battersea gig but fingers crossed for 1 June. Tickets will go on sale as soon as the details are confirmed. In the meantime, if you’d like to go on the mailing list, please send an email to sarah [dot] spacedog [at] gmail [dot] com.
Ealing Feeder - bell servos
The latest version of the bell rig is controlled entirely by two Arduinos, connected to a servo driver board and an array of LEDs. The device can read a stored midi file or can play an incoming midi signal. It’s housed in a black Perspex box, laser cut from my CAD files by Heritage Inlay, Brighton. I’ve used a simple FTIR effect to illuminate the etched, back panel and make its brightness vary in response to sound.
Thanks to Vivien Angliss for making the doll’s outfit and to Colin Uttley for his help with the assembly of the exhibit. While I was building and programming the bell mechanics, Colin did a great job of stuffing the doll with servos. Here, you can see him sewing the doll up again, after deftly hiding wires in her legs.
Colin sewing servos into the doll
I’ll be showing off the latest version of my carillon (automatic bell-playing rig) at the Kinetica Art Fair, P3 Gallery, 23 Marylebone Road, London, 5-7 February 2010. You’ll find me on the ArtHertz’ stall Electricity and Ghosts, which gives a sneak preview of our upcoming live show at Battersea Power Station.
Here, it will be playing an electric lullaby, inspired by a delightfully unsettling poem I discovered on the pages of The Electric Age (Vol 1, 1930), a pioneering gadget magazine published by the Electrical Association for Women. The words of the lullaby are inscripted on the piece, along with fragments of domestic circuitry from the time.
I’ll be posting images of the new carillon in a week or so – it features a new figure which may interest anyone who has enjoyed watching my other robotic dolls in action. The words Ealing Feeder come from the control room of Battersea Power Station, which provided London with electricity during the boom years of the fossil fuel age.
“Finally someone has released a rather fantastic mind reading app that genuinely triggers that “wow – how did you do that?” response.” Phillis, Derren Brown Blog.
Ever wanted to read someone’s mind?
With Telepath, you can convince almost anyone you’re a mind reader. Telepath is a new mind-reading iPhone app that the talented Richard Wiseman and I are releasing today. The idea is simple: Someone chooses a picture and mentally sends their thoughts to the iPhone. When they turn over the iPhone, they’ll be astounded to discover their thoughts on the screen.
Here’s Telepath in action …
I hope you like it! This is my first foray into the worlds of app development, Objective C and ESP.
As we say in the video, Telepath can also be used to predict numbers, cute animals, cards and dates – so can even improve your love life. Feel free to guess how it might work – and if you buy the trick from the app store, let us know what you think (but please don’t give away the method!).
Update: Thanks to all of you who have mentioned the app and given it a try. We’re so glad to hear so many of you are enjoying it. And we’re really chuffed with all the positive feedback from magicians around the world.
We’re now getting to work on an Android version – news on that very soon. Meanwhile, the lovely people over at Derren Brown Towers (which features all things magical, scientific and wonderful) would like to see some videos of you performing the trick. Can’t wait to see your magical powers in action!
SoundCurious
Update 11 October: My appearance has been postponed by the venue due to problems with space – I hope to see you there at a later date!
I’ll be bringing Spin Recovery, a small, experimental installation, involving robotic bells, cameras and video projections, to Brighton’s first SoundCurious event. At the Coachwerks, Brighton, 11 October 2009. POSTPONED.
SoundCurious is an ongoing series of curated performances, workshops, lectures and demonstrations examining all aspects of sound and vibration. It’s curated by Alice Eldridge.
My piece appears on the Sunday evening but SoundCurious runs all weekend. Day tickets are available, as well as tickets for the whole weekend. Further details and booking information here.
It Felt Like a Kiss
Over the last few months, I’ve been collaborating with Punchdrunk, the marvellous encounter theatre company, to make a very unusual multimodal effect – one that mixes emerging ideas in perception with a one-on-one theatrical encounter.
I’ll be revealing more about the nature of this effect in a few months, when some formal studies are complete. However, I can reveal we’ve piloted the effect – and have had some encouraging feedback – and have already used it (tentatively) in the recent Punchdrunk show: It Felt Like a Kiss. This documentary, the form of a promenade piece, was devised by Punchdrunk in collaboration with documentary maker Adam Curtis (featuring music from Damon Albarn). It Felt Like A Kiss was created in summer 2009 for the Manchester International Festival.
…vomit.
It’s an awkward position to be in: you need the sound of vomit but don’t have any of it handy. This is the problem I was facing in 2003, when I created a small exhibit for the Museum of Science and Industry, Manchester.
It all started when I was approached by acoustician Trevor Cox to make an exhibit about unpleasant sounds: fingers down the blackboard, babies crying, ringtones, the sound of someone slurping their dinner and other ghastly delights. I persuaded Trevor to turn the exhibit some kind of test – a booth where visitors could test their endurance of the ‘worst sounds in the world’. A simple idea – but one that hit the buffers when I started hunting around for library sound effects – the kind you can buy in packs of 200 on CD. I don’t know who library tracks are made for but I have to say they don’t cut the mustard if you’re looking for something that genuinely puts your teeth on edge. So I decided to spend a couple of days, in the company of some actors, making my own recordings. Here are the details for making one of those sounds – simulated vomit (please don’t venture any further if it’s teatime):
You will need1 tin of baked beans (any make will do)
1/2 litre of tepid water
A plastic bucket
A mug
An actor with a sterling constitution
A sound recording and editing system with reverb
1) Pour the beans into the bowl and mix in the water to make a sloppy broth.
2) Scoop out a mug full of the broth.
3) Holding your mic just inside the bowl, empty your mug into the bowl, while you record the sound. Make sure you record every part of the action – including the moment when the mixture first hits the bowl.
4) Repeat step 3 several times. Experiment with different amounts of broth. Also experiment with slow and fast emptying of the mug. Try and get some recordings where the broth hits the bare plastic of the bowl, others where it hits the broth that’s already in there. This extra effort will pay dividends later.
5) Ask your actor to make some retching sounds, as though he is about to be sick. If you are working with a method actor, you may find it helpful to let him smell or touch the broth at this juncture. Record the sounds he makes. It’s especially good if he can imitate the sound of a small piece of onion being stuck in the throat.
6) Now you have your raw materials, it’s time to edit them together to make a convincing vomiting sound. Listen to the recordings you have made and cut and paste the best takes to make a sequence of alternating retches and broth falls. You may like to start with some more delicate sounds that build towards a climax. Make sure you leave a hiatus between each retch and broth fall. And remember, you’re simulating a natural function here so don’t bee too metronomic about the placing of the sounds (unless you’re trying to beat match this to some music). Vary the pattern as much as you like – be creative!
The reverb plugin in Logic
7) Your sound effect is almost complete but a little reverberation will help to stitch the two elements of your sound together, convincing the listener that the two are taking place in the same space. A reverb of around 3.5 seconds should be ample for a domestic toilet but feel free to experiment here. The larger your imaginary room is and the more tiled its surfaces are, the longer the reverb will be. Most reverbs have a knob that lets you adjust the amount of ‘wet’ and ‘dry’ sound. Here, ‘wet’ sound is the sound that has been given the reverb treatment, ‘dry’ sound is your original sound. Start with a wet-to-dry ratio of around 30% but increase this if you want to give the impression your actor is further away. You may find you can increase the perception of distance by cutting the high frequencies a little.
Bad Vibes project website (sponsored at the EPSRC)
Interview with Monique Reymond, Foley Artist
Foley artists use umbrellas, dog food and a host of other unlikely items to make the incidental sounds in movies.
Testing Churchill's pressure chamber
This photographic gem is straight from the archives of Royal Aircraft Establishment, Farnborough. I understand it’s a pressure chamber, designed to take the strain off Winston Churchill when he was jet setting around the world. I think it dates from the mid-1940s. The aeroplane he travelled in didn’t have a pressure cabin – but lying in this chamber, Churchill could breathe a steady supply of air (and maybe smoke a cigar or two).
Hitler had something similar, apparently. Chambers like these were a must for any VIP traveller as they also offered extra security in an attack. I don’t know if there’s any evidence of Churchill using this contraption. His aircraft was once in danger but never came under serious attack.
I unearthed this wonderful image when I was digging through the archives for ‘Cold War Hot Science’, an exhibition I put together with Tim Hunkin, Robert Bud and Science Museum staff, early 2001. The exhibition marked the launch of a book by the same name. Among the many other extraordinary and alarming delights in the archive was a bomb switch for the Vulcan bomber (the aircraft designed to deliver our nuclear bombs, before we had intercontinental ballistic missiles) and some old laboratory glassware, used by Porton Down scientists to cook up Britain’s stock of the deadly Marburg Virus. Marburg is a Category 4 disease – like Ebola and Lassa Fever, it’s deadly, incurable and highly contagious.
Reactor Vessel used by Porton Down scientists to cook up Marburg virus and other Category 4 diseases
Putting together the exhibition, I also remember encountering what might be the world’s most historic pieces of Sellotape. They were holding together the original ‘drop models’ (small, balsa wood aeroplanes) that were used by engineers to figure out the best design for Concorde.
Working around 1962, long before the era of Computer Aided Design (CAD), engineers dropped these models, just like paper aeroplanes, from the top of a ladder or from helicopters. They watched them gliding to the ground as they were looking for an aeroplane shape that wouldn’t roll over dangerously, as it approached the runway, despite being contoured to travel smoothly through the sound barrier. After extensive drop model tests, Farborough engineers opted to give Concorde its famous ‘ogive’ (curvy, triangular) wing shape.
When Science Museum conservators prepared these drop models for public display, they took great pains to conserve the fragile remains of Sellotape that engineers had stuck to the models, all those years ago.
We juxtaposed artefacts from the labs with press cuttings about Farnboough workers, gleaned the local papers. Somehow, these very British local newspaper cuttings made the researcher’s undercover defence work seem all the more extraordinary.
Newspaper clipping: RAE are tops in drama
My favourite Farnborough clipping
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