Dave burraston's Blog (11)

WEATHER-MIX 5 minute weather sounds selection A multi-layered mix of natural weather pattern sonifications : rising and falling wind patterns rain storms (heard as cracks and pops when water strikes the pickup, and as zaps/pings as the rain strikes further down the wire) wir… Continue

well this ultra hot heatwave we had, followed by very strong winds has given us a good idea just how long a set of our piezo pick-ups will last. just about 10 months! which is pretty good going, as we were expecting to renew them after 6 months. i've uploaded some photo's i took yesterday showing just how much the weather has taken its toll. they are in an album on my page. i was quite surprised just how much they had been stressed by the heat, well we did get up to 45c and the heatwave lasted n… Continue

the wires themselves are multifaceted and the often discussed aeolian aspect is but one. they are also nature's microphone. much animal life intereacts with them e.g. insects (spiders, mozzies), birds and cows have all had a play too! the rainfall recordings are also very beautiful. water dampens the vibrations of the wire. water and morning dew will generally stop them from singing or vibrating. in light or short patches of rain the vibrations may not be completely dampened. the sound of the r… Continue

one of the important things we needed to see before the end of the residency was that the moo cows could co-exist with the installation. moo cows seem to get on fine with power and telephone poles, so we expect them to be no different with our poles and wires. however, one section each of both the short and long wire spans was just beneath moo cow head height after tensioning. so i made a few adjustments yesterday to compensate for this, which i've uploaded into a photo album called moo cow adj… Continue

sigh... another great one gone... d ---------------------- Begin forwarded message: From: Tom Rhea Date: 2008 April 27 8:45:11 PM EDT (CA) Subject: Re: [EMF World] Bebe Barron Thanks Folks, I appreciate the remembrances. I, too will miss Bebe. I videotape interviewed Bebe some years ago, and she told me that the AFM actually "blackballed" Louis and her from doing further work "in town." This was done by threatening the major studios with the possibility of boycotting their orchestral film… Continue

28-04-08-heavywind+rain part of a 3 and a half hour recording sesh today of the long wires in proper artic conditions as far as australia is concerned. the wind chill factor was pretty convincing, but leeds in march with blizzarding snow is somewhat more inhospitable and just as beautiful. this 28-04-08-heavywind+rain recording was made from the pickups on the bottom long wire. the cows are heading up to the wire paddock soon and there was a couple of eagles, wedge tails going across a very dar… Continue

i've just uploaded this recording which was done on 17-04-08. alan was at the far end of the short wire playing with the end post floating pole. i started at the top end where the short and long wire connect and walked down the length of the wire towards alan, playing the poles along the way and then reaching him at the far end for the remaining 10 mins or so. the excruciating high pitched wailing around 5mins was the wire scraping on the pole while alan was rattling the floating pole, ear split… Continue

phew.... its been a busy old residency for our little edirol recorder and the sd ram cards. i did what is probably the final batch of recordings for a while (probably until the next full moon if i can contain my recording fingers), as its now time to listen back to it all. i loaded the sound files into into itunes and it tells me that a total of 2.3 days (a mammoth 51.82 gigabytes) of recordings were made. all told there were 47 individual soundfiles. the first few of these were done at 44.1khz… Continue

i thought i'd better post this up as it just came through on the sonic arts network list via the acma list. a great pioneer, i was very sorry to hear about this. dave ------------------------------- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tristram_Cary Date: Thu, 24 Apr 2008 20:24:35 +0930 From: Christian Haines Subject: [Acma-l] Tristram Cary Dear All It is with great regret that I inform you of Tristram Cary's passing after a long illness. A truly sad day. Tristram was born in Oxford on 14th… Continue

leading up to the full moon many recordings were made giving us all a good idea of the variation of the instrument during the tempering of the wires. tempering of the wires is a complex phenomena of wind, meteorological, physical, atmospheric, seismic among other factors... the interesting thing is that during the construction of the system we had practically no wind, which is ideal from a construction point of view. the bonus came just after the first tensioning where we had no wind and sweet… Continue

yesterday (16-04-08) we got the first piezo pickup attached to one of the short wires. short here means about 200 metres. the current length of the wire instrument is about 1.1 kilometres and consists of 2 spans (approx 200 metres and 350 metres), each span consists of 2 wires. we made this first test recording at sunset when the wires were not self-resonating (singing). the instrument was played by alan lamb, robin fox, garry bradbury, deb spinocchia and myself. !!! **** WARNING NOTE : this is… Continue