Archive for category sounds

Date: July 19th, 2011
Cate: artists, Major Project, sounds

Longplayer

Longplayer is a one thousand year long musical composition. It began playing at midnight on the 31st of December 1999, and will continue to play without repetition until the last moment of 2999, at which point it will complete its cycle and begin again. Conceived and composed by Jem Finer, it was originally produced as an Artangel commission, and is now in the care of the Longplayer Trust.

Longplayer can be heard in the lighthouse at Trinity Buoy Wharf, London, where it has been playing since it began. It can also be heard at several other listening posts around the world, and globally via a live stream on the Internet.

Date: July 19th, 2011
Cate: Major Project, sounds

The Power of Om

The Power of Om

Synopsis

Reverend Richard Coles explores the world of spiritual sound and meditation and tries to understand what it is about certain sounds and chants which gives practitioners a sense of proximity to the Divine. He tunes into the Om, a sacred sound in several religions including Hinduism, Sikhism, Jainism and Buddhism and its vibration is believed by many to be healing. He speaks to the Director for the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies, Shaunaka Rishi Das, who states that Meditation is something we all do from childhood, for example when we are focussing on something we want to buy and how to get it or when we kiss, but that it can be used for greater ends

Richard meets neuroscientist Dr Alan Watkins of Imperial College who has worked with the Dalai Lama and his team in Tibet and found that people who meditate together showed signs of “entrainment” in their brain activity, the same phenomenon that allows flocks of birds or shoals of fish to move together. Is this the sense of “one-ness” people talk about when meditating?

Richard speaks to the expert in comparative religion Martin Palmer who suggests that there is nothing inherently sacred about chanting, but that is a trick whose powers can be harnessed by despots as well as for good.

Richard talks to Jem Finer of The Pogues, writer of their greatest hit The Fairytale of New York about his Longplayer project, a musical composition based on the meditative sound of Tibetan Singing Bowls and designed to play continuously for 1000 years.

Richard also hears from the nuns at Saint Cecilia’s Abbey on the Isle of Wight who sing Gregorian Chant everyday in its original form. What does the power of the Mother Note in Gregorian chant have in common with the mantra recitations of the Hindu tradition?

Producer: Victoria Shepherd
A Juniper production for BBC Radio 4.

Date: June 8th, 2011
Cate: Breath, Live Electronic Performance, Major Project, sounds

LEP Project

Live Electronic Performance Project

Noise: the base substrate that we are all grounded in and almost always paradoxically outside of, not a defined territory,  this is dissonance, difference, otherness.  A  non-representable, indexical? An innate capacity and breadth to both exist outside of a form and engulf a form, cosmological, a capacitor for change an evolutionary sea where the noisionists and their notions of all creation have derived consonance from and into.


My research for my main Masters project explores the properties and ideas about human breath, in essence the breath as a living proof of the necessity for interchange between every individual being and its physical environment. The breath, a bridge, between thought and action. In philosophy the breath can be a guide for exploration into the depths of consciousness; in art, breath can be a prime material or subject matter for creation.

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Date: April 28th, 2010
Cate: Major Project, sounds

Internal sounds

Laya Yoga: Meditation on Internal Sounds By Swami Rama

Laya yoga is the absorption of the mind in sound. The goal of this practice is to alter one’s normal awareness of self by focusing on hearing an internal, mystic sound. The mind will become steady and absorbed in the sound on which it focuses. In space, sound is produced by the movement of sound waves in the air. So, too, in the body, there are currents that flow and produce sound when one practices pranayama.
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