Shannon O'Neill » Work

Submerge#d

Shannon — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 00:59:18 +0000

I’ll be performing at this event in Cairns this Saturday as part of the On Edge festival.

Submerge#d

Arahmaiani (Indonesia), post (Syd), tako seijin (Sam Tupou), Zane Saunders, Unstrumenta Orchestra, Shannon O’Neill (syd), ReelDance – Australian & New Zealand Awards 2010, John Von Sturmer (Syd), Kris Keogh (Dar), Font featuring Tweak Bakini, Hanzard and lots more.

Submerge#d presents a diverse and eclectic night of short media and performance works from local and guest practitioners. Guest artist, Arahmaiani (Indonesia) is a key-figure in the current contemporary art scene in both Indonesia and South East Asia, and draws from community process and social/political issues in developing innovative performance art.

The Submerge#d program also includes Sydney group post presenting new work in progress, the ReelDance Australian and New Zealand Awards, and innovative artists Zane Saunders and Sam Tupou bringing contemporary indigenous and pacific island perspectives to the fore.

Sat 10th July

Old Hrvatski Klub Artspace, 240 Scott St

Doors 6.00pm, Show 7.00pm

Check web for full program/times.

Tickets: $10/ 7 at the door.

WIRED Lab DIY Wires Workshop, Web Launch & WIRED EAR Scheme

Shannon — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 23:17:34 +0000

WIRED Lab DIY Wires Workshop, Web Launch & WIRED EAR Scheme

Over Saturday 17th & Sunday 18th July The WIRED Lab will be hosting its annual in situ DIY Wires: Construction & Recording Workshop. This workshop is your chance to learn how to build your own æolian instrument and custom recording techniques. The weekend will also include an evening of performances by Alan Lamb & WIRED Lab members, and the launch of our new website.

The WIRED Lab is located on a farm in regional NSW (between Gundagai and Cootamundra). The WIRED Lab is the site of the latest ‘Wire’ instruments built by Alan Lamb, along with collaborators Sarah Last, Dave Burraston, Garry Bradbury and Robin Fox.

WORKSHOP DETAILS
Saturday 17th & Sunday 18th July
The workshop is offered for free to 25 lucky participants and will give you the DIY skills to build your own wires and pickups, held over two days, the workshop will include:
* Alan Lamb, Dave Burraston & Sarah Last will teach people how to build their own wire system and demonstrate ways to interact with the wires (eg. bowing and singing into polystyrene boxes, which work as reverberant amplifiers!).
* Permanent WIRED Lab resident & electronics wizard Dave Burraston will discuss his observations of The Wires when recording and will demonstrate how to custom build and attach piezo pickups.
* Alan Lamb will demonstrate percussion, bowing and techniques with the wires.
* Opportunity to interact with and record the wires.

NOTE: workshop places are strictly limited, with a maximum capacity of 25 people. Places will need to be reserved ASAP, with bookings on a 1st come 1st served basis.

WIRED EARS (EMERGING ARTISTS RESIDENCY SCHEME)
The WIRED EAR Scheme will provide financial assistance for NSW based young and emerging artists to attend selected WIRED Lab workshops. For our annual DIY Wires workshop we will be offering $150 to assist 8 emerging artists with the costs to attend the workshop. Artists who consider themselves to be ‘young and emerging’ are invited to submit a brief (1 page maximum) expression of interest detailing their arts practice and how they feel they will benefit from being a WIRED EARS participant. WIRED EARS expressions of interest are due on Monday 28th June.

PERFORMANCE EVENING & WIRED LAB .ORG LAUNCH
On Saturday evening WIRED Lab will launch its new website wiredlab.org, with Alan Lamb, Dave Burraston and Special Guests presenting a concert open to the general public in Cootamundra’s Creative Arts & Cultural Centre (CCACC). The CCACC is a new facility; it is the 1st time Cootamundra has had a dedicated Arts infrastructure, the Centre was initiated by local volunteers and is located in what once was an Ugg boot factory!

ABOUT ALAN LAMB
You may already be familiar with Alan’s work, he has been working with wires since the 70′s. He originally started with disused spans of telegraph wires and evolved into building his own that spanned hundreds of metres across the desert and the open landscapes. During this time he developed a technique of attaching stereo contact microphones to record and listen to The Wires. These recordings expose an infinite and amplified universe of sound that sonically reflects the environment and things we cannot see. The Wires sonically reproduces environmental and human interactions with an enormous dynamic range of harmonics and frequencies, often to visceral effect. Whilst having traditional sonic qualities such as pitch, timbre, rhythm and key, the sounds produced are perhaps best described as a deep space atmosphere with earth hums and electro-pings, even insects can be heard as they collide or crawl up and down the wire.

ABOUT WIRED LAB
A primary objective of The WIRED Lab is to consolidate Alan’s work and create a permanent site for his instrument to be further developed by other artists, and for Alan to devolve his skills and knowledge to as many people as possible. Since its 2007 establishment The WIRED Lab has presented workshops, concerts, an open day and various publications documenting Alan Lamb and WIRED Lab collaborators.

Thus far The WIRED Lab has built several sets of wires, spanning kilometres across the landscape. We have been recording the wires with piezo pickups and we plan on setting the wires up so we can record visiting artists and their interactions. You will find some recordings and info here:http://wiredlab.ning.com/

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Further logistical details about the workshop can be found HERE

REMEMBER: this workshop has ***limited availability***
This is primarily for logistical reasons; BUT NOTE we plan on hosting more workshops and an open day, so if you miss out this time there will be opportunity for many more people to get WIRED in the future.

Any further questions?
Please email Sarah at: info@wiredlab.org

The WIRED Lab
W I R E D : Wire Integrative Research Education & Development
http://wiredlab.ning.com/ and http://www.wiredlab.org/

Memory Flows – Curator Led Tour and Artists’ Forum

Shannon — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 06:21:04 +0000

The Newington Armory Gallery, the Centre for Media Arts Innovation (UTS) and New Media Curation invite you to the Memory Flows Public Programme:

Curator Led Tour and Moderated Artists’ Forum

Saturday 12 June 2010 | 11am-3pm Newington Armory Gallery | Buildings 18 & 22

Curator Led Tour @ 11am | Building 18

Join Sophia Kouyoumdjian on an exhibition tour as she discusses the works and concepts explored within Memory Flows.

Artists’ Forum @ 1pm | Building 22

Join selected artists from Memory Flows and Daniel Brine, Director of Performance Space for a panel discussion about collaborative and iterative media art practice in Australia. Panelists will explore ways that this practice can re-engage with ideas of water, ecology and the aesthetic metaphors these concepts generate. The Panelists are: Chris Caines, Shannon O’Neill, Greg Shapley, Megan Heyward, Jacqueline Gothe, Sherre DeLys and Nigel Helyer.

Memory Flows

Shannon — Wed, 12 May 2010 01:15:32 +0000

Memory Flows is an ongoing and distributed media art project of the Centre for Media Arts Innovation (CMAI) UTS. As elsewhere around the globe, Australian rivers are conduits that are emblematic of networking systems, travel systems and survival systems. Memories and stories – both actual and fictional – will flow and stream from Australians’ intense and varied relationships with water. Artists belonging to this group have tapped into the specific memory that rivers and waterways retain, streaming their enquiry back to the group and out to a larger public audience via exhibition.

http://memoryflows.net/

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS

15 MAY – 20 JUNE 2010 | open weekends only 10am – 4pm
Armory Gallery, Newington Armory Jamieson Street (off Holker Street), Sydney Olympic Park NSW 2127

LAUNCH EVENT AT THE ARMORY

Friday 14 May 2010 @ 6pm
Talks @ 7pm to be opened by Judith Blackall, Head of Artistic Programmes at the Museum of Contemporary Art
Headwater performance @ 8pm by The Field

There will be a charter bus leaving from the Art Gallery of NSW (5:45pm) and stopping at UTS (6pm) before heading out to the Armory (arrival @ 6:45pm). Return charter service to Central Station departs from the Blaxland Riverside parking lot @ 9pm.

FREE parking at Blaxland Riverside Park car park

Open Fields

Shannon — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 00:19:39 +0000

Open Fields is an interdisciplinary event occurring this week at UTS and Serial Space. I’ll be participating in two performances:

Thursday April 29, 5:30pm at the Bon Marche Studio – an open rehearsal by The Field (Chris Caines, Jessica Tyrrell and myself) of Headwater, an audiovisual work that we’re developing for the forthcoming Memory Flows exhibition at Newington Armory.
Friday April 30, 7pm at Serial Space – the debut performance of Monika Brooks‘ Stifle / Send composition for laptop ensemble and voices.

There are lots of interesting sessions in the program, so come along if you can.

Sound a Day Holiday

Shannon — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 12:51:54 +0000

Today I had the pleasure of participating in the GET RHYTHM! event at the Powerhouse Museum, with Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky & Annie K. Kwon, Andrew Johnston & Ben Marks and Jon Drummond. I gave a presentation about the Sound a Day project, as well as Alias Frequencies and Memory Flows. The drinks afterwards were full of interesting conversation.

Sound a Day will be taking a break over the holiday period. I had hoped to continue it, but I’m moving house and will be without a studio and possibly internet over the next few weeks. Once things have settled down I’ll be back with more sounds.

Have a great new year!

Sound a Day 013 – Chamber of Secrets

Shannon — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 12:12:24 +0000

Download

SAD013 – Chamber of Secrets 0:17 700 KB

The photo above is of the toilet at Jinnah’s.

The sound is of a toilet flushing, played backwards and slowed down, which is a technique often worth trying. The dynamics were enhanced with volume graphing in Wave Editor. I also got some interesting drones from the same recording which I might post later.

Chamber of Secrets could work well in an electroacoustic or musique concrète piece.

Sound a Day 012 – Jinnah’s

Shannon — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 11:02:59 +0000

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SAD012 – Jinnah’s 0:56 2.15 MB

Jinnah’s is a crazy Pakistani restaurant in Dulwich Hill. Going there is always an adventure, but I wasn’t prepared for what greeted us when we arrived tonight.

SAD012 is a recording of the entrance at Jinnah’s. I made it using FiRe on my iPhone. I don’t know why the sound is so strange – possibly a faulty radio transmitter? Staff walked past apparently without noticing! I just wish there’d been a strobe light to go with it.

Btw, the (rather expensive) food was great when we last ate there about a year ago, but tonight was very disappointing. The food tasted old, the restaurant was empty and they’d replaced the previously warm lighting with a few cold white CFLs. This was sort of a farewell as we’re moving away from the area, but we won’t be missing Jinnah’s as much as we thought we would.

Sound a Day 011 – Korg Study 002

Shannon — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 09:53:57 +0000

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Sound a Day 011 – Korg Study 002 0:08 312 KB

One thing I like about the MS-20 is that you pick up where you left off. There’s no saving and recalling patches. Today’s sound is based on yesterday’s patch, but the input signal has been removed. The repeating notes are played by hand. The built-in ‘modulation generator’ or LFO is set to a descending sawtooth wave, influencing the oscillators and filters, while some envelope modulation gives the notes more presence.

A fairly simple sound, SAD011 could be used as either a one-off effect or a loop. It could also be good slowed down &/or backwards. I might play around with it some more…

Sound a Day 010 – Korg Study 001

Shannon — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 12:58:29 +0000

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Sound a Day 010 – Korg Study 001 0:25 998 KB

For several years I’ve had the idea of doing a collection of ‘Korg Studies’ – short pieces that explore a particular sound or technique on the Korg MS-20 synth (and also the Korg mini-KP Kaoss Pad). Here is as good a place as any to start.

KS001 demonstrates my usual technique of using an external input to drive the control voltages. In this case it’s a random song playing on my iPhone. There are two square wave oscillators an octave apart, their pitches mapped to the mod wheel. One is modulated by the amplitude and the other by the frequency of the incoming signal. The low-pass filter is also being heavily modulated. When the incoming sound hits a certain level it triggers the envelope generators, which have a percussive shape. Continuous tweaking of parameters is done to shape the sound into something interesting.

These are techniques that I’ve developed and refined over the past few years of working with the Splinter Orchestra. I was also very impressed by Asmus Tietchens‘ performance at Liquid Architecture this year, and I think his approach to the synthesiser may have influenced me recently.

Sound a Day 009 – Alternative Comedy

Shannon — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 12:49:55 +0000

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SAD009 – Alternative Comedy 3:16 7.49 MB 90 BPM

Another Numerology piece. The voice is actually SAD003 played on Numerology’s built-in sampler, with lots of modulation going on. Strangely it sounds less like a computer and more like a real voice than before. The drums remind me of standup comedy, so I imagine this piece as a very odd comedy gig. I should add some audience sound fx, maybe the one I removed from SAD007. Anyway, some random piano, split into two tracks, rounds out the sound, adding some melodic interest and stereo movement.

Sound a Day 006 – TV Scrub

Shannon — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 12:44:57 +0000

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SAD006 – TV Scrub 6:06 14.04MB

For several years my studio and lounge were the same room. The TV would be on most of the time, with the sound going through the computer, allowing me to process or capture it. It was often subjected to spectral/delay/FSU plugins for extended periods. TV’s more fun that way.

For today’s sound I decided to process some TV audio in a slightly different way, without plugins. I recorded a minute each of 11 different TV channels and brought them into Ableton Live as a series of loops. Follow actions in legato mode switch to the next clip every quarter note, so it’s effectively in 11/4 time.

Structurally it’s quite simple, going from 999 BPM down to 20, then back up to 999 again. The result is a kind of basic wavetable or granular synthesis. I’m annoyed that Live can’t loop clips without putting them in Warp mode, but the ‘Beats’ setting resulted in some interesting buffer effects.

I have to admit to having a thing for cutup and processed voices. They tickle my brain in ways that other sounds don’t. I’m sure there’ll be more of them in this series.

Nauru Elegies: a portrait in sound and hypsographic architecture

Shannon — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 00:33:37 +0000

Nauru Elegies: a portrait in sound and hypsographic architecture
by Annie K. Kwon and Paul D. Miller (aka DJ Spooky)

Exhibition Dates | 19 December 2009 – 30 January 2010

Launch Date | Saturday 19 December 2009 @ 2pm | GET RHYTHM! Performances and Talks by Paul D. Miller and Annie K. Kwon with guests Andrew Johnston, Ben Marks, Jon Drummond, and Shannon O’Neill | Target Theatre | Level 2 | Powerhouse Museum, Sydney | RSVP ESSENTIAL to deborah@newmediacuration.com

Guest Curator | Deborah Turnbull | New Media Curation

Design Realisation | Interaction Consortium | Dr. Greg Turner | Aram Dulyan

As advertised in Museums & Galleries NSW and Ampersand Magazine

Available Publication: Rhythm Science, by Paul D. Miller (MIT Press, 2004)

PRESS RELEASE

I’ll be talking about my use of the web in recent sound works, including drawing from the Pool for Memory Flows, my new ‘Sound a Day’ project, and developments at Alias Frequencies. If there’s time, I may also do a short laptop performance.

Sound a Day 005 – Cistern Crash

Shannon — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 11:48:36 +0000

Download

SAD005 – Cistern Crash 1:30 3.46MB

Recording storms is one of the most obvious things to do with a portable audio recorder – I’ve recorded plenty with my Edirol R-09. Listening back to a 30 minute recording that I’d made of an incredibly loud downpour outside my bathroom window, I noticed a section in the middle where the rain stops, and one can hear the sound of a cistern, then a loud thunderclap. It’s that moment that I’ve selected for today’s sound. A cistern? Well yes, I had just used the toilet. Cisterns can make amazing sounds – people should listen to them more closely.

Cistern Crash is best heard on headphones.

Sound a Day 004 – Collapso

Shannon — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 12:04:33 +0000

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SAD004 – Collapso 4:07 9.9MB 120BPM

Numerology is a program that should be much better known. Imagine Ableton Live in which the emphasis on audio looping is replaced by step sequencing and generative composition. I love its extensive modulation and randomisation options which encourage experimentation.

Collapso is a minimal, ever-changing rhythm. It’s made of just a kick, hi-hat, and the ‘SynthTom’ patch on the LinPlug Free Alpha synth plugin. The tom has a short melodic sequence in Mixolydian mode, but the parameters of the sequence, including note probability and octave, are being continually modulated – you can see it running in the screenshot above. The hi-hats also have some randomisation, while the relatively simple kick helps give it momentum, emphasising the syncopation and bounciness of the tom.

I could listen to this do its thing all day, but should probably try to turn it into a finished track, with a few more sounds.

Sound a Day 003 – Ode to Tropical Skiing

Shannon — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 12:04:12 +0000

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SAD003 – Ode to Tropical Skiing 1:32 1.8MB

This is a text-to-speech rendering of John Forbes‘ wonderful poem, Ode to Tropical Skiing, which I understand was John Watermann‘s favourite poem. I made this as an intro to a performance at a lovely night called ‘Warm Words, Music and Dirigibles‘, as I knew that the audience would be appreciative. That’s the only time I’ve used it, so I think it’s OK to include here.

To make it, I used a program called Vox Machina and one of the built-in Mac voices (‘Alex’) and did a lot of tweaking of punctuation to modify the rhythm and cadence. I’m not entirely happy with the result, though, so I’d love to get some suggestions of better speech synthesis tools.

Sound a Day 002 – Fuck Right Off

Shannon — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 08:14:35 +0000

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SAD002 – Fuck Right Off 0:24 963Kb

Some of my earliest sound experiments involved grabbing bits of dialogue, music and sound effects from television using my trusty VHS recorder and creating collages of these sounds via pause button cassette edits on a ‘ghetto blaster’.

For the first few years of Wake Up and Listen, Adrian Bertram and I would each prepare a cassette full of such collages for every broadcast. We called these our ‘samples’. Even after we bought actual samplers, we still kept making cassette collages for a few more years, as they had a unique sound.

SAD002 is the sort of ‘sample’ that could well have been on one of those old collages. It’s a grab from the 1999 Trailer Park Boys film, in which the character of Patrick Lewis (played by Patrick Roach, who went on to play Randy in the TV series) makes a strong statement about his lifestyle. A good ‘sample’ is texturally interesting and has an element of surprise. This has those.

Instead of a simple VHS to cassette dub, the process of making this file involved noting the timecode of the desired sample using Google Docs, importing the audio from the entire video file using Wave Editor, selecting the sample, then exporting it.

Btw, I’ve decided to change the format of these sounds to 320k MP3s as a compromise between quality and accessibility.

Sound a Day 001 – Splinter Loop

Shannon — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 08:48:54 +0000

After my performance at Don’t Look Gallery in October, in which I remixed a bunch of older works, I felt that it was time to focus on making new sounds for a while. I decided to make a sound a day, but soon got busy and fell out of the routine. I mentioned this to Nat Bates when we caught up recently and it turned out that he’d had a similar idea. He suggested that we should each make and share a sound a day. He’s already started.

So for at least the next few weeks I will be uploading a new sound here every day. Which begs the question, what do I mean by a ‘sound’? Generally they will be the sorts of sounds that go into my recordings and performances, such as field recordings, synths and media samples, sometimes heavily processed. I hope to share some technical and aesthetic ideas along the way. You’re welcome to use these sounds – please share the results.

Download

SAD001 – Splinter Loop 1:31 3.7MB 84BPM 32 Bars

These days when performing with the Splinter Orchestra, I use my Korg MS-20 Synthesizer, with a number of accessories, including an iPhone, a Korg mini-KP Kaoss Pad, and an Edirol R-09 recorder. You can see my setup in the photo above. The Edirol is used to pick up sounds from the group and use them as triggers or modulation sources for the synth. A by-product of this is that I have many hours of recordings of Splinter Orchestra performances and rehearsals.

SAD001 is made from a brief moment of a Splinter Orchestra recording session at the ABC in September. It’s just the shuffle and thud of instruments as microphones were being set up and levels checked. I used Wave Editor to select the sound, then Ableton Live to warp the events into a rhythmic loop. Both the ‘Beats’ and ‘Re-pitch’ Warp Modes in Live gave pleasing results, so I made a clip of each version, then sequenced them randomly, using Follow Actions. Some compression was applied to fatten it up, along with EQ to reduce hiss and rumble.

By the way, the Splinter Orchestra will be performing this Monday at the NOW now festival program launch at Serial Space.

Douglas Kahn at the MCA

Shannon — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 05:04:16 +0000

Douglas Kahn, noted academic and theorist, will be speaking at the Museum of Contemporary Art this Thursday 19th November from 6.30 – 8.00pm.

Bookings are essential, to reserve your place please email the MCA or call the number listed below.

The November Art Monthly Australia ‘Arts of Sound’ edition guest edited by Douglas Kahn, which also includes a DVD of works by Australian artists, will be on sale at a special one-off lecture event price of $8 each or 2 for $15.

Also listen to Douglas Kahn on ‘New Music Up Late’ with Julian Day (prerecorded) this Saturday night (14th) on ABC Radio National 10:30pm to 12:30pm. The show will be available online for four weeks.

I contributed a review of Severed Heads’ Adenoids box set to the current issue of Art Monthly Australia. Tom Ellard has written a response. If I have time I may write something about that here, but I’ll probably just discuss it with him over a beer.

Audio Workshop on 2SER

Shannon — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 01:13:08 +0000

Students from my Audio Workshop class at UTS will be taking over the airwaves at 2SER tonight and tomorrow night to present their live radiophonic features:

Dead Air

Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us; when we listen to it, we find it fascinating…

So if silence is the absence of sound, then what is the sound of silence?????

Tune your radio into 107.3fm (2SER) on the 26th, October at 9.00pm to find out.

Produced by:
Emily McDaniel
Kimberley Bulliman
Cristina Sebastian
Min Tack Cho
Rosi Tuck
Fei Fei Jian

Sydney Underground: An Aural Odyssey

A radio documentary produced by UTS Audio Workshop. Sydney Underground explores the sociological, historical, and transitory nature of Sydney’s underground tunnel systems through sound. Come on an Aural Odyssey featuring musical compositions inspired and constructed by sounds from within the tunnels. Interviews and ambient soundscapes created from audio captured from the tunnels of Sydney provide an interesting auditory perspective of familiar terrain. A Live audio feed from inside the Chalmers Street pedestrian tunnel at Central railway will be manipulated and blended using granular sound treatment. The Documentary will be performed live at the Bon Marche Theatre at UTS and transmitted live on 2SER (107.5) on Oct 27th at 9pm.
Be sure to tune in on Oct 27th at 9pm on 2SER 107.3