Peter Traub

WoodEar receives funding from Turbulence.org and the NEA

I’m excited to announce that my proposal for a new piece called ‘WoodEar’, has received a generous grant from Turbulence.org with funds from the National Endowment for the Arts. Turbulence.org previously funded my 2007 web-based piece, ItSpace.

WoodEar will use data from sensors and microphones embedded in a living tree to drive a physical and online sound installation, and will explore the musical and network mappings that can be created when a tree is considered as a resonant object.

In WoodEar I am not just interested in resonances within the trunk, but in a number of constantly-changing environmental factors that impact the tree’s life and are filtered through its body: light, external sound, wind, and temperature. In addition to a local site-specific installation, sound elements from the tree will be streamed to a website, allowing visitors to manipulate and mix the different musical streams via a browser-based interface. WoodEar will be completed in mid to late 2012.

Pixilerations 2011, Providence, RI

Following a successful showing at SIGGRAPH 2011 in August, the newly rebuilt ItSpace went for a 10-day showing at the Pixilerations [v.8] New Media Fringe Festival from Sept. 22nd to Oct. 2nd in Providence, RI. It is a annual joint festival between the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) and Brown University. ItSpace was displayed in the lobby of the recently built Granoff Center for the Creative Arts on Brown’s campus.

SIGGRAPH 2011, Vancouver, BC

The second version of my installation, ItSpace, premiered at the SIGGRAPH 2011 Conference held at the Vancouver Convention Center in early August. I had spent the previous several months rebuilding the physical components of the piece from scratch. The original version was completed on a short deadline and used photos glued to paper-covered pieces of foam board. The new version was designed to handle more crowd traffic, as several thousand attendees were expected to file through the SIGGRAPH Art Gallery. The new photo boards were constructed from painted wood with the photos protected from fingerprints and other damage beneath thin panes of laser-cut plexiglass. The convention, as well as its location, was phenomenal, and I saw/heard/played with a number of fantastic art pieces and experimental technologies.

In addition to ItSpace’s gallery presence, it received a two-page spread in a special issue of Leonardo Magazine. You can also hear the recorded descriptions of ItSpace read in five different languages through the SIGGRAPH Art Gallery Podcast.

February (2011), sound for an installation by Jennifer Lauren Smith

Earlier this year I had the great fortune to work with Jennifer Lauren Smith, a grad student in Virginia Commonwealth University’s Sculpture + Extended Media MFA program. February is a 10-minute film centered around the inflation and flight of a hot air balloon over the Central Virginia countryside. I was responsible for recording, creating, and synchronizing the sound world of the film (and I rode a hot air balloon in the process).

The finished piece premiered on May 6, 2011 projected on a large screen in the Anderson Gallery Carriage House on the VCU campus. It was installed again in June in the Our Cult’s Classic exhibition at The Boiler in Brooklyn.

ItSpace at SIGGRAPH 2011

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The physical version of ItSpace, my sound installation from 2007 – 2008 that was featured on NPR, has been accepted to the art gallery at SIGGRAPH 2011 in Vancouver, BC. SIGGRAPH is the major annual international conference on computer graphics and interactive techniques. This year’s theme, “Tracing Home”, is a great fit with the concepts behind ItSpace. I will be going to SIGGRAPH in early August to help install the piece at the Vancouver Convention Centre where it will be exhibited from August 9 – 11.

My Remote Lecture to Wits

On October 27th I gave a remote lecture to students in the Digital Arts program at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. My parents both graduated from Wits and so I had a certain coming-full-circle feeling in giving the lecture there. We used a combination of Skype and native Mac screen sharing to do the talk. I remotely controlled the desktop of the Mac there to run Powerpoint and a Max/MSP example. The Youtube video here is the first of five in a playlist. Many thanks to artist and Wits faculty, Tegan Bristow, for arranging the lecture. From the ‘official’ description of the talk: “In this remote lecture Peter will talk about several of his recent pieces that focus on using physical, virtual, and hybrid spaces as compositional tools. The pieces span several mediums, from online installation to dance performance to site-specific physical installation. He will also discuss and demonstrate the tools, both software and hardware, that he used to create the works.”

Curve

Curve is an installation for four speakers and a long curved wall. It was also the final work of my five-piece dissertation series exploring physical, virtual, and hybrid spaces as compositional tools. The balcony walkway at the rear of UVA’s Old Cabell Hall is bounded by a curved wall creating an intense, prolonged, and stunning echo that varies dramatically as one moves along the space. Curve played with this pronounced artifact along the wall’s 150 foot length. Using four speakers placed along the wall, the piece created an enveloping sound environment that varied as listeners walk from one end of the balcony to the other. In combining the unique sonic properties of the space with precisely tuned pitches, timbres, and rhythms, the installation made audible both the dramatic ricocheting echo and the effect of sound taking 135 milliseconds to travel from one end to the other–a perceptible and musically useful delay. The installation’s swells, drones, pops, pitches, and silences transformed the less-visited rear of the hall into a large immersive instrument.

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listen to a short excerpt of Curve, taken while walking along the balcony.

Curve premiered at the Digitalis 2010 Concert on May 4th. I hope to run it again in the future, as it could be fairly easily tuned to work along other long, curved, reverberant walls.

Not to Scale: New Music for Hybrid Space

On April 7th, 2010, I will premiere a new work performed by flutist Wayla Chambo – Passages and Recesses: for solo flute and hybrid space. This is the fourth piece in my dissertation series and is the result of a technical collaboration with Eric Montgomery, a recent graduate in computer science and music from UVA. Eric will also premiere a new piece for solo piano and hybrid space, called Sound Across Grounds, performed by pianist Benjamin Yobp.

Each piece will be performed from a different space – Eric’s from cavernous the Main Lounge of Newcomb Hall, and mine from the resonant upper stairwell of Old Cabell Hall. They will acoustically connect their respective spaces via the network with the Dome Room of the UVA Rotunda – a United Nations World Heritage Site and the architectural heart of the campus. The program will start at 12:50PM in the stairwell. There will be a fifteen minute break in-between pieces to allow listeners to change locations for Eric’s piece.

The event is the culmination of a project funded by a Double Hoo Grant, an award given out annually by the Center for Undergraduate Excellence at UVA to encourage collaborations between graduate and undergraduate students.

Chirp! : playing summer in winter

Chirp! was an evening I created for Audio March at The Bridge in Charlottesville on March 10, 2010. It was an experiment in effecting seasonal disorder. We raised the temperature inside the Bridge’s main gallery space up to 83F and added a little humidity. I created a continuous sound installation, Freesound Summer that surrounded the space with sounds of summer such as birds, cicadas, children playing, and fireworks. I also hung a 660 watt ‘sun’ that I constructed from clamp lights, wire, and lighting gel scraps. While we were a small group, our wonderful performers, New Loft, Dzian!, and Cathy Monnes really had fun with and in the space. The performers played with the sound installation surrounding them, and the resulting mix worked well enough that I will try to do this again. Listen to New Loft’s improv below to hear the combination of their live instruments with my installation.

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Chirp! was not a serious evening, but a reason to have fun, wear short sleeves, and get a little bit of summer in the air after our very snowy winter. Thank you to our performers, as well as The Bridge for hosting Chirp!.

Study No. 1 for Bodies, Metal, and Air premieres

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After several months of work in the metal shop and rehearsals with my choreographer partner, Dinah Gray, and our dancers Rose Pasquarello Beauchamp, Lisa Eller, and Aaron Wine Goldman, our piece Study No. 1 for Bodies, Metal, and Air premiered at McGuffey Art Center in Charlottesville on March 5th, 2010. It was the third completed piece in my dissertation series. We did three performances over the evening, and each one was well-received. Audience members were able to play with the metal items in the sound environment after each performance. The accompanying video is from the second performance of the evening. As the sound is so spatially-specific, the subtle changes do not translate well to a recording, but the video gives a general idea of the piece. You can read more about how it works on the Sounds page.