iMMERSE! with Charlie Morrow

Michael Gerzon re-broadcast 0a

Gideon D’Arcangelo - Designing Immersive Experiences 23

Gideon D’Arcangelo is a man of many ambitions. His main interests include the integration of virtual and physical worlds, working toward the design integration of physical, media, systems, graphic & content to ultimately create holistic experiences. 
He joined Arup’s New York office in 2019 where he is a Principal and serves as the Americas Digital Services Portfolio Leader  and a designer of interactive and immersive environments.He has been the VP of Strategy and Communications at ESI Design. He has worked on the Hall of Human Life at the Boston Museum of Science, and the Institute for War and Peace Reporting’s web platform the Reuters Sign at Three Times Square, and the on-island and on-line ancestor search at Ellis Island Ellis Island Heritage experience. Another focus has been the intersection of new technology and musical experience. He is currently a contributing producer for WNYC’s Studio 360. From 2005-2008, he produced the series Listening In on “Weekend America.” In the 1990s, he worked with ethnomusicologist-folklorist Alan Lomax on the Global Jukebox, an illustrated database of world song and dance styles. I met Gideon when he was a youngster, living in upstate New York in the 1970s where his family was based. His father, painter Allan D’Arcangelo – briefly as well-known as Andy Warhol - and mom Sylvia were close friends of my mentor and artistic collaborator, poet Jerome Rothenberg and his anthropologist wife, Diane. Gideon and I were more in touch after his time at University of Chicago and continue through to the present. His interweaving of creative and social threads, his easy and evergrowing technological learning is a driver of this constellation. Aside from the magic Gideon has brought to his own designs he has kept his father's extraordinary art legacy alive. 
Playlist of audio samples
A Future Harvest • Charlie MorrowEin Feuer Aus Licht Und Liebe • Die Welttraumforscher vs Klangwart Hamanamah • KlangwartWater & Ocean • Charlie MorrowSalmiana • Marc SloanInsurrection Oratorio 1 • Charlie Morrow & Bread & Puppet TheatreO Yeh Charlie Echomix • Charlie Morrow & b/artLeave With You • 2XMThalys bells + lobby & elevator & hotel ambience + mall muzak + distant trains + crickets + radio signals

Ville Pulkki & His Pursuit of SuperHearing 22

Ville Pulkki’s fame reached the techno avant garde with the adoption of his ingenious VBAP (vector-base amplitude panning) a tool for creating spatial sound. When I met him in Helsinki, I was delighted to discover that behind the techie who developed VBAP, a charming jokester. Since then, I’ve enjoyed his warmth and his efficient organizing of the Acoustics Department at Aalto University, including the 2023 convention of the Audio Engineering Society of Europe. Maija-Leena Remes and I interviewed Ville in his lab where he was studying the acoustic layers of the Earth’s atmosphere. He also talked about his learning to dance at the age of 40 and performing on television for commercials and musical events, where the delight of performance must compete with his delight of invention.  
Ville Pulkki is a professor in the Department of Information and Communications Engineering  at Aalto University, Helsinki, Finland who has worked in the field of spatial audio for over 25 years. He developed VBAP for his PhD. in 2001 and later, directional audio coding with his research group. He has also made contributions to the perception of spatial sound, laser-based measurement of room responses, and binaural auditory models. He received the Samuel L. Warner Memorial Medal Award from the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers and the AES Silver Medal Award. He enjoys being with his family, building his summer house, playing various musical instruments, and acting, dancing and singing in musical ensembles.
Playlist of samples:Score The World contest STW2618 • Ville PulkkiSongs of Flowers and Stones • Charlie MorrowChorale bounce 1 • Charlie MorrowSoundflake orchestral version • Ville PulkkiMusical fractal Kuusi Soundflake instrumental • Ville PulkkiTous les Matins du Monde (Marin Marais) • Jordi SavallElla (1960) • Charlie MorrowUltrasonic spatial superhearing • Ville PulkkiA Future Harvest • Charlie MorrowScruTiny in the Great Round • Charlie MorrowDaydream musical composition • Ville PulkkiBinary sequences Six variations for orchestra • Ville PulkkiWave Music III - 60 Clarinets and a Boat • Charlie Morrow Sun Chant (1975) • Charlie MorrowBat Sounds
Themes discussed: VBAP, perception of spatial sound, early immersive experiences in Finland, experiencing silence, bat sounds, ultrasonic super hearing, physics vs music, esoteric inventions, ambisonics, performing music live. 

Micky Remann & His Operahouse Filled With Water 21

Micky Remann is a German media artist and producer of media events. He invented the “Liquid Sound” concept and its installation in various locations with exceptional waters such Bad Orb & Bad Sulza in Germany. They involve participants floating in body temperature salt water where they participate in immersive experiences that includes underwater sounds, music, lights and surround video. 
Remann also developed the popular international FullDome Festival at the Zeiss Planetarium in Berlin. It features innovative productions, music and entertainment in the genre of 360-degree, audio-visual media and immersive fulldome theatre performances. He is also a some-time singer, a songwriter, and an author. I met Kicky in Bad Sulza where I could enjoy the underwater sound system. In this podcast Remann discusses his explorations of whale & dolphin languages and his more recent exploits expanding the Liquid Sound concept.
Playlist of samples:Underwater bubble soundsAquasonic • Between MusicPhoning Annea • Charlie Morrow & Annea LockwoodConcert for Fish • Charlie MorrowLive at Liquid Sound • BalsamfieberComet, Fire, Water • Charlie MorrowLiquid Sound Festival 2014 exc • Thomas Kagermann Liquid Sound Festival 2014 exc • Jim NollmanWater, Ocean • Charlie Morrow
Subjects discussed: immersion concerts, salt water flotation, pre-birth experiences, fulldome experiences, first immersive experience at age 3 when he almost drowned in a pond, his sister saw him in a dream-like state and yelled to his mother who ran to save him, mermaids, underwater crystal palaces, temple for underwater listening, communicated with whales of the Pacific Northwest coast with music, environmental opera & symphony, reincarnations as an Orca Whale, body temperature and salt water while simulating the musical experience of whales, underwater concerts, thermos / bad / spas, DJ nights, full moon concerts, Liquid Sound Festival ...

Bread & Puppet & Peace with Peter Schumann 20

Today’s iMMERSE podcast is even more unusual than many of the others. I interviewed Elke and Peter Schumann in February of 2020 in their Glover, Vermont home along with Jay Walbert, the archivist for my Archive in nearby Barton, Vermont.
The octagenarian Schumanns immigrated from Germany to New York in 1961 and have led the Bread and Puppet Theater since 1963. 
In this podcast, they share their history and artistic politics and bread. As Peter says here: We went around and gave them pieces of bread to eat and found they were a better audience when they were chewing – we liked them better…"
In the beginning of our chat, Peter turns to Elke and says, "When I don’t remember something, you will".
"I will" she says. This happy conversation is ever so dear to me because Elke passed away on August 1, 2021.
I first met Peter in New York in the 1970s through public events maker, Karin Bacon. I first came to the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont in 1968 to work with Fluxus artists Dick Higgins and Alison Knowles.
In the years that followed, I bought some land from them and built a house there in the 1990, the house where I now live and am recording this introduction. Since 1990, my relationship with Bread and Puppet and the Schumann in the neighboring town of Glover continued to grow. 
The Bread and Puppet Theater engages people, after filling them with hand-milled sourdough bread. They work environmentally and for many decades now, they've been making amazing use of the landscape, natural light changes and natural acoustics.  Puppets from tiny to gigantic, signs, banners and hand-made art have always animated their events. Their roadside museum is filled with decades worth of their fanciful performance objects from their local, national and international pageants. 
The tradition of handing-out bread always guarantees good spirits and an enthusiastic audience ready to be entertained by the humor, irony, politics, pageantry and their deep concerns for humanity. But let’s just let them tell their own story.
Topics covered in podcastJohn Cage, Merce Cunningham, Claes Oldenberg, anti-Vietnam war protests, Judson Church, Living Theatre, Red Grooms, Stefan Brecht, Tompkins Square Park, Lower Eastside, Daily street muggings of the Bread & Puppet performers, street performances, Grace Paley, volunteerism, Burning Man, War Resisters League, Strike for Peace, Vermont, Barton, Glover, Northeast Kingdom, Socialist pageants, searching for clay, puppet historian, John Bell, Alison Knowles, Dick Higgins, Earth People Park, Burke, pianist Karl Schwartz, Sheffield, baking rye bread, summer Bread & Puppet performances in Vermont, homemade clay bread oven, May Day, Pageant Park, Crystal Lake, Peter Schumann’s sculptures, the Bread & Puppet Museum, Sheffield River clay wall, The Charlie Morrow Archive ...
Samples playlist:Insurrection Oratorio • Charlie Morrow / Strange Circus • Lee Volfoni / Carnival Of Souls • Verne Langdons / Wonder Bread Commercial 1950s / Bread and Puppet Theater 2021 • Tetsuro Hoshii / Brother Bread Sister Puppet • Grace Paley / Grosse Fuge • Charlie Morrow / Fellini’s Circus • Daniele Benati / Kiddie Land • Prelude to a Nightmare

Chris Wangro - Park & Circus as Real Immersion 19

iMMERSE! 19 Charley Morrow interviews Chris Wangro 
Today we talk with my long-time friend & co-conspirator in public events, Chris Wangro. We met through the New City Department of Parks, where he just had been hired as events coordinator. My colleagues and I at the New Wilderness Foundation were producing a summer solstice celebration in New York's Central Park. Chris had, at the time, the early 1980s, just returned from working in Europe with experimental rock band Henry Cow. We have continued to make things happen to the present-day.
Chris Wangro started out as the ringmaster of a one-man circus and rose to become the tzar of Special Events for the City of New York in the 1980s.
These days, he works as a Sought-After Public Space Strategist who pursues the improved design of public space, employing placemaking, community-building strategies that are enhanced by his PASSION FOR BRINGING PEOPLE TOGETHER IN JOYFUL, DYNAMIC, AND UNEXPECTED WAYS — all across the globe. He has produced countless prestigious events for audiences from intimate to massive including festivals, cultural programs, presidential summits, NASCAR rallies,  papal visits, Dolly Parton conerts, pachyderm parades and art festivities worldwide. The event we produced was broadcast internationally. 
Topics discussed: immersion, VR vs real immersion, the park as ultimate immersive experience, the circus as a tangible immersive experience, solstice events in Central Park, PT Barnum, concert hall vs informal space performance, immersive experiences are as old as mankind, what makes a good circus, magic tricks, experimental & political performance, live events & festivals, feeling the space, Olmstead, improv, homemade musical instruments, independent & noncorporate events.
Interview Transcript to Follow

Charlie Morrow - The Magnetic Still Point 18c

 
Charlie Morrow: The Magnetic Still Point
[hors-serie iMMERSE! podcast]
Hello, I’m Charlie Morrow. Welcome to iMMERSE! & our conversations on immersivity. Today is a still point. One of those moments when time seems to have stopped.
I’ve been moving further & further north from my origins in New Jersey, US & art & business beginnings in New York City. As a 7 & 8 year-old, my summers in Maine began my north-o-tropia. In 1968, I visited Dick Higgins & Alison Knowles at their Something Else Press workshop & home in Barton, Vermont.
In the 70s, I bought property there & in the 80s built a sugar house, where maple sap is boiled to become maple syrup, in the 90s I built a Vermont home in the sugar woods, the local name for a forest of maple sugar trees.
On my first trip to Lapland in 1986, I had come the furthest north I’d ever been. It was late autumn with light snow. In the night light, as I drove north through Finland toward Kat Kat Keino, I appeared to drive past giant, very wide, dark trunked trees, separated by narrow passages of white light. I came to understand that these were tiny trees & wide expanses of tundra! Still points can be just like this, moments when life turns inside out.
There’s a ready connection to what some call vertical time. Time when the past & the present & the future are one. Music & sound, like words & images, open the mind to immersion & to time travel. Human communication starts with gestures & graphic images evolve into writing & printing, photography & sound recording, visual & sonic transmission.
Memory & imagination starts with capturing experience, evolves storing selected information & distilling information.
The phrase still point appears in T.S Eliot’s poem “Burnt Norton”: “At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless; Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is, But neither arrest nor movement. & do not call it fixity, Where past & future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards.”
Medically speaking, the still point is a period of time when the movement of brain activity is not apparent. This temporary cessation of motion can last from a few seconds to a minute or two. It is thought that still points occur spontaneously as well as being able to be induced.
& then there is the vanishing point, which Wikipedia tells us is “The point at which parallel lines receding from an observer seem to converge. The point in linear perspective at which all imaginary lines of perspective converge. The point at which a thing disappears or ceases to exist.
Poet Armand Schwerer writes of an Aleut shaman’s statement to anthropologist Franz Boas:  “When I do the ceremony just right & the setting sun light is just right I disappear.” Today is a still point. One of those moments when time seems to have stopped...
All iMMERSE! texts & transcripts available here: https://www.charliemorrow.com/immerse-podcast.html
 
 

Relaunch Renovated immerse! 6a / Brian Katz 18b

This is a relaunch of immerse! 6 with updated information on the Notre Dame renovations
 
Brian Katz, acoustican, CNRS Research Director at Sorbonne University’s Institute Jean Le Rond d’Alembert Sound Lab, is also a specialist in spatial hearing, room acoustics, and virtual reality. The most interesting development in the past few years was his work on the Notre Dame reconstruction with regard to the acoustics in trying to reproduce the century-old sound.
April 2023 will see the launch of a 4-part French podcast series called “Une Fiction Sonore” @ http://alarecherchedenotredame.pasthasears.eu/.
It includes “In Search of Notre Dame” which claims to plunge listeners Victor Hugo mind as he researches his new novel about the Notre-Dames in 1828. Hugo was upset by the poor condition of the cathedral. Hugo leads listeners on an investigation/experiment regarding Notre-Dame’s acoustics and soundscapes over the centuries.
April 2024 will see the streaming (audio or VR), of various works played in Notre-Dame in the simulated historic acoustic conditions appropriate to their composition period, spanning choir, organ, to full orchestras.
He is currently working on a listening study that examines how the acoustics affects the transmission/reception of medieval music via various virtual acoustic conditions
He and his colleagues are also placing a small choir in various virtual acoustic conditions corresponding to different historical states, and examining how their performance is modified.
as well as refining acoustic material definitions by measuring various tapestries, rugs, and other fabrics at the Louvre and National Monument Archives. The results will be incorporated into simulations examining the more decorated periods of Notre-Dame’s history.
Brian FG Katz, Research Director, CNRS, Sorbonne Université, CNRS, UMR 7190, Institut Jean Le Rond d'Alembert, http://www.dalembert.upmc.fr/home/katz
photo of Brian Katz used with permission, Notre Dame Gargoyle by bart plantenga
All iMMERSE! texts & transcripts available here: https://www.charliemorrow.com/immerse-podcast.html

Introducing the sidebar Sub-iMMERSING 18a

iMMERSE! is a series of podcasts I produce with Charlie Morrow who interviews colleagues & collaborators on the trending topic of immersion [think sensuround sound +]. For Morrow, it all began in the mother’s belly, eventually migrating to the Ear Inn where he met a pack of audio outliers & ended up with Ear Magazine & the Audiographics series of cassettes + countless events, interventions & concerts that forever changed the mindscape of NYC & elsewhere. We are now embarking on a sidebar Sub-iMMERSING!, which will feature offhand impromptu audio diversions ... here is the short intro to Sub-iMMERSING!
All iMMERSE! texts & transcripts available here: https://www.charliemorrow.com/immerse-podcast.html

Thomas Kraupe - Immersion Magician 18

Thomas Kraupe is a German astrophysicist who specialized in x-ray astronomy at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics. He’s managed a kind of magical situation by combining math & physics with his love of planetariums & music to create numerous interactive edutainment & art science crossover projects that have attracted artists such as Snap, Heaven 17 & Pink Floyd at several planetariums most recently as Director of Planetarium Hamburg, which he transformed into one of the most advanced planetariums in the world before retiring in late 2022. He continues to serve as a consultant for immersive theaters worldwide. I met Thomas in Colorado Springs, Colorado at one of the first immersive gatherings.His invitation for me to join & chair the International Planetarium Society Committee for Immersive Sound has opened the door for many projects. Charlie Morrow & Thomas again crossed paths at Imersa Montreal 2022.
All iMMERSE! texts & transcripts available here: https://www.charliemorrow.com/immerse-podcast.html
* production & audio backdrop: bart plantenga