Sound and social focus for digital residency

Sound and social focus for digital residency

Luke Munn, a New Zealand sound artist well known for his socially focused arts practice, has been selected as the inaugural Digital Artist in Residence on The Big Idea website, a partnership project between CoLab and The Big Idea.

Luke Munn’s project is called The Big Room and people are invited to contribute an audio recording of the room they work or live in as their contribution to a fluctuating sonic space to be shared on The Big Idea.

About this residency Luke says, "Real world or field recorded sounds have been focused on more heavily in the last thirty years, from the natural 'soundscapes' of Murray Schafer's acoustic ecology, to the sound environments of our cities. But, while noted artists foray into the Amazon to retrieve exotic sounds, or trek into the desert to capture the fragile dawn chorus of the animal kingdom, I think many of our most important (but overlooked) sounds, that animate our environment and assist in establishing the identity of space and place, are found much closer to home - in the home or work spaces that we spend most of our time in."

To record your room, you can use a variety of free and low-cost equipment. Windows users can utilize 'Sound Recorder' software that comes pre-installed, while those on the Mac can bring up Garageband to also easily record. If you want to crop your audio, change the volume, or make other basic edits, try Audacity - an open source, cross platform audio editor (http://audacity.sourceforge.net/).

If you have a microphone, plug that in and start recording, or use the built-in microphone on your laptop. Luke also encourages you to listen to your space while you're recording - moving your hearing outwards to capture filtered sounds, hums, clicks, and vague tones that form the subtle sonic backdrop to your space. Then simply export the audio as WAV, AIFF, or MP3 format, and send it through.

The Big Room is now open for submissions. Contribute a recording of your room here.

About The Big Idea | CoLab Digital Residency

In a first for New Zealand, The Big Idea | CoLab Digital Residency is part of CoLab’s mission to support the development and realisation of new digital art work and collaboration. The Big Room provides Luke Munn with a unique opportunity to use The Big Idea website as both the source of and the location for a unique digital sound work.

About Luke Munn

Luke Munn’s work centres around re-activating and re-presenting real world sound via site-specific performances and projects that often use the architecture of a space, objects from the audience, field recordings of an area, or historically or socially derived audio. As former Online Curator for Window, Auckland, he has curated dozens of web-based shows with international artists. His projects have been featured in the Centre de Cultura Contempor‡nia de Barcelona, Spiel Festival Austria and Ohrenhoch Berlin, with recent commissions by Aotearoa Digital Arts and Creative New Zealand. His unique performances have been given in Paris, Dublin, Berlin, Chicago, and New York, amongst others.

ENDS

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