10/05/19 SoundArtist.ru 08 – Tim Shaw: Bell Studies

Tim Shaw is a British artist and musician. His practice is concerned with the many ways people listen, specifically how listening environments can be constructed or explored using a diverse range of techniques and technologies. He has a background in recording sound and his practice is anchored in the creative use of field recordings. He is interested in appropriating communication technologies to explore how these devices change the way we experience the world.

"This mix is made up of Bell Studies 1, 2 and 3, each one an exploration into a large corpus of recorded bells processed and played back in a variety of different ways. During a residency at ARC in Switzerland in 2018 I recorded over 500 single hits of Swiss and German cow bells. For Bell Study 1, a granular synthesis engine choses 4 of the bell hits and plays them with different pitch and position intervals. In Bell Study 2, a multi voice system randomly choses a bell hit, plays it, then choses another. Dense textures emerge throughout the piece as more voices are added to the composition. Bell Study 3 sends the bell hits from the disk of the local machine to different servers located at different place across the world. Rhythmic and temporal changes are dictated by the time that it takes for the recorded bell to get from one place to another and back again".