DAYTIME SESSIONS

An Experiment in Documentary Fiction – Aaron Henkin

Imagine an intimate little recording booth (ala StoryCorps), but instead of going in there and tenderly interviewing a loved one, you will enter alone and agree to be subjected to a number of mysterious and probing personal questions from a stranger (yours truly). You will be told only that your input will become part of the raw material for a radio experiment. What’s actually happening is that your real-life, personal answers these puzzling questions will become the source material for a fictional ‘non-fiction’ radio drama between you and several other voluntary participants totally unknown to you. The finished product will be revealed (hopefully with some coherence and entertainment value) at a listening party during the final day of Megapolis. This project is not a formal workshop or seminar, but something more like a Megapolis curio or novelty booth–a place to drop in, share a few mysterious minutes between other activities, and subsequently have your voice woven into something communal and surprising.

Aaron Henkin is a co-creator and producer of WYPR’s weekly radio program, The Signal. His reports and features have aired nationally on Morning Edition, All Things Considered, Day to Day, as well as PRI’s Studio 360 and The World. Aaron is also a guest-host on the American Public Media program The Story. Aaron’s latest project is a weekly folk music and storytelling program called Tapestry of the Times, a show that explores the audio archives of Smithsonian Folkways Recordings.

An Unlikely Monument – Dirk Adams

Explore the making of a public work of art in this participatory audio tour. An Unlikely Monument takes on a neighborhood near Harvard Square as its site for exploration and engagement. The audio portion of the tour will be available online and at the Pierre Menard Gallery to download onto your own mp3 player. A limited number of players will be made available on site. The tour will be led by the artist – Dirk Adams – who will provide additional navigation and instruction. An Unlikely Monument is approximately 20 minutes and will start at 10:30am, 11am, and 11:30am on Saturday. Tours start at the Pierre Menard Gallery.

Dirk Adams creates work in a variety of media including performance, sound, installation and web-art. Adams’ work is concerned with language, memory, and culture, and frequently investigates current events, popular culture, and politics. In his live work, different modes of performance – including physical actions, explorations of social roles, casual interactions, and theatrical personas – are frequently intertwined, as is the relationship of artist-performer to audience-participant. He is one half of the Gang Clan Mafia.

Audio (De)construction – Gregory Whitehead

RSVP Required (see below)
Sit down with award-winning audio artist Gregory Whitehead for a personalized review and critique of your audio work-in-progress, project idea, and/or completed work (5 minute excerpts). Anyone is encouraged to apply although preference will be given to current students due to limited space. Pre-register at contact [at] megapolisfestival [dot] org — include an introductory paragraph about who you are and what you’re working on. FULL AS FULL CAN BE!

Gregory Whitehead writes, directs and produces radiophonic adventures for the BBC and other broadcasters. His most recent work, Bring Me The Head of Philip K. Dick, explores the seemingly endless American dance between our hunger for God and our need for a demon. Where does it end?

Cassette Collage Workshop – Andrew Conner

The Cassette Tape Collage Workshop is an experiment in the creative interpretation of urban sounds. Participants use handheld cassette tape recorders in the urban environment. Each recorder has a specific assigned adjective and a 30 minute tape, and participants are asked to record sounds they think best describe, encapsulate, or relate in any way to the adjective of their individual recorder. The resulting recordings will be shared and displayed at a base table. As the space of each tape is eventually used up, the “collage” aspect of the workshop will become more prevalent. This exercise is intended to encourage adventurous listening and the sonic exploration of space, as well as to exhibit and share individual and collective interpretations of our shared sonic/physical environment.

Andrew Conner is 22 years old and most likely lives somewhere in Allston, Massachusetts. He may or may not have a beard. [Beards rule. -ed.]

Circuit Twisting: DIY Physical Interfaces – David Nunez

RSVP Required (+ $10 materials fee)
This presentation is for audio artists interested in creating physical interfaces for their electronic audio experiments. A very broad survey of sensors, software, and circuits accompany demonstrations of techniques for quick and inexpensive audio hacks. Topics include the bare minimum electronics workshop setup, where to find components, microcontroller board options (ex. Arduino), and how to hook up to software (ex. Processing or Pure Data(PD)).

In the spirit of open source movements, each attendee receive a Circuit Twisting Kit–an Altoids tin filled with a starter assortment of electronic components and a CD-ROM collection of software and PDFs about audio hacking.

Using the objects in the box, a series of electronic instruments and interfaces can be built by someone with little technical experience. For this workshop, we are using the Circuit Twisting Kit to build an electronic drum that responds to tapping on the box itself.

Please RSVP at our ticket page.

David Nunez curates dorkbot-boston, a monthly gathering of people doing strange things with electricity. He is an art+technology designer working on projects that apply engineering in unusual contexts. Previously, he designed the multitouch table used to play the Electric Gongs, a set of instruments for the Austin Children’s Museum. His robotic marionette, El Quemira, won multiple blue ribbons at the 2007 Austin Maker Faire.

Collective Improvisational Music Workshop – Bhob Rainey with Vic Rawlings

So, you’ve got your chirping, beeping, crackling box of joy from Vic Rawlings’ workshop on Saturday, and you want to make more noise with it. Sure, it’s fine to play alone, but why not dive into an ecstatic cacophony with a group of other tinkerers and really see what your creation can do? Bhob Rainey, director of the large improvising ensemble, The BSC, will join Vic in guiding groups of sound hounds in collective improvisation. No musical background is required, just a willingness to work with others and to leave any preconceived notions about “music” behind.

Participants who did not attend Rawlings’ Saturday workshop are also welcome. Just bring a self-sufficient sound-making device; i.e., a washboard, a broken delay pedal attached to a small speaker, a clarinet, etc.

Bhob Rainey is a composer, saxophonist, and electronic musician. His music occupies a charged space between synthetic and organic sound, bringing forth improbable sensual and narrative experiences through virtuosic extended techniques, homemade synths and sound processors, found recordings, and a kind of living silence that is apt to wreak havoc with the perception of time. He is the founder of both nmperign (with trumpeter Greg Kelley) and the BSC, which he also directs. He has collaborated with musicians such as Ralf Wehowsky, Le Quan Ninh, Gunter Mueller, and Lionel Marchetti, and has released music on labels such as Selektion, Grob, Sedimental, Rossbin, Twisted Village, and Siwa. Festival appearances have included Musique Action, Instal, Amplify, Densites, Fruits d’Mhere, High Zero, Improvised and Otherwise, and now MEGAPOLIS.

Creating a Third Reality: The Visual in Sound Art – New School Faculty & Students

Our world is often perceived as visually dominated. Yet, for the sound artist, the ear can dictate what we see and how we see, acting as a feedback mechanism for the eye. How can we incorporate this reality into our work? How does this relationship/schism inform our approach to interfaces for audio? It is imperative for sound artists to consider the ocular plane. Panelists from The New School’s Media Studies department moderate a seminar-style discussion exploring how the visual realm is utilized in sound art works. We invite participants to share insight about how they navigate the audio/visual dialectic in their work. Aural / visual coincident themes such as: visualizing radio, device design, audio tours, soundtrack and scoring, live performance, and web radio stations are discussed.

Jim Briggs III is a sound designer/editor and mix engineer for sonic, visual and physical media and performance. Highlights among his credits include PBS’ American Experience, public TV miniseries The Supreme Court and We Shall Remain, Public Radio International, Paul Simon, R.E.M., and an ongoing partnership with VIA Dance Collaborative. His work has been presented at the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Dance Theater Workshop, Jacob’s Pillow, Dance New Amsterdam, Contour-Mechelen Gallery in Belgium, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Swing Space, ComiCon, the Tribeca Film Festival, and the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival. He teaches audio and advises a web radio project at The New School and Eugene Lang College in the Department of Media Studies and Film.

Cambra Moniz-Edwards is a radiophile and sometimes-writer and sound-maker living in Brooklyn. She is currently concluding work on her MA thesis project, which examines the relationship between radio, the body, and gender. Other projects include oral history work (with the nonprofit project StoryCorps) and archiving of sound (at The Paley Center for Media in midtown Manhattan). Some work can be heard at prx.org, vocalo.org, and newschoolradio.org.

Penny Duff lives in Brooklyn, New York where she is currently pursuing her Masters degree in Media Studies at The New School. Language games, noise, and the communal dimensions of sound culture form the basis of most of her work, including her forthcoming thesis project “Sonic Heterotopias: Reimagining the Social with Sound.”

Hethre Contant is pursuing a Masters degree specializing in sound studies at New School University. She is a teacher’s assistant and a founding member for WNSR, New School’s internet radio station. Her productions have aired here, on WBAI, and on the university campus. She has also created a rudimentary sound device which has been shown at the Brooklyn Artist Gymnasium.

DIY Contact Microphone – Laura Vitale

RSVP Required (+ $10 materials fee)
For just a few bucks in parts you can make a microphone which records sound in an intriguing new way. Contact microphones record with a piezo element that picks up sound transmitted through solids, rather than through the air around us. We will listen to sounds recorded by various artists with contact microphones and build our very own. Each participant will come away with his or her own contact microphone. This workshop involves soldering, but no experience is necessary.

Please RSVP at our ticket page.

Laura Vitale is an artist living and working in New York City. She has been working in radio art and sound design for five years. Her work focuses on the literary, painterly, and of course musical potentials of sound. She is also a member of the production company Piehole, an experimental puppet group. She graduated with a degree in Visual Art from Brown University in 2006. Her work has been aired in many cities including WBEZ Chicago and Resonance FM London, as part of the St. Marks Poetry Project, and at Palestine Gallery in Chicago. She is a 2008 Van Lier Fellow at Harvestworks Digital Media Arts Center.

Doktor Q’s Frequency Modulation Blink Machine Radio Jammer – Doktor Q

Beginning with dozens of FM radios tuned to various frequencies, Cambridge Guitar God Doktor Q of Red Quiet channels guitar noise with forces hitherto unknown to Eastern New England with the assistance of the Passive Electric Blink Machine and engineer Johnny Twocomputers, his Right and Honourable Assistant. After tuning the room to Feedback Nightmare, a gelatinous ether first created by WWI-Era Austrian scientists, Doktor Q, aided by various residents of School Street, Somerville, will perform his long-awaited cover of Human League’s ‘Don’t You Want Me Baby?’ much to the chagrin of Cambridge Hipsters. Doktor Q is available for Bah Mitzvahs, Weddings and Funerals. Especially Funerals.

How Art and Music Can Change the World – Jean Smith and David Lester (Mecca Normal)

Through this lecture, art exhibit and performance event that has toured through university classrooms and bookstores, Jean Smith and David Lester of the underground literary rock duo Mecca Normal intend to inspire audiences towards considering political content in their creative self-expression.

“Who cares if there’s underground culture or not? Gap-Coke-Sony-Time-Warner satisfies our needs… don’t they?”

Referring to their extraordinary 25 year history in music, art, and publishing, Jean and David illustrate the reality of being artists and cultural activists, by revealing the behind-the-scenes workings of their long-standing D-I-Y collaboration. Jean and David de-mystify the work methods and philosophies that define their collaborative partnership, touring, writing and publishing, making art and music.

Jean Smith is the author of two published novels and the recipient of two Canada Council for the Arts Awards as a professional writer of creative fiction.

David Lester is a small press publisher of fiction and award-winning poetry and the author of The Gruesome Acts of Capitalism. Together, as the legendary rock duo Mecca Normal, they’ve released 13 CDs (Kill Rock Stars, K Records, Matador).

(Easy/ Uncomplicated/ Elemental) Electro-Acoustic Instrument Building) – Vic Rawlings

RSVP Required (+ $10 materials fee)
You will explore the potential of misused consumer-grade electronics to create electronic/ electro-acoustic instruments. The session will begin with a short demonstration and description of Vic’s instrument. We will continue with instruction on how to safely and effectively combine found materials to create sound devices that will have a musical application.

Then, bring your new instruments to Pierre Menard on Sunday afternoon for a Collective Improvisational Music Workshop!

Absolutely no prior understanding of electronics or music is required for this session – non-tech people are encouraged to attend as well as tech people.

What we’ll provide with your workshop fee ($10):

  • a consumer-grade electronic device
  • a battery for said device

You may bring:

  • any resonant object whose sound you are interested in amplifying
  • any conventional musical instrument
  • all manner of microphones, amplifiers, adapters, cords, mixers, etc. that you are interested in using
  • anything that you are inspired to bring after reading this

Please RSVP at our ticket page.

Vic Rawlings is active as an improviser and instrument builder, specializing in modifications of existing instruments, creating extensive cello preparations. He also continually develops an electronic instrument from extant exposed circuitry, producing, in effect, a modular analog synthesizer with a highly unstable interface. He performs solo regularly as well as with musicians as diverse as Eddie Prevost (AMM), Donald Miller (Borbetomagus), Daniel Carter (Other Dimensions in Music), Laurence Cook, Jaap Blonk, Masashi Harada, and Stephen Drury, and he has made records for the Grob, Sedimental, Emanem, Boxmedia, Chloe, Absurd, and Rykodisc labels.

Internal Urban Landscapes – Sarah Yahm

Radio is a particularly effective medium for representing people’s internal worlds and experiences. This workshop is the first step in an ongoing project to represent not just the empirical world of the city but the experiential, internal world as well.

Do you make up stories about the people sitting next to you on the subway? What are your fears when you walk home alone late at night? Do you have any games to entertain yourself like avoiding cracks in the subway, stepping on crunchy leaves, counting the number of people wearing impractical shoes in the snow?

Living in the megapolis, surrounded by so many strangers, requires a particular type of watchfulness and creativity. What are our obsessive thoughts as we navigate modern city life? How are landscapes recreated inside our mind? How can we replicate the multiple internal experiences of one discrete cityscape using sound?

The workshop itself will be half a writing workshop and half a recording/mixing workshop. People will first freewrite some of the thoughts/rituals/fantasies they have as they navigate through cities. Then we will record these thoughts/daydreams and begin to mix them to create a multi-layered soundpiece that reflects the ways in which our thoughts repeat, loop, interact, etc. Hopefully we can recreate in a small way the internal anxieties and pleasures built into life in the megapolis.

Sarah Yahm is an independent radio producer, oral historian, and educator trying to figure out how those three things can actually equal making a living. Her pieces have been played on a variety of NPR affiliates, on WBAI in New York, through various internet venues (including transom.org), and in the Reel Work Film Festival. She’s been a high school teacher, an adjunct college professor (which she still finds hard to believe), and a producer/editor/all around girl Friday for Atlantic Public Media/transom.org. She recently graduated from the new Social Documentation program at UC Santa Cruz. She’s interested (or more accurately obsessed) with finding ways to replicate people’s internal landscapes through sound.

Live?Die?Kill?: 3 Questions in Various Geographies – Karen Michel

A live broadcast on 88.1 FM/WMBR and http://www.wmbr.org, brought to you by the Association of Independents in Radio.

Live?Die?Kill?: 3 Questions in Various Geographies is a live performance documentary that distills Karen Michel’s travels around the US asking strangers three questions and teasing out the answers. In small towns, fishing streams, and very few cities, Michel asked folks “What do you live for? What would you die for? What would you kill for?” This performance, which will be streamed as it happens at WMBR.org and broadcast on 88.1FM in Cambridge, distills some of those answers to the questions that comprise the fundamental tenets of religion and politics. A combination of image, text, sound and drinking. Festival participants are invited to join Michel and AIR Executive Director Sue Schardt in the WMBR studios on Memorial Drive for this session.

Karen Michel started in radio as a guest on “Kids Say the Darndest Things.” From that experience she learned that live can be pre-lived, that you can’t hear a toupee, and how to engage an audience, at least when you’re five years old. She first Officially Worked in radio during her long tenure in Alaska, covering wolves, dogs, the usual. Michel finally moved to New York in the search for reliable electricity, an indoor toilet, and water than ran from pipes rather than a creek. Many documentaries and features for National Public Radio later, now Michel is a full-time academic occasional contributor to NPR newsmagazines, and really interested in exploring performance documentary. Back to live and toupees.

Logan’s Walk: Urban Cartography in the Flyzone – Pejk Malinovski & Ian Gray

Every constructed highway involves a forgetting of other landscapes, an abandon of other means of movement.

For most of its urban history, Boston has been a port town. If you sailed from England with John Winthrop in 1629, you would have arrived to the “City on a Hill” in a three-masted brigantine. The “port” for urban arrivals nowadays is Logan International Airport. Unlike the seaports, which were so close to the city center that you could virtually walk down the gangplank and be on your way to Beacon Hill, the new urban ports are located on the outskirts of our cities and are connected not by gangplanks, but by highways and tunnels.

This experiment will attempt to put our feet back on the ground. Disembarking at Logan, we will approach the city like every other traveler, but do it at our own speed—walking. This workshop will trace the findings of this movement as an audio slideshow performance and conversation.

Pejk Malinovski is a writer and a radio producer. He has produced long-format radio documentaries, cultural reporting and sound art for the National Danish Radio, BBC?s Radio 4 and Australian Broadcast Corporation. He is currently an associate producer with WNYC?s arts and culture show Studio 360 and producing an Audio guide to the poetry history of Manhattan?s East Village. At night he teaches teenagers how to make their own audio guides to the Museum of Modern Art.

Ian Gray is a sometimes radio producer, but frequent walker. He has produced feature radio pieces for Marketplace and Weekend America and cultural features for stations including WBUR, WABE and KUFM. He worked most recently as an Associate Producer for Living on Earth, produced an audio walking tour of the village of Woods Hole, MA and hosts a regular podcast for his current employer—the environmental finance think tank Ceres. He favors Ecco moccasins as a sturdy, reliable walking shoe.

Lost Film Fest – Scott Beibin

A special audio- and copyright-focused edition of the Lost Film Fest. If corporations and politicians make you want to puke, and you’d like to see them getting pied and pranked, you’ll love the Lost Film Fest cinema laboratory hosted by VJ Scott Beibin. It’s a fun mix of live performance and rare short films featuring pranks by culture jammers like The Yes Men, sexy-smash-it-up riot footage, illegal art, media archaeology, clips censored by the mainstream media, video re-mixes, and so much more. Lost Film Fest Travels the planet year round. You never know where it will turn up next! Revolutionaries and “the kids” all agree: Lost Film Fest “is better than bad, it’s good!”. This jam is about smashing the illusions cast by Hollywood, the Pentagon, and FOX News. Yeah! Lost Film Fest: resurrecting Abbie Hoffman since 1999.

“Lost Film Fest is my favorite film event ever” – Sam Green, dir. The Weather Underground

In addition to the LFF, VJ Scott Beibin is the co-founder of the Evil Twin Booking Agency which he runs with partner Liz Cole, organizing tours for Bill Ayers, Vandana Shiva, Dead Prez, and many more. In the 1990s he ran the seminal punk label Bloodlink Records. Future projects include the multimedia performance called Scientists are the New Rock Stars, exploring the intersection of science, anthropology and metaphysics with an emphasis on environmentally sound new technologies.

Music for Circumstances: MBTA, Red Line, Park Street to Alewife – Benjamen Chaffee

Music for Circumstances: MBTA, Red Line, Park Street to Alewife is a sound piece by Benjamin Chaffee for listening to on personal headphones while riding the MBTA Red Line from Park Street to Alewife. For the best coordination with the train, start the piece when the train starts moving at Park Street. The piece is available for free download from musicforcircumstances.com.

Benjamin Chaffee is an artist living and working in Boston, MA.

Not just for Writers’ Al-maniacs: Thinking Poetically about Radio – Dennis Conrow & Jesse Dukes

Poets understand sound in a way that the rest of us don’t. They know the rhythms and the silences of everyday speech, they know the conscious and unconscious use of metaphor, and they know when to sing in the loudest voice–and when to whisper. Producers Dennis Conrow and Jesse Dukes lead a workshop that attempts to create sound art toolkit by examining the poet’s tools of the trade.

We will examine particular elements of the writer’s art, and draw parallels to the production of audio. We will provide solid examples of poetic sound; discussions about the ways it is produced, and our own brave assertions of why it matters. We will dissect audio pieces into discrete poetic elements (i.e., meter, “white space,” rhyme), play compelling audio examples, and talk about how it works… or how it doesn’t. Be prepared for audience participation and open dialogue. Yes, we know that it might sound serious, weighty and poindextery, but we promise it will be light, accessible, and maybe even funny.

Dennis Conrow has been the assistant producer of the nationally syndicated public radio literary program New Letters on the Air since 2004. He holds a degree in English with emphasis in creative writing, and is a graduate school dropout. A former book editor and layout designer, Dennis Conrow is interested in the production of omnimedia, and ways of subtly inserting art into ordinary communication. In his spare time, he enjoys sky writing over rural Midwestern villages in a vintage Fokker F.VII, collecting Chinese calligraphy from the Qin-Han dynasties, and worm farming. Dennis Conrow cautions you that some or all of this biography is blatantly untrue, and leaves it to you to decide. He lives and works in Kansas City, Mo.

Jesse Dukes is an independent radio producer and an Associate Producer of With Good Reason, a Virginia-based public radio program. Jesse occasionally produces pieces for nationally syndicated public radio programs like Studio 360 or NPR’s Weekend Edition, and has produced for and curated the Big Shed Audio Documentary Podcast. He’s also produced multimedia for The Virginia Quarterly Review and local arts organizations. When he’s not making radio, Jesse goes outside a lot, or writes songs. Jesse is based in Charlottesville, VA.

Practical Perceptual Ergonomics for Audio – Aaron Soloway

How are your recordings perceived? People listen with speakers, headphones, in the car, from another room, via 8-track… permutations are countless. One thing is constant though: every listener experiences sound with their ears and brain. This presentation increases every participant’s ability to tailor their audio projects to their listeners’ auditory perception – make them more perceptually ergonomic – delivering the most rich and moving experience for humans possible. A practical guide to auditory perception is laid out through telling the specific story of binauralairwaves.com – a recording project that seeks to deliver the most perceptually realistic recordings in the world.

What is binaural?
Binaural recording is a perceptual recording technique that only uses two microphones, one in each ear, to capture the acoustic signature of the head and ears. These recordings capture sound in the precise way that our perceptual systems have uniquely evolved to understand acoustic phenomena over the millennia of human existence. Harnessing these thousands of years of auditory perception aptitude, binaural enables the listener to “wear the ears” of another human and have the most accurate three-dimensional re-experience possible, be it of music, a thunderstorm, or even a walk through a city.

The best explanation of binaural is by hearing though. So, grab your headphones (headphones are required for binaural) and check out some binaural recordings at binauralairwaves.com. You will probably get more out of the presentation if you hear a binaural recording or two before hand since we will not have headphones at the presentation.

Aaron Soloway is an engineer at a Cambridge-based start-up that invents technology to reverse engineer mammals’ (humans, dolphins, bats, etc.) hearing systems for a wide variety of applications, including gunshot detection. In his free time, he builds acoustics and audio projects such as the one-of-a-kind ultra high fidelity binaural recording manikin that he records with for binauralairwaves.com. He has made binaural recordings all over North America, Iceland, and Israel, ranging from classical music to urban and natural soundscapes, to rock and electronic music. He holds a B.S./B.A. dual degree in Electrical Engineering and Music from Brown University and plays bassoon, piano, and guitar in addition to doing composition and audio production. Aaron wants to personally assure you that while there will be a binaural manikin at the presentation, there will be absolutely no ventriloquism in any way shape or form under any circumstance whatsoever.

Sonic Ethnography, or Documentary Without Words: From Field Recordings to Recording Fields – Ernst Karel & Stefan Helmreich

This session will present audio work for listening and for a discussion of how audio can function in a documentary or ethnographic way without narration or voiceover. What can the listener gather from such material — can the experience be more revelatory than a musical experience? As makers, what to keep in mind when recording and editing such work? Along the way, we seek to problematize the notion of “field recording”. The term “field recording” is often used in a way that connotes the diffuse, the nonspecific. Instead, we want to explore how location recording can serve as an intensive investigation into a specific space and the social meanings indexed therein. We begin by presenting audio works that explore different senses of “field”: for the sense of a scientific field or discipline, we present an excerpt of Karel’s Heard Laboratories, and for the sense of doing ethnographic work “in the field,” we present Helmreich’s anthropology of underwater sound. Other relevant works will also be presented.

Ernst Karel is a musician, sound recordist, and composer, whose work has ranged from acoustic to electronic and from improvisation to installation. His most recently completed work, Heard Laboratories, is composed of location recordings from scientific research environments at Harvard University, and will be released on and/OAR in 2009. His doctoral thesis at the University of Chicago was a study in the anthropology of sound in South India. He currently manages the Sensory Ethnography Laboratory at Harvard University, and is a member of the New England Phonographers Union.

Stefan Helmreich is a Professor of Anthropology at MIT, where he teaches courses in science, technology, and society. His work on the culture of deep-sea biologists (Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages In Microbial Seas, University Of California Press, 2009) has brought him into submarine soundscapes and has lately inspired his new teaching in the anthropology of sound. His CD, Xerophonics: Copying Machine Music, which tracks the sounds of photocopying machines, was released on Seeland in 2003.

Supplied by the Public – 31 Down Radio Theater

Supplied By The Public is a telephone-to-radio system. During the festival you can call a 1-800 number to record comments, interviews, performances, or just shout-outs. These recordings will be streamed on Internet radio. Number and URL to be provided during the festival. Telephones can be linked to a radio broadcast in order to create a dialogue between social groups during public demonstrations and events/festivals. Our project is based on the concept of the 1966 work by Max Neuhaus titled, Public Supply. Sadly, Neuhaus passed away early in 2009.

A workshop will be given to illustrate the technology involved in creating this project, featuring an Asterisk PBX and the software Pure Data. This piece is supported by free103point9 and features the work of Ryan Holsopple and Lee Azzarello.

31 Down creates audio-based performance work with a heavy emphasis on imagery and mood. There is an invested use of new technologies and interactive systems to create and control the performances; all of the works are automated and controlled by the performers on stage. Recent performance history includes productions at various NYC and national venues, including: The Ontological Incubator, New Museum, The Kitchen, Rhizome, free103point9, EXIT ART, White Box/PERFORMA 05, Participant, Eyebeam, and WFMU.

Through Cambridge by Radio – Matthew Valades

With the help of radio/tape decks, participants collect AM transmissions from around the city specific to paths of transit of their choosing. Independent small groups can select or happen upon these paths, taking as long to travel them as it takes to fill up their tape. In addition to pedestrian means, using public transit, automobiles, bicycles and other forms of motion are encouraged.

Following this, the participants, their recorded sounds, and remembered travels will reconvene at the original workshop meeting place within the festival. The planes of travel can be recorded on a pre-existing map, a rearrangement of a pre-existing map, or on a map of one’s making. This final activity will be the mutual creation of a collective map and a group listening, situating each piece within our larger context. This final listening will be recorded and distributed among the participants through email. Radios, tapes, some readings and map-working materials will be provided.

Matthew Valades lives in Brooklyn. His sound work has included radio experiments, prepared auto-harp, acoustically rich parking lots, refrigeration harmonics, quiet bus rides, and ultra- and infrasound. Back in 2008, he helped found a music and events venue called Surreal Estate in the post-industrial area surreptitiously called East Williamsburg. It is still there. He also produces a program for Brooklyn Community Access Television. He studied music at Wesleyan University with Alvin Lucier and Ron Kuivila, and is preparing to begin study towards a degree in public librarianship. He is particularly interested in urban situations, media theory, prisons, geography, why capitalism seems so scary, and libraries.

Ten-Thirty-One – Ann Hepperman and Kara Oehler

RSVP Required
It’s a game. And it all starts with 10 sounds. You, dear producer, have 30 minutes to mash those into a one-minute piece. Manipulate them any way you like. The rules are this: 1) All 10 sounds must be used. 2) The final product must be 1 minute long. Join independent production duo Ann Heppermann and Kara Oehler for a workshop aimed to fuel sonic bricoleurs with the means to create and employ auditory hallucinations, narrative blips and gain atmospheric redemption.

Kara and Ann will provide the sounds and play some sound inspirations to set the mood. You bring your editing station of choice. The best of Ten-Thirty-One will be played at the closing reception.

Please RSVP at our ticket page.

Ann Heppermann and Kara Oehler are Peabody-award winning public radio producers and media artists based in Brooklyn and Boston. Their stories and long-form documentaries air nationally and internationally on public radio shows like Hearing Voices, Studio 360, Morning Edition, Radio Lab and Marketplace. Individually and collectively, their radio stories and media projects have been exhibited at Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), UnionDocs and Conflux, among other venues. Kara and Ann are transmission artists with free103point9.

Tyler Mains (Performance)

Tyler Mains is a native Kentuckian with a background in all varieties of music. Tyler began studying violin at the age of eight and piano at the age of 15. He has held the concertmaster position in all of his local orchestras, ensembles, and chamber groups. Tyler began studying music composition as he entered high school, but only in a serious manner towards the end of his sophomore year. Tyler has attended the Young Composer’s Program arranged by Peter Gilbert and Orianna Webb at the Cleveland Institute of Music for two years in a row. Gilbert introduced Tyler to the realm of electronic manipulation of natural sounds- this is where Tyler has found his niche. Tyler’s graphic scores are featured in Theresa Sauer’s “Notations 21″, an anthology of graphic scores based on John Cage’s, “Notations”. Tyler was also a featured composer in Chelsea Art Museum’s Graphic Notation Gallery along with the Online Streaming Museum’s Graphic Notation Exhibit.

Unsound Mind

RSVP required (see below)
A surreal audio tour and listening party inside an abandoned mental health ward, hosted (remotely) by a world-famous psychiatrist. Space is very limited. Please note that this session occurs farther away from most of the other festival events. A sense of adventure and non-litigious disposition is required. RSVP at unsound [at] megapolisfestival [dot] org.

UpRightDown – Laura Silver

RSVP Required

UpRightDown is a collaborative, multimedia storytelling site. We supply the plot (or invite others to do so) and invite participants, or performers, to interpret the plot their medium of choice. Join us for a real-time, collaborative session at Megapolis.
We’ll provide a 100-word story line — or will solicit one from one of you — and will invite to assemble a one- to two-minute audio piece based on that plot. In an hour. It’s a chance to produce a narrative-induced sound piece within constraints of time and topic.

Please bring a laptop loaded with audio software (Audacity or other) and your sound library, or at least five clips you might want to work with. (We’ll provide some sounds, too). And, listen up, we’ll have a chance to hear each other’s stuff once we’re done. All pieces produced during the workshop will be eligible for posting on UpRightDown.com.

Please RSVP at our ticket page.

Laura Silver has been a professional writer and editor for the last 12 years. Her writing on arts, culture and science has appeared in outlets including The New York Times, National Public Radio, WNYC Radio and Popular Science. Silver’s essays on agriculture in rural Senegal, Mrs. Stahl’s knishes and high school soccer coach Ms. L appear in recent anthologies. She lives in New York City.

WFMU’s Free Music Archive – Liz Berg & Jason Sigal

New Jersey freeform radio station WFMU has been a leader in non-commercial radio’s use of web technologies and social media. WFMU’s newest project is the Free Music Archive, an interactive online library of high-quality, curated audio. Every track on the Free Music Archive can be downloaded legally, and many grant additional rights under Creative Commons agreements, making the FMA a valuable resource for podcasters, video producers, remix artists, and others in search of legal audio. The site is also a platform for collaboration between established media curators, including other non-commercial radio stations, audio festivals, and performance venues. How can artists/musicians benefit by offering free downloads? Why is the site curated, and how does that make the FMA different from other free audio/podsafe sites? What are the legal issues and obstacles involved with setting up a site like this? How will the music industry react? These questions and more are answered by WFMU’s Liz Berg and Jason Sigal, who give a brief tour of the emerging website and an overview of its progressive licensing options.

Liz Berg is the Assistant General Manager of WFMU, where she hosts a weekly radio program, and oversees the station’s archives, podcasts, web-only programs, and annual fundraising Marathon. She was happy to help WFMU use money collected from payola violations to create the Free Music Archive.

As WFMU’s Licensing Director, Jason Sigal curates and secures permissions for the station’s contributions to the Free Music Archive. He has become something of a bridge between the site’s web developers and its users. Jason is also a WFMU DJ, and a musician who has eaten quality road food throughout the US and Canada.

Your Phone is Your Mic – Laura Kwerel, Walker Mettling & Dial-A-Stranger

Using the telephone to peek into private lives: why and how. Part instruction manual, part listening party, we’ll let you in on the intimacy (and sometimes cruelty) of using Ma Bell as your mic.

Dial-A-Stranger takes questions from random strangers (like you), and poses them to other strangers (like you) over the telephone. This process has led to conversations on tiki conventions, Disneyland and how to get permanently banned from the U.K. The Voicemail Project is a collection of funny/sentimental/weird messages left on other people’s phones. Recurring categories: cute kids singing happy birthday, messages left for the wrong person, accidental recordings from inside pants pockets. The Telephone Story Chain is a string of true stories from across the country recorded through the phone line. Each storyteller passes the project off to a friend or acquaintance, with the goal of collecting 10 stories in each chain. The result? A story about childhood ghosts in San Francisco might end up in Rural West Virginia with a story about a band of brain-eating killers.

Zachary Kent and Mercedes Martinez started Dial-A-Stranger to highlight the stories of everyday people and to be the excitement they wanted to see in the world. They are both married (although not to each other) and live in Austin, TX.

Laura Kwerel is a public radio producer. Her VMP influences include Found Magazine, The Conet Project and Howard Stern. She once saved a voice mail from her mom for a year and a half. She lives in Fairfax, VA.

Walker Mettling is an artist/curator who drags as many people into his projects as he can. He lives in Providence, RI.