Nye Parry

My installation Significant Birds is now touring with the exhibition ILLUSION originally created for the Science Gallery in Dublin. The installation consists of 12 bird cages with small speakers which emit fluctuating sine waves that sound like bird song. Collectively however they add up to discernible human speech, a text taken from Helmholtz’ On the Sensation of Tone. You can find more details of the piece here. the exhibition also features Madi Boyd’s The Point of Perception for which I made the sound.
The ILLUSION exhibition is currently at the Reuben Fleet Science Center in San Diego and runs until the 15th of January. The tour will continue to North Carolina in 2015 – watch this space for further dates.

Following the success of last year’s Visions of the Universe exhibition my digital composition class at Trinity Laban Conservatoire has again provided the soundtrack to a new exhibition at the National Maritime Museum. Guiding Lights covers the work of Trinity House, the centre that coordinates the UKs lighthouses and Maritime safety. The Exhibition runs until January 2016.

The Tate have just put up a little piece I wrote for their blog here. I was asked to evaluate and consider the potential of their project Art Maps (see below) and contextualise it in relation to my own artistic practice.

On Friday 17th January I will be speaking at a Tate research event entitled Art Maps: Field Notes.
This research seminar features presentations by three artists, myself, Simon Pope and Susan Stockwell, followed by a panel discussion, chaired by Professor Steve Benford, investigating the Tate’s Art Maps project and the relationship between art, place and technology. The Art Maps project is developing a web application that allows people to relate Tate artworks to places. Using a smartphone or computer, anyone will be able to find works in Tate’s collection on a digital map, then share local knowledge to help pinpoint locations as well as add comments.
We were invited to explore and test the Art Maps website on desktop and mobile devices and are each presenting a short illustrated response to the site, and the ideas behind it, from the perspective of our own practice and creative preoccupations. There is also a short presentation by doctoral student Cristina Locatelli, examining her findings from a series of public engagements with Art Maps. The event would be of particular interest to artists, technologists, curators and academics interested in locative media and mapping.
Full details can be found on the Tate website.

Ok, this is bad – over a month into the show I am finally getting around to posting about the great ILLUSION exhibition at the Science Gallery in Dublin. The Gallery specialises in shows that use art to illustrate, comment on or otherwise deal with scientific ideas, and ILLUSION looks at how we can learn about perception through (mostly visual) illusions. I have taken the principle behind my Exploded Sound work to create an audio illusion (entitled Significant Birds) in which a spoken text is broken down into individual harmonics which chirp away in 12 bird cages – the listener hears them drift in and out of phase. As they coalesce it is impossible not to hear the voice although no individual speaker contains any more than a single fluctuating pure tone (like the chirping of a bird – the bird imagery extends my piece Bird:Cage).

The Show runs till the end of September and details can be found here:
https://sciencegallery.com/illusion/significantbirds

There are a couple of interviews with me online here:
http://www.newstalk.ie/audio-henry-illusionists-crazy-installations

and here:
http://siliconrepublic.com/innovation/item/33415-magic-psychology-and-art
(this one is a little stilted at first because they had just persuaded me to demonstrate some vocal harmonics on camera so I’m trying to express myself in a way that will make that feel natural )

The ILLUSION show also showcases the larger version of Madi Boyd’s The Point of Perception for which I made a soundtrack earlier this year:
https://sciencegallery.com/illusion/pointofperception

This curious contraption which seems to have landed in the grounds of Chelsea School of Art is the Be Open Sound Portal – a surround sound listening environment designed by Arup Acoustics. All this week it is in residence at Chelsea, just next to Tate Britain and I was asked to contribute a piece to one of the programmes that will be playing there. Opening times are here http://soundingspace.tumblr.com/times. My piece is first in the LCC block which is at different times each day. Mine is called ATC Zero.
Taking as its starting point two recordings I made in London after the eruption of the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull, which left all air traffic grounded for several days (a condition known as ATC Zero), the piece moves through an invented landscape of exterior and interior spaces (including that of the Portal itself) and explores the simultaneous feelings of openness and enclosure experienced in that time. Its basically a chance to experiment with some vaguely ambisonic techniques, both recorded and synthesized. Check it out if you are in the area!

Another new work from Madi Boyd with my audio can be seen at the wonderful Kinetica Art Fair 2013 from next Wednesday February 27th – March 3rd. Fragment Cinema explores moving image as illusion, where the cinema screen is re-invented as sculpture and interacts with the film. Kinetica is at its usual venue Ambika P3, 35 Marylebone Road, NW1 5LS and you can find more details and book tickets on the Kinetica website http://www.kinetica-artfair.com/

On the 15th Feb I will be chairing a session at this symposium on field Recording

In the Field

Exploring the art and craft of field recording

British Library Conference Centre,
London, February 15th and 16th, 2013

A two day international symposium to open up and explore the practice, art and craft of field recording through a series of panel presentations, listenings and screenings.
Starting from the early days of field recording the symposium aims to relate the multitude of contemporary field recording practices to their historical precedents and investigate issues in contemporary practices including how field recordings are distributed to and heard by an audience; recording the unheard; mapping the urban and
questioning the extended nature of the field in a digital networked landscape.

Presenters include:
Ximena Alarcón, Joeri Bruyninckx, Angus Carlyle, Des Coulam, Peter Cusack, Simon Elliott, Felicity Ford, Helen Frosi (SoundFjord), Zoe Irvine, Christina Kubisch, Cathy Lane, Udo Noll, Francesca Panetta, Nye Parry, Davide Tidoni, Cheryl Tipp, David Vélez, Salomé Voegelin, Chris Watson, Claudia Wegener, Jana Winderen, Mark Peter Wright

Ticket information: Full two day pass £25 / £15 concessions
One day £15 /£10 concesssions
Book tickets in advance at http://estore.arts.ac.uk/browse/extra_info.asp?compid=1&modid=2&prodid=100&deptid=175&catid=52

Curated by Cathy Lane, Angus Carlyle and Cheryl Tipp

A collaboration between CRiSAP http://www.crisap.org (Creative Research in Sound Arts Practice) and British Library http://www.bl.uk/
Funded by the Sounds of Europe http://www.soundsofeurope.eu with the support of the Culture Programme of the European Union.

For more information http://www.inthefield.org.uk

The symposium will also celebrate the publication of two new books On Listening and In the Field

Today we had the first rehearsal for Richard Baker’s new work for the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, The Tyranny of Fun for which I have devised the electronics. The piece, which re-conceives Ravel’s La Valse in the world of 80s Disco music features an electronic percussion part which utilises a specially built set of percussion mallets with accelerometer in the heads. The premier is on the 15th February at the CBSO Centre in Berkeley Street Birmingham.

Tomorrow I have a small piece entitled Solo, a Duet in Four Voices, in a little gig at the Old Operating Theatre in London Bridge. The concert focuses on specially commissioned work that uses aspects of this fascinating and historical space. The gig is at 5pm. My piece is for Clarinet + and utilises the unique layout of the space.

Madi Boyd’s amazing immersive 3D moving image installation The Point of Perception can currently be seen in Berlin. The show entitled: Synaesthesia 2, Space and Perception is on at the Art Laboratory Prinzenallee 34, 13359 Berlin and is open Friday – Sunday afternoons from 2 – 6 pm until March 10th. Its a satellite show for this year’s Transmediale festival. The piece now features a specially composed soundtrack by myself. Catch it if you can!

Here is a little installation from the Out of the Cage day at Trinity Laban Conservatoire last week at the Old Naval College site in Greenwich. The day was a centenary celebration of John Cage comprising 10 hours of simultaneous concerts, installations and happenings. My contribution consisted of a small bird cage hung high in a stairwell. Inside is a small speaker playing something that sounds suspiciously like birdsong. In fact it is a single sine-wave partial isolated from a recording of Cage reading his famous Lecture on Nothing. The piece uses similar partial tracking technology to my Exploded Sound project and if you listen very carefully you can hear Cage in the background.