A selection of sounds by John Grieve
A selection of sounds by John Grieve
When building a new supermarket in Hackney, London, Tesco Stores and Hackney Council commissioned a public sound art work as part of the development. The supermarket was built on a site where formerly there had been a street (Chalgrove Road). The work was an oral history of the missing road made from interviews with people who had lived on or near it between 1910 and 1970.
This map shows where the street used to exist
This is an edited selection of some of the oral history. The Installation involved six audio speakers arranged around the site with random selections of oral memories played on each one evoking voices from the past that floated around the space. More work with spoken word can be heard here
Popular on YouTube this video shows a device built in 2014 using bicycle wheels with "groan tubes" attached. Groan tubes are related to reed organ pipes. They are sounded by a reed which moves down the pipe thus changing its length and the frequency of the note produced. Other organ pipe experiments can be seen here
Slowed down groan tubes.
An induction microphone amplifies the sound of the capacitor in a camera flash as it charges and discharges. The rotating steel drum in the middle moves the balloons and triggers a microswitch which sets off the flash unit. The sound is transmitted through an amplifier and speaker onto the pen. The drum rotates the manuscript paper. The device writes its own score as it plays.
Ethnochoreological study
A small cymbal was struck and then a car horn was attached to a car battery for 30 seconds, the cymbal was struck and the horn connected again - these two events were repeated until the audience left - Holborn, London
Chance meeting between a sewing machine, guitar, bass drum and Hi Hat cymbals.