Weathersongs Installation to visit Italy

The Weathersongs Installation has been invited to visit Italy in April this year. The installation will be playing at Thunderstorms 2007, a national public event on climate change and extreme weather conditions to be held in Abano Terme, Veneto from 24-29 April 2007. The installation will be open to the general public from the 27th to 29th at Teatro Pietro d’Abano, Abano Terme.

Richard will be taking the installation to Abano Terme as a guest of ARPAV (Agenzia Regionale per la Prevenzione e Protezione Ambientale del Veneto)

Thunderstorms 2007 (English)/ (Italian)
ARPAV

Weathersongs Plays Live

The Weathersongs Installation gave its first public performance on June 28th at the People’s Plas event at Plas Machynlleth in Powys. The public event, featuring local art, music and dance was set up to publicise proposals by the local activists to turn the Plas into a much-needed community resource including a cinema, a cafe and small office units. Richard brought the Weathersongs Installation along to the festivities and had a lot of good conversations with people who stopped to listen to the music.

People’s Plas

Weathersongs on TV and Radio

The release of Weathersongs Volume One: Days In Wales has attracted a flurry of attention from media in Wales. In the first week since release, Richard has been interviewed on ITV, BBC Wales and Radio Ceredigion.

Tuesday 5th April was particularly busy with Richard giving an interview to Good Morning Wales on BBC Radio
Wales in Aberystwyth at 08:50 and then coming back home to be filmed for ITV’s Wales Tonight (seen here with ITV’s Rob Shelley). This was followed by a photo for the Cambrian News and, on Wednesday night, an hour chatting and playing some tracks from the album with Steve Edge on Radio Ceredigion.

A half-page article and photo came out in the Cambrian News on Thursday.

Following this, the first international airplays came in with album tracks being played on Silent Running (Radio ARA, Luxembourg) and RTQE (WORT Madison, WI USA). Online, the project has featured in Rhizome News and elsewhere.

New Album out now

The first CD album of music from Richard’s Weathersongs Project, entitled Weathersongs Volume 1: Days in Wales, was released on March 28th 2006.

Days in Wales is an album of 14 short pieces of music derived, in real time, from the weather conditions in Southern Snowdonia on 14 different days over one year. Each track was electronically generated by a computer program connected to an electronic weather station at Richard’s home in the foothills of Cadair Idris, North Wales. Selected output from this installation, was then edited and recorded to make the CD.

The music ranges from the gentle ambient electronica of a cool spring morning to wild, almost Free Jazz, saxophone as the westerly gales of autumn hit Cardigan Bay.

More Details/ Listen/ Buy

New Arrival

Heather and Richard are very happy to announce the birth of their son, Sean. He arrived at Bronglais Hospital, Aberystwyth, Wales on Monday, 10th October 2005 and he is, of course, very beautiful.

60×60 Airplay

Richard’s entry for the 60×60 project 2005 was played on June 12th on Max Shea’s Martian Gardens radio show (WMUA FM 91.1 Amherst, Massachusetts, USA).

60×60 is a concert containing 60 compositions from 60 different composers, each composition 60 seconds or less in duration. These 60 recorded pieces are performed in succession without pause one after another for a 1 hour concert. The performance is played in conjunction with synchronized analogue clock. At the top of each minute in the hour the domain of space for the composer has begun. Composers who have written works less than 60 seconds are strategically and artistically place within that minute; the rest of the minute is filled with silence until the next minute begins.

In Richard’s submission, entitled 60/168 and written especially for 60×60, a computer program uses the number 60 and its factors (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20 and 30) to create 168 musical events. Sixty events occur once a second, thirty occur every two seconds, twenty every three seconds, and so on. All events of the same time interval have the same pitch. Sixty events are then chosen at random and played over a MIDI synthesizer. Whenever the program runs, a different variation is heard.

Each of the 1.907 x 10128 possible variations lasts exactly one minute.

The final selection of 60 pieces will be made in September.

Martian Gardens
60×60 project (voxnovus.com)

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Weathersongs Project now Online

Richard’s latest project, Weathersongs, is now up and running.

Weathersongs is a project to compose music from the ever-changing patterns of the weather. The project has a number of elements ranging from a real-time installation through to musical interpretations of data and collected over days or even months.

The first phase of the Weathersongs Project is an installation which uses an electronic weather station to compose continually evolving music in response to surrounding weather conditions. The first version of this installation has already been built and is located at Richard’s home in North Wales.

The second phase edits the real-time output of the installation to form shorter, more structured pieces, that reflect the weather at particular place and time. In time, Sunday Dance plans to release collections of pieces, each collection from a specific location, as audio CDs.

Extracts of music produced by these first two phases can be heard at the weathersongs website.

The next stage will utilise a data logger to record changes in the weather over set time periods (say, single days); sonify the information; and play back the resulting music over a shorter time (probably one day = six minutes). Collections of these "Days In the Life" will also be made into CDs. The software for this element is currently under development.

The Weathersongs Music Project has its own dedicated website at weathersongs.org

NOTE: weathersongs.org is no longer running. Details of the project can be found here.