oscillation series - sonic theories and practices #16 - Musical Print and EM-Sniffing // Talk, Presentation & Sound  // Date: 7th June 2012 (Thu), 20h      The 16th session will be dedicated to Musical Print and EM-Sniffing with Mara Mills, Victor Mazón Gardoqui and Mario de Vega    Musical Print   Along with more familiar experiments in electrical scanning, such as wirephoto and television, “reading machines” for blind users emerged in the first decades of the twentieth century. Beginning in 1913 with Edmund Fournier d’Albe’s Optophone, these devices converted text into tones, vibrations, and—after the addition of optical character recognition—speech. This talk will survey the category of text-to-tone or “musical print” reading machines in the United States. While Braille had already expanded reading to the tactile sense, these translators defined reading in auditory terms. Compared to phonographic “talking books,” musical print required an extra layer of symbolic decoding. OCR would eventually delegate more of the reading process to machines than to the ear.     Mara Mills is Assistant Professor at NYU Steinhardt and a historian of science who works at the intersection of disability studies and media studies. Her research and teaching interests include communication history, telephone and mobile media studies, science and technology studies, and disability theory. Her current book project traces the historical associations between deafness and communication engineering in the telephone system. Other projects include: a history of talking books, reading machines, and print disability; a collaborative study of the history and politics of “miniaturization” in the electronics industry. Mills has lectured widely, including recent talks at National Tsing Hua University (Taiwan); the Insitute of Media Archaeology at Kulturfabrik Hainburg (Austria); CNRS/Université Paris Diderot; and the Stanford Seminar on Science, Technology, Society. She went to NYU after two years as a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania.     SNUFF   is an electronic device designed by r-aw.cc to de-codify electromagnetic pollution produced by wireless networks. An analog and battery-operated receiver able to amplify and de-modulate frequency ranges between 0.1 GHz to 2.5 GHz produced by wireless based networks. SNUFF amplifies electromagnetic activity into audible ranges, exposing high frequency ranges produced by wireless devices overused in contemporary societies. This electromagnetic pollution is used by r-aw.cc as an impulse to modify the acoustic space with audio visual performances, printed matter, lathe cut vinyl in different formats, objects, publications and pedagogic strategies. Through the process, several experiments have been produced ranging from the amplification of electromagnetic activity produced by wireless devices  to the amplification of microwaves, computer based applications to visualize data traffic and public performances. SNUFF its also a theoretic-praxis seminar about traffic & wireless telecommunications where participants construct an analog and portable device able to amplify into audible ranges electromagnetic activity produced by Bluetooth data transfer, WLAN, mobile phones, GPS, wireless phones, microwaves and several other electronic devices. During the workshop topics related with non-regulated traffic, vulnerability, data transfer interruption, obstruction and sniffing are presented/discussed. r-aw.cc/snuff/   Víctor Mazón: Graduate degree from the University of Basque Country in Lithography and Engraving, 2008. His artistic practice is defined between experimentation and materialization of concepts as physical objects confronted to its native environment, (un)stable arrangements and systems that proves frailness or inability to withstand the effects of formulated environments into human beings, through site-specific manifestations. Has been involved since 1999 into experimental tactics and techniques of media agitation/intercession trough performances and seminars in museums, universities, cultural buildings, public spaces and mass media interventions through the use of sound, light and custom electronics. His works has been perform or exhibited on museums, galleries, public TV/radio stations, bilboards and urban screens across Europe, Africa, Rusia, North America and Mexico. Mario de Vega: Through accidents and its outcomes, actions, processes and objects that conceptually connect with acoustic activity, his work research the value of vulnerability exploring causes and effects that determine the construction of realities. He has performed live and exhibited his work throughout various platforms, which include Festivals, Galleries and Museums in Europe, Mexico, United States, Canada, Russia, Korea and Japan, investigating aesthetic and social realms through a multiplicity of mediums as site-specific interventions, photography, performance, design, video, sculpture, and sound installation. > June 07, 2012   <- Back to: Archive
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