“What do you hear in the city? What sounds are only perceptible in the ultrasonic realm, where bats and crickets communicate? Sounds which are so high, our human ears cannot perceive them. This acoustic world becomes audible in Ultrasonic City and they get their place in the sounds of the city and the world.

Director and narrator:
Wendy Van Wynsberghe

Fieldrecordings:
Marion Guillemette

Edits : Vincent Mattyn and yours truly

Thanks for your patience, support and tenacity: Acsr, Carmello, Clementine & Carine

And thanks to
acclivity
hanstimm
roubignolle
aguasonic
dobroide
cajo
Corsica_S
FreqMan
fons
Jovica
pera
klankbeeld
for their sounds under various Creative Commons licenses from Freesound

2013 Creative Commons Attributions Non Commercial Share alike

More:

The urban sound world is quite dense. By extracting the ultrasound I wanted to reveal a sonic universe or even add another layer to the field recordings. When you hear only the ultrasonic layer of the city, you hear a place devoid of human voices. They simply do not reach that high. Some very quiet sounds get enhanced, such as rubbing your fingers together, frottements in French. In a park at sunset you hear the foraging bats, whilst at the same time, our human ears only register ducks, planes and other humans. A swimming pool gets reduced to splashes, you do not hear the children shriek nor play. Plastic, metal, water all produce ultrasounds.
With the help of ACSR, I was able to record the same place in the city ultrasonically and with high quality “normal” microphones. This revealing/unravelling/hiding of layers of sound I want to present in this documentary.

A live perfomance by Chris Farmer in the Radio Panik studio, based on a previous work he did a few months ago for a german galery (Expo Berlin). The work he did in Berlin resulted in an improvised performance which was an electronic, harmonic and visual echo of the surrounding urban space.

In Brussels, Chris farmer proposed to the Radio Panik listeners to recreate the poetic and harmonic experience of that particular urban landscape, which he recorded and translated with his sound recorder and coloured pencils.

**

Living and working in Brussels, Belgium, Chris Famer is of vaguely British origin and a self-taught gardener, linguist, musician and artist who composes and improvises in all of these media. Since the early 1990s, he has gardened, translated and created his way through France, Belgium and the UK.

His quest is to find poetry in noise and the botany of language, hoping to one day compile a formally chaotic and above all subjective monograph of the world that confronts him, and us, every day.

Since an early age, Chris Farmer has been influenced, or obsessed, by song and sound, and especially how it can be transformed or dismantled, as seen in the works of Anthony Milton, Michael Gira, Richard Skelton.

He currently experiments with the relation between languages, culture, sound, structure, horticulture and art, in various random combinations.

Chris Farmer’s website.

Chris Farmer’s mixcloud.

Chris Farmer’s soundcloud.

Berlin In Art’s blog about the performance in Berlin

Expo-Berlin galery

Chris Farmer pour une performance en live dans les studios de Radio Panik.

À l’origine de sa proposition, une invitation de la galerie allemande Expo-Berlin qui avait donné lieu à une écoute aux casques d’une composition, improvisée en live, résonance sonore, visuelle, électronique et harmonique de ce que lui a inspiré l’espace urbain berlinois au cours de ses déambulations.

À Bruxelles, et en studio, ce jeudi 13 décembre, Chris Farmer propose aux auditeurs de Radia de retrouver et de recréer la poésie et l’harmonie surgies de ce paysage urbain que son enregistreur et ses crayons de couleurs s’étaient amusés à traduire.

À propos de Chris Farmer :

Installé à Bruxelles depuis 3 ans, Chris Farmer est un autodidacte protéiforme : jardinier, linguiste, musicien et artiste, il compose et improvise à partir de ces différentes sémantiques. Depuis le début des années 90, il jardine, traduit et créée ainsi son chemin à travers la France, la Belgique et la Grande-Bretagne.

Faire émerger la poésie du bruit et la botanique du langage constitue une constante dans sa démarche qui vise l’espoir d’un jour, parvenir à recenser en une monographie, formellement chaotique, et par dessus-tout, subjective, notre rapport au monde.

Chris Farmer est influencé, sinon obsédé, par la chanson et le son, en particulier par la manière dont ils peuvent être déformés et démantelés, à l’instar des travaux d’Anthony Milton, Michael Gira et Richard Skelton.

Il expérimente actuellement les variations aléatoires qui peuvent résulter de la relation entre les languages, la culture, le son, la structure, l’horticulture et l’art.

O’tanzz Aairbus is a free improvisation trio based in Brussel. O tanzz aairbus is written o.t.a.n.z.z. a.a.i.r.b.u.s.

hope you’ll enjoy this live performance made in Nova Cinema.

O’tanzz Aairbus produces a very nice monthly improvised radio program for Panik, available as podcast on the website for those among you who would be interested : http://www.radiopanik.org/spip/-O-tANZZ-AIRBUS-

Lift ou esstich dévoile trois polarités, le fait de vivre dans une capitale à communauté multiculturelle et polyglote, de pouvoir se comprendre avec un mot universel, usuel et de tous les jours tel que bonjour.
La symbiose et la richesse de cet ensemble, nous donne des ailes  vers un tour du monde sonore haut en couleur.
Merci à Radio Panik sans qui le challenge n’aurait pas eu lieu.
Bonne écoute.

podcast :  http://www.radiopanik.org/spip/Show-337-Lift-ou-esstich

Lift or esstich unveils three polarities, the fact of living in a multicultural community in a mulitlingual capital, being able to understand each word with a universal, common and everyday word as hello.
Symbiosis and the richness of this set gives us wings to a tour of the colorful world of sound.
Thanks to Radio Panik, without which the challenge wouln’t have taken place.
Happy listening.