Image by: David Paul Ohmer (flickr)

Why is death such a difficult subject to talk about? From hospital mortuary to the grave, The D-Word explores our complex relationship with death through the perspective of those who deal with it on a daily basis.

Recently featured on Transom.org, The D-Word is an audio documentary I produced last summer on the subject of death. I’d urge you to visit Transom and explore their excellent site, but you can also listen to or download my piece below:

 View on PRX

The documentary was made in part for my MSc in Science Media Production and explores our relationship with death through the perspective of those who deal with it on a daily basis.

The piece experiments with a braided narrative weaving between interview and actuality recordings, taking the listener into a hospital mortuary, inside funeral homes and across a church yard to explore the concept of death from a number of personal perspectives.

This documentary is also a response to my own experience in dealing with the death of a close friend and you can read more about this in my article over at Transom.org.

In addition to this piece, I also produced two further shorts from the material recored for this documentary. These short audio vignettes experiment with form and sound to explore some of the themes touched upon by pathologist Dr Stuart Hamilton.

Adam as machine (more info)

Adam as machine by eprosser

Winters Rest (more info)

Winter’s Rest by eprosser

Last year I interviewed sound recordist Chris Watson on the subject of noise for a piece exploring the use of birdsong at Alder Hey Children’s Hospital in Liverpool.

Chris is one of the worlds leading sound recordists and is well known for his work with the BBC Natural History Unit, including the recent Frozen Planet series.

There was a lot of interesting discussion during this interview about the nature of noise pollution and the considerable threat it poses to our quality of life. Worrying still, it appears that our noisy modern world is drowning out the natural soundscape and interfering with species of wildlife that rely on sound for communication.

What seems to be most alarming is that we’re largely ignoring this problem – our world certainly isn’t getting any quieter – and with more of us living in urbanised environments, noise pollution is fast becoming a significant health problem.

As only a portion of this interview was included within the Alder Hey piece, I thought it might be interesting to share some of the additional material. The interview was recorded at FACT in Liverpool, back in April of last year and explores some of the causes and concerns towards noise in the modern world.

Chris Watson on Noise by eprosser

Additional info

Image: youngdoo (Flickr)

It’s another short piece (see Adam as machine) which has fallen out of The D-Word, a documentary I produced over the summer which will be appearing on Transom.org early in the new year. This piece features pathologist, Dr Stuart Hamilton and was recorded in the mortuary at the Sunderland Royal Infirmary back in July. The material I recorded with Stuart at the mortuary only forms a small part of the overall documentary, yet I think it’s interesting enough to justify an entire piece on it’s own, maybe I’ll get around to it one day.

Winter’s Rest by eprosser

I’m not going to go into a massive rant on how important it is to make an effort to spend time with family, because I’m particularly guilty of not doing so. It just seems that the mortuary staff gain a depressing insight into the mistakes we make and how we choose to lead our lives.

Image:_John Brown (Flickr)

I was interested to read today about a new research project being undertaken, to investigate the psychological impacts of exposure to birdsong. In particular the project will look at how birdsong affects our psychological state, including its effect on mood, attention and sense of creativity.

The research is being conducted as a joint collaboration between the University of Surrey, National Trust and Surrey Wildlife Trust. Researcher Eleanor Ratcliffe, highlighted that there was a real a lack of evidence on the effects of birdsong, stating:

“A great deal of anecdotal evidence suggests that we respond positively to birdsong. However, currently there is a lack of scientific research on the psychological effects of listening to birds.”

You can find out more about the project here.

For me the sound of birdsong offers predominantly positive associations. Living in London, I’m now surrounded by a largely synthetic soundscape, which is strongly connected to the stresses and frustrations of city life (the daily commute, working long hours and a persistent sense of fatigue).

Living amongst this hubbub has unsurprisingly increased the value I attribute to natural soundscapes. Standing in binary opposition to the din of urban living, natural soundscapes offer potential for escape, not just from noise, but from all the negative associations paired with it.

It may be that natural sounds can help us escape from a chaotic lifestyle or at least provide a restorative effect from stress. Understanding the psychological impacts of birdsong will allow us to better understand how we respond to such sounds and perhaps learn more about this relationship. If birdsong really does improve our state of mind and / or sense of wellbeing then it could have real potential in it’s application as a therapeutic tool.

Birdsong as a therapeutic tool?

Back in April / May – I produced a radio piece which looked at the use of Birdsong in the healthcare environment. Alder Hey Children’s Hospital in Liverpool has been experimenting with the use of birdsong to improve the experiences of it’s young patients.

Installed in the central corridor is a sound installation playing the beautiful birdsong recordings made by Chris Watson and Alder Hey patients. These recordings are also used with patients during traumatic and painful procedures, often as a way of calming them down or taking their minds off the situation.

Speaking to the hospital’s Arts Coordinator Vicky Charnock, I found out that there was already tremendous anecdotal evidence in support of birdsong as a therapeutic tool. They were also interested in setting up some form of trial in which to test the potential therapeutic benefits of birdsong.

You can listen to and download the piece here:

Alder Hey’s Dawn Chorus by eprosser

A trillion frames per second

The first is a video from researchers at MIT who’ve developed a trillion frame per second (fps) camera. That’s correct – a trillion. So you’re probably used to watching video in the region of 30 fps and that’s fast enough to trick your mind into perceiving motion between frames.

However, this camera is capable of capturing light, as it travels from point A to point B. Although it doesn’t seem to be able to capture the movement of individual photons, it does seem able to capture individual pulses of light, as they move across the frame or scatter as they interact with certain materials.

Interestingly, it’s dubbed by it’s creators as the world’s ‘slowest fastest camera’ – despite being able to capture the speed of light, it can only record data in two dimensions and only one of these is spatial (the other is time).

So in order to record enough data to obtain a multidimensional movie, it must record the scene multiple times from slightly different angles and this takes time (up to an hour apparently). Anyway, the video below elaborates on this and features some of the incredible footage captured by the camera.

As the camera requires multiple takes to obtain enough data, it’s seems that its applications are somewhat limited. However it’s ability to capture light as it scatters across a scene is certainly valuable in the analysis of different materials and could even be used for what its designers describe as ‘ultrasound with light’. Read more here and here.

The camera never lies?

The first time I saw this I was pretty stunned. This video basically outlines a new and simple method of realistically inserting objects into an image after it was taken (in post-production essentially). This is done without the user having to perform complex measurements with perspective or lighting – instead, with minimal annotation the user can place objects into an image and the system will work out all the necessary lighting conditions to which it should to conform to. The result, as you will see, is incredible – with the inserted objects appearing as if they existed in the original scene.

What’s more, the researchers also found that subjects were unable to tell the difference between real images and images generated by their system. It’s looks so good it’s almost a little disturbing.

You sort of have to see it to believe it:

You can read more about it here, or their research paper here.

Reconstructing reality?

The last two videos are also pretty smart, describing processes by which poor quality images can be reinterpreted or reconstructed using the information within them.

If you can get past the rather dry voice over, the first involves the reinterpretation of data within an image allowing one to:

“Decide later if it stays a photo, becomes a video or turns into a lightfield so you can digitally refocus”

The final is one you are likely to have come across and details an extraordinary feature in the upcoming release of Adobe’s photoshop series (CS6) – It’s an image deblurring feature which seems to work remarkably well, able to pluck lost detail from what seems like nowhere:

I definetely ran out of steam towards the end of this post.

Thanks.

Recordings made using a Zoom H4n, edited and assembled on Ableton Live.

Headphones recommended.

Today I popped into the lecture theatre to watch Professor Chris Bishop as he prepared for his upcoming ‘Science of Fireworks’ public lecture – this mainly involved blowing up balloons containing varying amounts of hydrogen. This produced a couple of rib rattling explosions like this… (obviously all in the name of science).

Where will science take you at bedtime? Image: tessarlo.com

I remember listening to audiobooks as a child and there were years where I wouldn’t sleep unless I had a tape playing in the background. To a child, silence can be pretty ominous and I suppose there is something comforting in having ‘someone else’ in the room with you, narrating a story as you fall asleep. Even now, when all I seem to crave is silence, there is still something comforting in putting on a pair of headphones and escaping into a world led by the voice of another.

A while back I recorded Lizzie Crouch reading a series of extracts from popular science books – intended as little audio ‘bedtime stories’ for scientists. At first we thought about adding in additional sound to enhance the recordings, but upon reflection it was clear that they worked a lot better on their own. There are thousands of great audiobooks out there, but I suppose very few cover popular science – so here’s an attempt to bring you just that.

Lizzie is going to be posting a new one each week, you can hear the first one below (an extract from ‘Trilobite!’ by Richard Fortey), but listen to the rest over at her blog.

The Soundwall awaits...

The wall features a total of 77 speakers and is controlled via the use of a handy touch screen interface. The interface allows the user to essentially bounce sound from three mono tracks (or up to 8 analogue inputs) across the wall in realtime, much to the delight, or perhaps annoyance of everyone in hearing distance.

The simple touch screen interface includes volume faders for each of the three tracks, which are subsequently represented by one of three coloured balls. These coloured balls essentially represent where the sound is localised on the speaker wall; so as the user moves the balls across the screen the sound on the wall pans accordingly. This allows the user to throw sound across the wall in all directions, just imagine a ball of sound bouncing about inside your head and you’re almost there… It’s certainly very cool to play with.

The touchscreen composing desk. Image: David Robertson.

So I tried out a collection of ‘racket’ themed samples which I have prepared for use during next weeks Science Museum Lates:

… and here’s a clip of me standing infront of the wall as David Robertson throws the sound all over the place, you can hear an interview with David in the next episode of Tomorrow’s Tentacles:

Although the wall’s functionality is pretty limited at the moment, it will be interesting to see how its use is expanded. It could certainly do with a few more features, perhaps expanding on the user interface to include a selection of tracks or the addition of effects which could be controlled via the touch screen. Its use as a performance tool is certainly very attractive and I’d love to experiment with it further! – Watch this space.

This is a short video I produced last month with Nisha Ligon, Tom Welch and Camilla Ruz for the Guardian website. It features BBC wildlife presenter Kate Humble and Martin McGill who were promoting their new book ‘Watching Waterbirds with Kate Humble‘ at the London Wetlands Centre.

We got really lucky with the weather. Turning up at Hammersmith station in the morning we were greeted with a torrential downpour – not ideal for shooting wildlife outside. Thankfully the rain subsided just as we arrived at the Wetlands Centre and we were granted with an afternoon’s worth of sunshine to walk round the site and capture some of the wildlife on camera.

Check out the video below to have a look for yourself!

The London Wetlands Centre is an unusual oasis of wildlife and greenery which is situated surprisingly within the city confines near Hammersmith. It provides people with a great chance to break free from the usual urban surroundings and take in some of the natural scenery usually reserved to those living outside the city limits.

GO SEE.

http://www.wwt.org.uk/visit-us/london