Street Vibe Festival of Sound was held at The Scoop at More London on 14 June 2008, 11.30am - 6.00pm.

The main performances took part in the amphitheatre (The Scoop) and workshops in marquees around The Scoop.

The event highlights were….

One Voice
Dr Kevin Hollis - 'Lagan Love'

Trevor & Steve: Beautiful Music Horrible Sounds
This is a show about getting into the X Factor and breaking World Records.

'Phluffy Nice' is a classic girl-boy duet group while 'Grim Reaper' is a close harmony group.

Steve Mesure and Professor Trevor Cox used sound science and engineering to give these terrible groups a make over. Steve and Trevor explored whether technology could have the potential to make or break their bid for fame and fortune.

World Record Attempt
The Street Vibe team beat the current 1.98m record for the largest Whoopee Cushion in the Guiness World Records by producing a 3m whoopee cushion, the title was awarded at the event. Volunteers were encouraged to sit on the specially made whoopee cushion - the largest in the world - to demonstrate exactly how wind instruments work.

Eugene & Steve: Heart Beats, Rhythms and Street Vibes
Composer and musician, Eugene Skeef and Physicist Steve Mesure orchestrated a musical performance by the audience. They explored the different tones that can be made by our own bodies and with the instruments that the audiences made on the day. Eugene and Steve used the science to produce cool beats, rhythms and vibes.

Visit the marquees around The Scoop

Strangeloop
Strangeloop is a new organisation of computer music practitioners engaged in performance, composition, installation work, academic research and experimental music and video software development. They work at the crossroads of academia, culture, science and the arts, acting as an independent organisation involved in research and development of new software tools, events organisation and education. At Street Vibe Festival of Sound, Strangeloop hosted a computer music lab demonstrating different ways that technology changes the way we make music, including microsound, a technique for finely slicing up recorded sounds so that they can be manipulated in powerful ways, evolutionary techniques for 'growing' sounds, ways that computers can be used to listen to sound and measure the similarity of different sounds, and ways to generate new sounds and images using feedback and interesting mathematical ideas such as fractals.

Squid Soup - Freq2
What you see is what you hear…

Any sound can be described as a waveform, or a line drawn in space. Think of sine waves, square waves, the grooves on a vinyl record; these lines fully describe a sound. A straight line produces silence.

Using the Freq program is a bit like generating that record groove in real time. It takes the outline of your silhouette, turns it into a line, and then plays it back as sound. Every move you make, however small, will immediately affect the sound you are listening to.

This piece, Freq2, also adds a few other ideas to the mix. It places the sounds you are generating into a musical structure. The sounds are played at different frequencies (the beeps and drones are all made entirely from your waveform), and a long echo loop is added, to give the piece a form of memory. Both the sound and the visuals retain elements of what has gone before.

Listen to the effects your movement has on the sound. Link to www.squidsoup.org/freq2

Sound Factory
Sound Factory gives children of all ages and abilities the chance to really engage with science and to realise that we are all engineers and scientists at some level.

The workstation supplied visitors with fruit, vegetables and the equipment to make any sort of musical instrument they wished.

Making whistles out of carrots, or water drums from melons, may seem strange science and engineering, but it challenges us to think about the physical structure and properties of the fruit or vegetable, and the various ways they can be shaped in order to make different sounds.

Pictures and illustrations credit: Louise Camrass