Site: Duquesne Incline (Simone Zhang, Anna Gusman, Mauricio Gil-Silva)

Our installation focuses on the soundscapes of the Duquesne incline. It is augmented by historical and present Pittsburgh broadcasts, and the historical Pittsburgh piece "Iron Etude" from the library that we chose to represent.  The concept of an iron etude seemed to represent an incline so we took a trip to the site in order to record it's environment. While we were there we came across the sonic artifacts of the tourists and beating mechanics of the funicular machine. When we saw the telephone booth in the library it inspired us to create a space that evoked traveling through Pittsburgh like in the incline. The booth will have the ambient sounds of the incline ride and an interactive numpad that triggers the traveling experience. 

 

 

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Site: South Side (Erik Sargent, Rey Lariosa, Tahj Spigner, Eugene Li)

 

Our chosen sheet music is the South Side Polka. A polka is a generally upbeat, fun, and lively type of song, so through our exhibit, the project aims to capture that feeling and show how the South Side captures it as well (past and present).

On the one hand, locations such as the Hofbrauhaus bring to mind the kind of jolly fun that a traditional polka embodies, but on the other hand, many of the locations in the South Side (bars & restaurants, movie theaters, bike trail next to the river, etc) embody a more modern sense of fun & liveliness.

We hope to merge these two ideas in our exhibit, making a mixture of old & new sounds.

 

[link to sounds]

 

Site: Shady Side (Ada Rojas, LeRoy Gary, Kyle Leve, Elizabeth Maday)

 

For this project, we explored a backwards progression through the history of Shadyside, conveyed through a corridor of sounds and animations installed in the stacks overlooking the dinosaur exhibit at the Carnegie Museum of Natural history. We based our compositions on the the “Shadyside Mazurka,” a 1873 polish dance piece by Wm. J. Smith. This specific mazurka is expanded by both an old and modern approaches to sound creation: the playing of traditional instruments, the use of synthesised instruments, and implementation of found sounds from the Shadyside area. As you walk through the piece, you are greeted by modernity, then progressing to themes of 19th century opulence, finishing with an acknowledgement of Pittsburgh’s dark past as a colonialist enclave. The windows on the left were amplified using transducers, and the stacks on the right mounted small, hidden speakers to give an immersive experience without clear directionality.

 

 

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