The deeplocal (Elevator Beep) Tone and Message Alert

The Crew at deeplocal (the picture Dave wanted me to take)

Meet deeplocal–from L-R, Eamae, Dimitry, Nathan, Matt, Dave (face to wall), Heather and Zack. [Side note--their crew has since been refreshed since I attended this December Waffle Wednesday to take these photos. You can check out their expanding posse here.] If you’re in Pittsburgh on the right Wednesday morning, you should definitely pop in for “free consulting and gourmet waffles”–the next one is February 17, 2010 from 9-11am.

A December Waffle Wednesday Guest

Nathan Martin Visits with Another Waffle Wednesday Guest

It’s about time I got around to publishing this tone! After all, deeplocal hosted me as an artist in residence for 4 months last year, and has graciously granted me Artist in Residence Emeritus status to continue developing Locally Toned. Nathan Martin, CEO of deeplocal came up with idea for the Old and New Media Residency Program. He then invited Encyclopedia Destructica to co-host the program, “created to promote an exchange of ideas, skills, and networks by placing an artist in both a contemporary art production setting and a working corporate setting.” I hear-tell they’ve already identified their next resident artist–but I won’t say anything further about that…yet.

The deeplocal tone consists of a recording of what it sounds like getting on up to their top-floor headquarters in the Liberty Bank Building (in the East Liberty neighborhood of Pittsburgh). It’s a distinctive sound, the deeplocal (Elevator Beep) Tone.

If you liked that, you’re surely going to dig the short and jarring deeplocal (Elevator Beep) Message Alert.

The deeplocal Portrait I wanted to Take

Thanks, deeplocal folk, for all the time, energy, work and good will you’ve put towards this public art/ringtone creation project, and thanks also for keeping me on Emeritus-like so I can continue working on the project!

Ally Reeves’ Tones

Ally on the Women’s Train in Mumbai, India

This is Ally Reeves–an artist, designer and educator. She’s currently living in Mumbai, but before she left town (to work through a Fullbright grant there to research street vendors), we recorded some tones. I met Ally a couple of years ago when I was working at the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University, where she was a Fellow working on the One Mile Garden Project, and I was directing the Pittsburgh Creativity Project.

It’s fitting that I should kick off this new year (and next phase of Locally Toned) with Ms. Reeves’ ringtones. This week, I’ve been drawing attention to socially engaged work (commercial and non-commercial) by artists and designers. There is a whole field of contemporary art categorized as art as social practice. Locally Toned could be classified as such, as much of Ally’s work could, too.

In order to explain that term briefly, I like what Harrell Fletcher and Jen Delos Reyes say on the Portland State University MFA Art and Social Practice home page:

“In some ways a social practice artist is a documentarian with agency. Instead of recording what is happening in the world, the social practice artist is also affecting the world, setting things in motion, fostering connections between people, and organizing everyday life so that it can be seen as engaging and meaningful. In this way the artist becomes engaged on a new level with the artist’s target audience as well as issues related to life.”

To me, that first phrase is so important in defining the practice, so relevant to my approach. I’ve done a good deal of motion picture work, and I’m a fan of John Grierson’s description of the documentary as a “creative treatment of actuality.” In the field of art as social practice, I might say that artists have a broader freedom to work with non-traditional tools and skill sets to collaborate with and engage audiences in a more direct fashion. A rather large (and often invisible to the public) component of this type of work is how artists design (and adapt) the systems which they implement within communities (kind of like pre-production in film/video work). And, as I’ve been sharing Locally Toned’s Visual Project Maps this week, too, well, inaugurating the 2010 tone series with Ally’s recordings makes very good sense!

These tones aren’t representative of Ally’s social practice work. They come straight from her vocal chords, and from her observations and associations within certain experiences. They and tell us a bit about who she is and where she comes from (“Etowah, TN a one-stop light town at the foot of the Smokey mountains”).  I’m interested in sharing the stories surrounding the content (ringtones)–who are the collaborators? What do they do in the community? Where do these sounds come from?

The first Ms. Reeves’ tone is her Homage To Minnie Pearl Tone. Ally says, “ As a child I held a special dislike for Minnie Pearl. She seemed to mock small town women and their mannerisms and played a giggly, backwater character on the show Hee Haw. As I grew older, I came to realize that Minnie Pearl’s character was more complex than I had initially thought: When other characters on Hee Haw treated Minnie Pearl as a naive simpleton, she mocked them in a more sophisticated, subtle way than they anticipated, and they themselves appeared the bumpkin’ halfwits.”

The second tone Ally shares is her gentle-sounding Shmoo Tone. She says, “I encountered a framed picture of a Shmoo skeleton while house sitting for a friend in Chicago a year ago.  The Shmoo is a point of wonder, a potentially fictional animal that makes the world feel larger and more mysterious. The Shmoo, like the dodo, occupies such a niche role in the food chain that it has been chased, like so many rare and odd things, to the brink of extinction. Shmooooo….”

Thanks, Ally, for sending me these lovely illustrations to accompany your original tones, and for the many gifts which you share with the world and its communities!

Locally Toned’s Visual Project Maps

Visual Map for Mobile Ringtone Performance

Locally Toned has some new visuals–project maps which help me to describe the whole or aspects of this public art/original ringtone creation project to others.

In my last post, I mentioned that I’m very interested in how a work is perceived by its many audiences. This information can be useful. It’s important for artists to develop a skill set to help them to promote their work, for how they perceive and describe what they do is often first way an audience, curator, or journalist encounters their work.

Welp, I’m thankful to Nathan Martin for his summary of Locally Toned in Contagious Magazine (in the opinion piece entitled, “GutterTech: Squinting at Technology“). It helped me to see a more complete picture of my project, and to make some new visual tools to describe and promote my work. Here’s a paragraph from the article:

“It is the experience, not the technology, that makes Locally Toned stand out. It is simple, fun and clever. Anyone can be or create a ringtone, and when T. Foley gets in your face on a bus or while roving the streets in a custom ringtone collection outfit, armed with a megaphone, people happily create their own tone. She thought of Gumband not as technology, but as a facilitator of her idea.”

After my first read of the article, I thought, “Getting in people’s faces? Roving streets in a custom ringtone collection outfit? Being armed with a megaphone? That’s me?!“

Performing at the July 2009 Gallery Crawl, Pittsburgh. Photo by Larry Rippel

That’s me.

When Martin presented his take on the work I’ve been doing, he shared a snapshot I wasn’t familiar with. I’d been so busy working at close range, developing content (making ringtones with collaborators, taking photographs, archiving project components, blogging and performing), that I hadn’t noticed how all the facets of the project come together. The paragraph that Martin wrote, helped me to conceptualize new visual tools to help answer the question, “What is Locally Toned?”

Visual Map for Ringtone Art Cards

Visual Map: Open Ringtone Recording Session

Martin’s verbal snapshot left me with two useful questions: How do I tell the story of the work I’m doing on this project? and How can I tell the story? Mulling it over, I realized that I most often answered questions with words (written or spoken). Sometimes my words were peppered with photographs (when I had the opportunity to share images). But was there a more efficient or interesting way to communicate the scope of work within the project? What if I could put all those elements into a visual map of some sort? And what if I could add dynamic media (audio and video) to the map?

I began by making some still images to supplement applications I prepared for conferences (the visual maps above). If I was proposing to attend a conference to do a *Mobile* Ringtone Performance, I could illustrate the components of the performance–the amplifier, the ringtone art cards, and the ‘custom ringtone collection outfit.’ Once I made a few of these images, I was excited to note that if I made an introductory project map online, it could also contain moving pictures and audio files. Check out this online project “map” to see how I’m working with that concept. And check back later, too–these visual project maps are still a work-in-progress.

P.S. Thanks to Larry Rippel for so many of these photographs–I’ll be sure to credit your work in the final drafts!

Locally Toned Mentioned in Contagious Magazine, Issue #21

More good news for Locally Toned! Mention of this original ringtone creation project appeared in Contagious Magazine in an opinion piece called “GutterTech: Squinting at Technology” by Nathan Martin, CEO of deeplocal (one of this project’s Old and New Media residency co-hosts).

Contagious (out of London, England) describes itself as a “magazine, DVD and online resource, covering topics such as: branded content; mobile marketing; social networking; user-generated content; word of mouth; viral; interactive; blogs; video games; retail initiatives; design innovations and emerging technologies.”

How’d Nathan Martin get invited to pen an opinion piece for the journal/consulting resource?

In October of 2009, deeplocal/Standard Robot’s the Nike Chalkbot made the cover of Contagious Magazine. And in December of 2009, the Chalkbot made the magazine’s “Most Contagious 2009″ list.

What’s the Chalkbot? A robotic chalking mechanism that receives, processes, prints, captures and delivers data (text, GPS coordinates and photographs). Both deeplocal and Standard Robot worked with Nike’s agency, Wieden+Kennedy, to design and develop the pneumatic robot and software system for Lance Armstrong’s Live Strong campaign/foundation during the 2009 Tour de France. Armstrong’s foundation helps raise awareness, fund research and end the stigma about cancer that many survivors face.

There was also a good deal of online conversation about the Chalkbot coming from artist/activists. It’s worth sharing that info, too, as I’m very interested in how a work is perceived by its many audiences (I’ll be writing my next post about a shift in perspective about Locally Toned that was afforded to me by Martin’s opinion piece appearing in Contagious).

The Chalkbot is similar to contemporary artist/activist projects like GrafittiWriter and StreetWriter by the Institute for Applied Autonomy and BikesAgainstBush by Josh Kinberg.

If you’re interested in reading some of the non-corporate news about the Chalkbot, read IAA’s press release which states that, “The Nike Chalkbot is nearly identical to the ‘Streetwriter’ we began developing ten years ago.” Or click that BikesAgainstBush link (above) to read about Kinberg’s project and the story he tells leading up to his opinion: “What’s really important is the particular context and action in which the device is used that really makes the statement. In these three cases you have the DARPA Challenge (IAA), the 2004 Republican National Convention protests in NYC (BikesAgainstBush), and the 2009 Tour De France / Livestrong Campaign (Chalkbot).”

Locally Toned Receives Grant from The Pittsburgh Foundation

I’m delighted to announce that Locally Toned has received a grant from The Pittsburgh Foundation. The funds will support an interim phase of research, assessment and future planning. That means that I’ll continue to make, post and distribute new ringtones, will conduct further readings and research, and will complete some lively (motion picture) project documentation. I’ll also be working on drawing up a plan for future project sustainability. Time to get busy–new ringtones coming next week!

Thanks to The Pittsburgh Foundation for supporting Locally Toned!

Dalzell Place Tuba Tone

Sam Russell is a 10th grader at Winchester Thurston where he does crew, is pretty good at math, and enjoys participating in and supporting the performing arts program. Russel impressed me with his submission idea because he not only wrote into the project about a ringtone, but also sent a video along–a video of his neighbor (and others) playing live music on a porch in Squirrel Hill! [BTW, this is officially the second "porch tone" in Locally Toned's archive--the other is here.]

Sam grew up on Dalzell Place, and has heard music coming from his neighbor Roger Day’s house for years. “I’ve just heard this great sound coming from Roger’s house as I’ve been growing up on this street. I can hear it when I’m in my house, or when I’m hanging outside with friends. To me it would make a great ringtone.”

Roger Day has been conducting cancer research for 30 years–he’s an Associate Professor within the Department of Biomedical Informatics/Biostatistics at the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute. He is also known as Professor Beautiful. He wanted to play some Bach for a tuba tone because, “Well, it’s a short piece, and he can’t sue me.” Professor Beautiful has been playing music for 40 years, trying to make music better every year he plays.

If you’ve taken a gander at these first pictures in the blog, you’re probably thinking to yourself that they look like they were taken when it was much warmer outside. Yet it’s December! What took me so long?

Alaquiva Prepares to Record Day at Ya Momz House studio

Although I tried recording the tuba tone two times myself (once in the summer and once in the fall), it’s thanks to Emmai Alaquiva and Ya Momz House that we finally have this audio in the collection. As I learned, Tubas are difficult to record decently without the right equipment, and when Alaquiva heard about my recording trials and tribulations, he generously extended an offer to Locally Toned to record Roger’s tone at his Emmy award-winning studio gratis. [BTW--Emmai is also the founder of Hip Hop On L.O.C.K.--his students' tones, recorded earlier this year, are two of the most popular in the project.]

Here’s the long-time-coming Dalzell Place Tuba Tone. Sam, thanks for your patience and for your lovely neighborhood based submission idea. Roger, thanks for your patience and persistence. And Emmai, serious thanks for opening up your “house” to (and sharing your mad skills with) Locally Toned!

Elizabeth Perry’s Scrapyard Challenge Jam Tone (from Mobile Art && Code)

Liz Perry and Her Daughter Piper

Dr. Elizabeth Perry is an artist and the Technology Coordinator at The Ellis School in Shadyside. She’s also a member of the awesome, non-profit, community-based workshop known as Hack Pittsburgh. I’ve known Liz for years through technology education connections and circles, and in early November, we both attended the Mobile Art && Code conference that took place at Carnegie Mellon University. Designed by artist Golan Levin, the symposium focused on the artistic and tactical potential of mobile, networked and locative media, and took place at Carnegie Mellon University from November 6-8 of 2009.

Liz’s ringtone contribution for this project comes from a workshop she participated in that weekend called the Scrapyard Challenge. Hosted by artists Jonah Brucker-Cohen and Katherine Moriwaki, folks who attend the Challenge built simple electronic projects (both digital and analog) out of found or discarded “junk” (old electronics, clothing, furniture, outdated computer equipment, appliances, turntables, monitors, gadgets, etcetera). Liz told me she signed up for the workshop because she facilitates a similar experience, an after school invention workshop, at The Ellis School for 3rd and 4th grade girls. The day I visited the workshop, to take photos and conduct a proper interview with Liz, the young girls were designing and building projects with ear buds and LEDs.

Wow! Dr. Perry’s work at The Ellis School is powerful. As a media literacy educator, I know that democratization of the skills and tools for making electronic media in relation to future educational and career choices is important for populations traditionally unfamiliar with or excluded from these fields. Exposure to the skill set through fun and hands-on experimentation/invention experiences for girls (and others lacking access), in relation to science and technology, is so very important.

The ringtone contribution from Dr. Perry is from a recording she asked me to capture with her 3G iPhone after the workshop participants from the Challenge showed off their projects and then ‘jammed’ together, setting off, or playing their creations together at the same time. Many of these devices incorporated interesting sound and/or musical elements, so it was good fun listening to the performance. Liz told me that she had me recording the Scrapyard ‘jam’ with an iPhone application called iTalk Lite. “That application allows you to record ‘lossless’ AIFF files–that’s why I chose it.” The piece Liz built in the workshop was called Art && (Morse) Code.

Art && (Morse) Code (photo by Liz Perry)

She describes her workshop project this way: “It consisted of a cigar box containing a large old metal switch, which turned the sound off and on when you tapped it, a non-functioning analog signal gauge, and a light sensor hooked up with pipe cleaners, which modified the pitch of the sound, depending on how bright or dark it was.  A smiley face lamp in the background provided extra light for the sensor. My piece, like all the other projects, was connected to an Arduino microprocessor, and from there into software which interpreted the signal as sound. I played my instrument by tapping the old metal switch while moving my other hand around near the sensor to alter the pitch. It was lots of fun to make and play, and produced a surprisingly variable sound.”

Here’s Liz’s description of the audio source for her tone: “The ringtone is a recording of all the Scrapyard Challenge participants playing our new instruments at once.  Cacophonous and joyful, it reminds me of the cheerful chaos of making new things from old.”

Liz Perry’s Art And Code Scrapyard Jam Tone is dedicated to the democratization of electronic media, creators of mobile (locative) media, and Pittsburgh hackers of every age!

Rick Gribenas: In Memoriam Tones by Ayanah Moor

Posts on this blog usually begin with and include a picture of the contributor of the tone(s). In regards to these In Memoriam Tones, I’m avoiding that tendency; for these images are meant to convey the loss or absence of a person from our Pittsburgh landscape–the artist Rick Gribenas, who passed away earlier this year. He died when he was 31, as he was undergoing treatment for Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

The image above and the tones below were submitted by Ayanah Moor, artist and associate professor in the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University.

Around 2001-2002, Ayanah began collaborating with Gribenas. Their collaborations consisted of print-making and mixing music together. “I believe we met each other at A.I.R. (Artist Image Resource) on the North Side,” Ayanah said. “When we played music together, Rick would come over to my house, he’d bring his cassette tape deck, a stack of tapes and a computer, and he’d alter sound from the tape deck in real time. I worked with two CD turntables. We didn’t talk a lot about thematics before we’d begin playing–we just let these ‘conversations’ unfold.”

Around 2005, Gribenas left Pittsburgh for grad school at Columbia College in Chicago. That same year, Ayanah had a solo show at A+D 11th Street Gallery in Chicago (Columbia College’s gallery), and one of their recorded pieces was part of he exhibition. The photograph above is documentation of their 11-minute piece,  A&R. The two ringtones contributed by Ayanah are excerpted from that collaborative piece, and are dedicated to Rick in memoriam.

“When he returned to Pittsburgh after completing his graduate studies, Rick left this note in my mailbox. I kept meaning to respond to it, but didn’t,” Ayanah said. “I never caught up with him. That’s why I decided to create some tones in memoriam. It’s an opportunity to bring closure. It just feels right.”

Last week, Ayanah and I listened to the track and talked about excerpts that would capture the essence of their music-making collaboration. We both thought that Gribenas/Moor@3:41 would make a great ringtone or phone alarm, and then we selected Gribenas/Moor@7:10 as a second tone.

These are the first memorial tones in the project. Thank you, Ayanah, for your thoughtful contribution–a contribution that responds to my project’s focusing question with sounds from the not-so-long-ago past that still resonate in the minds and in hearts of many Pittsburghers who knew this young artist.

What did Pittsburgh sound like? Sometimes it sounded like the handiwork of Rick Gribenas.

Steel Fabrication Tones

Meet the gentlemen who work at Zottola Steel Corporation, a fabrication shop in East Liberty. I met Matt Zottola about a month ago at a friend’s party. As soon as I answered his what-do-you-do question, he said, “How about some steel fabrication tones?” Since I’d just been to Rivers of Steel to get archival steel industry tones, I thought some present-day steel tones would be fitting. Plus, such a shop would be the next likely stop after steel came out of a mill–so perfect!

Matt started working at his family’s business when he was in high school. “I’d get calls from my father to come down and help out when other guys were missing from the floor,” he said. And it’s still a family business–the day I visited, Matt’s son Brandon was there working.

The shop is huge (the building is 18,000 square feet and the ceiling is about 25 feet high). Looking around, I kept thinking of the Richard Scarry books I had as a little kid. How I loved looking at all those finely detailed pictures of animals working (at the airport, in stores, on city streets). Those books, like episodes of Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood, when Fred went to visit factories and farms and other exotic-to-me places, made me feel like I was having a look at something most folks don’t get to see. Neat-o.

I asked Matt where their work goes after it leaves the building. “About 99% of the fabrication we do is for construction of some sort. Every once in a while, we produce a part of a machine for a customer. And we also did the cages and chutes for the elephants and polar bears at the Pittsburgh Zoo.”

Matt identified major sounds related to the work that goes on in the shop and introduced me to the men on his team who specialize in working with the various equipment. As we went around the shop, the guys were helpful, fun to work with, and darn patient with me and my childlike curiosity about what the heck the machines actually did.

The first audio I recorded for a tone was made by Russ Kovacic, who was working on a stainless steel truck rack.

Before I began recording, the guys brought over an extra helmet so that I could see what the welding process looks like. If you haven’t seen anybody weld before, you might not know that you shouldn’t look directly at that firey light from the torch. Through the green glass of the helmet I couldn’t see the fire, just the path of melted steel from the torch. Very cool. Or should I say hot? Anyhow, here’s Russ Kovacic’s Welding Tone.

After welding, we moved onto grinding. When I asked Matt which of the audio would make the most ‘iconic’ ringtone for him, he said, “grinding because practically every job that goes out of here has to have some grinding done on it before it leaves this place.”

Dave “Unk” Demme did the honors. I pulled very straightforward audio from his work on the steel truck rail to make this Grinding Steel Tone.

Here’s the other Dave–Dave Bassett. He ran the machine called the Iron Worker, which, as Matt told me, “takes a lot of tonnage to punch through stainless steel.” And it makes a very loud “bang” sound that made me jump in the air when I heard it the first time. This ringtone audio consists of the ‘whir’ of the machine once it’s powered up, the punch and a little clank.

It was the loudest, scariest, most powerful sound I recorded within the shop. It reminded me of the industrial music my college friend Sean used to listen to back in the mid-to later 80s.  For that reason, I was inspired to make this Iron Worker Industrial Tone–the sounds are mixed from the range of audio content I recorded from Dave working the machine. I also made a very short (but shouldn’t be described as sweet) Iron Worker Punch (Message) Alert for the non-faint of heart who want a powerful text or picture message alert–it’s a simple chronological excerpt from the type of work Dave did with that machine.

Last of all, I edited a clang-ey Fixin’ to Move Steel Tone from audio I recorded of the guys (starting from far left–Matt and Brandon Zottola with Dave Demme),  moving steel beams across the shop floor.

You’ll hear a lot of clanking sounds. That’s Brandon Zottola throwing the chains around (for the most part) to use the crane to move steel through part of the fabrication shop space.

Thanks to Matt Zattola (and the guys) for welcoming me to the shop to collect some awesome steel fab tones, and thanks also to Craig Parrish for showing me how the drill line works. Watching that machine operate was super fascinating, but the audio wasn’t distinct enough from the other sounds in the shop to cause me to want to make a ringtone out of it.

Thanks gentlemen of Zottola Steel Corporation! I’m pleased to have a whole new set of local industry heritage related work tones in the project.

Hola Tones from La Escuelita Arcoiris

This is Megan Rooney. She’s the founder and director of Pittsburgh’s La Escuelita Arcoiris–a Spanish Immersion preschool and kindergarten in Squirrel Hill. She wrote into Locally Toned this summer, asked if I had any Spanish tones in the project, and said she’d love to have her students help make an Hola ringtone (or two) for the project. Being very interested in the diversification of the project in relation to language, I was interested. And as a part time/life-long learner of Spanish myself, I felt the project could use a tone submission from locals learning a new language.

Megan asked permission from all the parents of the children attending the school, and then asked me to come to La Escuelita Arcoiris during afternoon circle time. After getting my equipment ready, I sat down in the middle of the circle to work on setting audio levels (to ensure that I’d capture a good recording of the children singing). Some of the little ones seemed a bit shy around me (a stranger directing strange objects, the microphone and recorder, at them), so I asked Megan if I could introduce myself (and my equipment) to the students. “Hola, mi nombre es Teresa! This is my microphone,” I said. “The microphone is kind of like an ear. What do ears do?”

“Hear!” a bold little girl explained.

“That’s exactly right. Ears hear and so do microphones. So if you want my microphone to hear you sing, you can come close to the microphone and sing,” I said, showing them exactly how close they could get. Some students eagerly moved forward.

The audio content of La Escuelita Arcoiris tones are charming to me because they’re so candid–you can rehearse as much as you like with preschoolers and kindergartners, but whatever happens, happens. What you get is what you get (bumps and all).

Here’s the first (and shorter) tone from our session–the Hola Escuelita (Hello, Little School!) Tone.

And this is the Hola Amiguitos (Hello, Little Friends!) Tone–slightly longer than most tones in the project (at 33 seconds). I’d describe it as hyper-preschool/kindergarten realistic and “of the [cold] season”–listen carefully and you’ll hear a little sniffle. You’ll definately hear the cough in the second part of the tone.

Thanks to the Arcoiris staff, families and students for helping to contribute two very sweet tones to the project!