After Dark: Sound

KANBAR FORUM

Floating
By Phoebe Tooke and Wayne Grim
6:00­-7:00 p.m.

Float high in the sky on the airship Eureka, America’s only commercial passenger airship, as it flies over the South Bay salt flats. Music for Floating (2013) was first created by digitally enhancing the prominent natural frequencies in recordings of the Eureka's engines and propellers. Using eight separate tracks, these recordings were manipulated to remove most of the original audio, leaving an auditory “ghost image” of the airship’s sound.

We encourage you to move around the room to explore the soundscape.

Insect Sounds
With Ralph Washington, Jr.
7:30 p.m.

No spring evening is complete without a symphony of chirps and trills from nocturnal insects. What is the difference between a chirp and a trill, and how do insects produce these different sounds? Come sit and enjoy the staccato of katydids, the pure tones of crickets, and many more fascinating sounds created by the insect world.

Talking to Sperm Whales
With James Nestor
8:30 p.m.

Explore what it’s like to dive face-to-face with sperm whales and get your bones (literally) rattled by sperm whales’ sonorous click communication.

Sperm whales are the world’s largest and loudest predators. They are also among the most intelligent, with brains six times the size of ours and in many ways more complex. Marine biologists believe they are using these oversized brains to communicate through encoded “clicks,” which possibly contain sonographic images. A small team of researchers is now studying the click communication of these animals up close with freediving, the ancient practice of using a single breath of air to dive hundreds of feet into the ocean. 

BERNARD AND BARBRO OSHER WEST GALLERY

MUSE Interactive Instrument Petting Zoo
With the Oakland Symphony
6:30-9:30 p.m.

Get to know trumpets and cellos at the Instrument Petting Zoo. Join Oakland Symphony staff to explore symphonic instruments such as the violin, bongos, flute, triangle, and clarinet, and play some music of your own.

Designer Ears
With the Field Trip Explainers
6:30-9:30 p.m.

Why do animals’ ears look different from yours? What would life be like if your ears were shaped differently? Make new ears for yourself and find out.

Audio Illusions
With Explorables
7:00-10:00 p.m.

Phantom Words
Listen to a sequence of sounds repeating over and over. Do you hear any words? Do they change? Explore the ways our brains attempt to make sense of ambiguous audio input. 

The Lips Don’t Lie
See a brief video of a person (allegedly) pronouncing a sequence of sounds. Then close your eyes and listen to the video again. How do the sounds change? 

Speaker Dissection
With the High School Explainers
6:30-9:30 p.m.

Tune in to surrounding sounds by experimenting with strings and vibrations, and use electromagnets to build a basic speaker. Learn how to listen with your bones, and explore the workings of the inner ear.

Music Exhibits
6:00-10:00 p.m.

SOUTH GALLERY

Pink Trombone
By Neil Thapen
6:00-10:00 p.m.

Akin to our Vocal Vowels exhibit, Pink Trombone is an interactive speech synthesizer created by Neil Thapen, a researcher at the Institute of Mathematics of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic.

Thapen’s app allows users to change the shape of digital lips, tongue, and oral and nasal cavities in order to produce different sounds at different pitches.

Sound Sculptures
With Sudhu Tewari
6:30-9:30 p.m.

YEMRS (Yasmin Electro Mechanical Sequencer) is a rhythm sequencer built from the chassis of an Otari MX55 professional reel-to-reel tape recorder. In YEMRS, a simple analog electronic brain generates rhythmic sequences that activate four solenoids amplified by a bevy of contact microphones. Use a homemade mixer to draw forth different sonic aspects of its mechanical movements.

Green Apples is a sound sculpture/musical instrument designed to inspire free play and inter-audience-action. An internal contact microphone amplifies the sounds of small springs covering the overturned colander. In addition to amplifying sound, visual representations of the sounds are shown by a circular volume unit (VU) meter in the center of the colander and a modified Apple computer monitor. Green Apples’ circular form invites us to interact with both it and each other, playing with the artwork’s sonic possibilities and audiovisual relationships. 

BECHTEL CENTRAL GALLERY

Failures, Prototypes, and Works in Progress
With Sung Kim
6:30, 7:30, and 8:30 p.m.

“My work as an instrument builder was born out of the necessity to create a voice for myself to articulate and to compose. My instruments are all works in progress and by treating them as such, I allow myself to constantly develop and build in an organic manner. Many of these pieces begin as individual components built as I develop solutions dealing with mechanics, playing techniques, and resonance. These components are then combined, modified, or discarded as needed.” 

Meet with improvisor, sculptor, and musical instrument builder Sung Kim to explore the artistic process behind his beautifully handcrafted creations.

BASE Camp
With Bay Area Sound Ecology
6:30-9:30 p.m.

Bend your ears with Ambisonics, a technology used for capturing three-dimensional soundscapes that, at playback, can give you any desired perspective. Orient a remote microphone located across the gallery to experience audio “telepresence” and learn about BASE projects exploring new ways to mash up location, mobile computing, and sound.

Sound Exhibits
6:00-10:00 p.m.

PHYLLIS C. WATTIS WEBCAST STUDIO

Sound Explained
With Ron Hipschman
7:00 p.m.

What is sound? How high a pitch can you hear? Can you measure the speed of sound with a yardstick? Can two sounds add up to no sound? Delve into these questions and more in this resonant presentation.

Social Meaning: Pronouncing “s” in Northern California
With Jeremy Calder
8:00 p.m.

Follow the ways we use phonetic (spoken) sounds to convey social information. We know that different people have different "accents"; that is, people pronounce things differently from one another. What do these pronunciation differences say about someone’s personality, identity, or the groups they identify with? See how people pronounce the /s/ sound (for example, the first sound in "sat") in various communities across Northern California, from valley girls to country boys to drag queens.

EAST GALLERY

Sounds Like a Shatteringly Good Time
With Zeke Kossover
7:00, 8:00, and 9:00 p.m.

When people say that a speaker’s comments resonate with them, it means that they have a shared ideas. That connection is usually a good thing. When glass resonates with a speaker, they share a common frequency, and that might tear the glass apart. Come see the downside of a good connection.

“Hello? Mosquito? Mosquito, Who?” Citizen-Based Mosquito Monitoring
With Abuzz 
7:00, 8:00, and 9:00 p.m. Presentations
6:30-9:30 p.m. Activities

Let scientists from Stanford’s Abuzz project put a bug in your ear about using mobile phones to track mosquitoes by their distinctive sounds, and make a mosquito capture chamber from a plastic bottle.

Worldwide over three billion people are at risk of contracting mosquito-borne infectious diseases, such as malaria, dengue, and Zika. To accurately monitor the transmission dynamics involving mosquitoes and humans, Abuzz uses mobile phones to crowdsource acoustic surveillance of the insects, yielding mosquito data on a global scale.

Nature Field Recordings
With the Nature Sounds Society
6:30-9:30 p.m.
East Gallery Corridor

Listen to natural sounds recorded by members of the Nature Sounds Society, and experiment with a binaural rig that records sounds with two separate microphones and then transmits the recordings through separate channels, creating the impression of hearing the sounds in their original environment.  

FISHER BAY OBSERVATORY GALLERY

String Quartet
With Members of the San Francisco Symphony 
7:00 p.m.

Join members of the San Francisco Symphony for a performance of Samuel Barber’s String Quartet and other exciting works. Featuring Yun Chu, violin; Amy Hiraga, violin; Nancy Ellis, viola; and Peter Wyrick, cello.

Sound Sculpting
With Doug Hollis 
8:00 p.m.

Exploratorium Artist-in-Residence Doug Hollis focuses on two of his most iconic sound exhibits, Listening Vessels and Aeolian Harp.

Listening Vessels, two large, parabolic sound reflectors set 50 feet apart from each other, is a longtime Exploratorium favorite. Sitting in one dish, you can clearly hear someone in the other dish, in spite of ambient museum din.

First built for the Exploratorium in 1976, the towering Aeolian Harp’s seven stretched strings are strummed by the wind, amplified at one end by large metal dishes. After the talk, take a walk down to this 27-foot-tall harp to hear its eerie orchestral chords for yourself.

NORTH GALLERY

Sound On Fire!
With Michael Kearney
6:30-9:30 p.m.

Write your music in fire with a Ruben’s tube, an early analogue to the oscilloscope first described in 1905 by Heinrich Rubens and Otto Krigar-Menzel. Comprised of a sealed pipe perforated with dozens of holes and filled with inflammable gas, the tube is attached to a speaker at one end. When the gas is lit, flames erupt from the holes. When the speaker is on, the flames arrange themselves into an alluring display of standing sound waves.

THROUGHOUT MUSEUM

Sounding Off!
With Mission Delirium
9:15-10:00 p.m.
(Moving from West to Central to North Galleries)

A love letter to your feet from the dance floor, the 15-piece Mission Delirium (MD) is an invitation to revel in pounding drums and facemelting brass. They make the music that makes you want to shake it so let your hair down, get delirious, and move. And if it moves you, MD plays it: Bollywood, Balkan, Brazilian, Ethiopian, Tango, Afro-Pop, Middle Eastern, Salsa, and more all served with a unique twist of San Francisco.