City Frequencies

There are some things arriving by post at the studio awaiting the new build for Random Acts Of Elevator Music. A few important events have taken place recently which has bought the timeline of this project forward to include this years Melbourne Fringe and an interstate tour. Yes, we may be appearing in elevators near you one day.

This is the battery pack for Random Acts of Elevator Music which is carried at the bottom of a suitcase. Two buses provide 24 volts and 12 volts to power all the equipment that we take onboard elevators. Much like this website all of our music machines are going through a redesign or upgrade. The website redesign seems to be looking nice and fresh so we can now put our energies towards the plans for this year, more on that later.

One of the features of the Random Acts of Elevator Music project is its use of small battery powered sound machines, be they synthesizers, effects pedals to even an old laptop computer. All these devices must be portable in that they are carried in either a briefcase or a sales executives suitcase and the power supply for them is also carried in one of the cases. We are currently looking at adding to our kit list of sound machines so that we can add new elements into the music we play in elevators.

Pictured above is part of the Random Acts of Elevator Music mobile sound system. Containing the amplifier, mixer, speakers and power bus unit this is known imaginatively as the Black Box. Its been in storage for a while but now its time to power it up and plan for any upgrades that we may need sometime soon. The broken laptop pictured is there to show where the real one goes, when its lid is opened it covers most of the control panel, so this may need redesigning.

Yes its true that at the moment the website has a generic design layout. This is due to upgrading the software that runs this site and not spending anytime making it look presentable. A few more tweaks and posts regarding the findings from the Fringe Festival performances will follow shortly and then perhaps some information about the plans for this year.

So, we’ve been compiling a few statistics on the numbers of people that happened upon the elevators we played in during the Fringe Festival. For one of the better elevators documented (elevator 33) we found that over the 40 minutes playing time we had 96 people crammed into our elevator, not all at once obviously.

Given that we had 16 elevators where we played our full set of 40 minutes and didn’t feel the need to abandon due to low audience numbers, we can use some “interesting” mathematics to reach the conclusion that we played to over 1536 people, not including those that we reached before evictions, etc.

The audience can be be considered a captured one in that the “auditoriums” were only several cubic metres in size and more often than not we had people watching us and not the floor numbers counting up or down as we journeyed. As such we also experienced more interaction with our audience when they inevitably asked us who we are, what are we doing and why are we doing it. Comments about the music styles and the change to the elevator environment our presence made regularly followed that exchange of formal pleasantries.

We also discovered the existence of what we called the “jobsworth”, whom became apparent when an eviction by a security guard or building management representative took place with aforementioned jobsworth, or snitch, grass, snout, dobber, etc, standing next to said guard and pointing to us before skulking away to its lair… I mean office. Others weren’t so keen to point us out and merely rang the building supervisors to inform them of our “intrusion” and that they should do something about it. This we found out by the guard telling us that they had received a phone call and had to do something about it, usually with a “what the…” bemused look on their face. A few guards, however, were a bit more over zealous with their enthusiasm for eviction possibly due to the relative boredom of the average work day and the moral ambiguity that each would struggle with when faced with our performance.

Several of the audience members had heard of us prior to our performances through advertising in print and radio arranged by the Fringe Festival and us. This website also served to allow people to follow our progress across this great city of ours because each step was documented by a photo and a few sentences that were uploaded here “live from the field”, as we say in journalism, using a mobile phone that could send email and a php parser script.

Here is the table of our overall responses from each elevator measured in Full Set, Half Set and Evicted, where Full Set means playing the full 40+ minutes set, Half Set means we abandoned the elevator through low audience numbers (ie few audience for 20 minutes and the elevator going to “park”) and Evicted which means we got asked by someone (in authority or not) to leave, usually after playing for at least ten minutes.

Day || No. || Response
1 || 1 || Evicted
1 || 2 || Full Set
1 || 3 || Full Set
1 || 4 || Evicted
———————
2 || 5 || Full Set
2 || 6 || Full Set
2 || 7 || Full Set
———————
3 || 8 || Half Set
3 || 9 || Half Set
3 || 10 || Full Set
———————
4 || 11 || Evicted
4 || 12 || Full Set
4 || 13 || Evicted
4 || 14 || Evicted
———————
5 || 15 || Evicted
5 || 16 || Full Set
=============
6 || 17 || Full Set
6 || 18 || Full Set
6 || 19 || Full Set
———————
7 || 20 || Evicted
7 || 21 || Evicted
7 || 22 || Evicted
———————
8 || 23 || Half Set
8 || 24 || Full Set
8 || 25 || Evicted
———————
9 || 26 || Evicted
9 || 27 || Evicted
9 || 28 || Evicted
9 || 29 || Full Set
9 || 30 || Full Set
———————-
10 || 31 || Evicted
10 || 32 || Full Set
10 || 33 || Full Set
10 || 34 || Half Set
10 || 35 || Evicted
==============
==============

Totals :
Full Set : 16
Half Set : 4
Evicted : 15

Well it’s the start of the sort through of our experiences during the 10 days of Fringe Festival performances. Below is a list of the recipients of the Elevator of the Day award in date order. You might notice that there isn’t a recipient from the very first day of performance, so we might add one in later.

Day 10 – Elevator 31
Day 9 – Elevator 30
Day 8 – Elevator 24
Day 7 – Elevator 22
Day 6 – Elevator 19
Day 5 – Elevator 15
Day 4 – Elevator 12
Day 3 – Elevator 9
Day 2 – Elevator 5
Day 1 – _ _ _ _ _

Its that time where we dust off the gear and update the website because we have plans for the next month or so. Yes, real plans.

Spent a bit of time mangling the code of the site today but it wasn’t all CSS hairpulling. Now there are some updates to the Cafe Voyeur project page that detail some of the process and results from that project during 2004. Yes, not really an update, more a case of posting old data into the new layout. And there are more updates to come including a few more tweaks of the site design.