Johann Diedrick

2022 FIC Fellow

Johann Diedrick

Johann Diedrick is an artist, engineer, and musician that makes installations, performances, and sculptures for encountering the world through our ears. He surfaces vibratory histories of past interactions inscribed in material and embedded in space, peeling back sonic layers to reveal hidden memories and untold stories. He shares his tools and techniques through listening tours, workshops, and open-source hardware/software. He is the founder of A Quiet Life, a sonic engineering and research studio that designs and builds audio-related software and hardware products for revealing new sonic possibilities off the grid. He is the Director of Engineering at Somewhere Good, a 2022 Future Imagination Collaboratory Fellow at the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU, a 2021 Mozilla Creative Media Award recipient, a 2020 Pioneer Works Technology resident, a member of NEW INC, and an adjunct professor at NYU’s ITP program. His work has been featured in Wire Magazine, Musicworks Magazine, and presented internationally at MoMA PS1, Ars Electronica, Somerset House, and multiple NIME conferences, among others.

 

Projects

Dark Matters

Dark Matters exposes the absence of Black speech in the datasets used to train voice interface systems in consumer artificial intelligence products such as Alexa and Siri. Utilizing 3D modeling, sound, and storytelling, the project challenges our communities to grapple with racism and inequity through speech and the spoken word, and how AI systems underserve Black communities.
 
Harvester
 
The Harvester is an open-source, hand-held, portable sampler and synthesizer that lets you make music with everyday sounds. With the instrument, you are able to “collect” sounds around you (your voice, another musical instrument, environmental noises etc.). The instrument provides an interface that lets you play back the sampled sound based around a musical, pentatonic scale. This allows for a wildly expressive sonic palette that has been used for musical performance and sound art installations.
 
Glass Salt
 
Glass Salt is an experimental music and sound duo consisting of singer, producer and improviser Caylie Staples and artist, engineer, and musician Johann Diedrick. Staples and Diedrick improvise with voice, electronics, custom software, homemade hardware and percussion. Based between Brooklyn and Toronto, Glass Salt creates with values of presence, tactility, transparency, friendship, collaboration, learning, skill-building and playfulness. Much of their music is created using the Harvester, a custom-built hand-held synthesizer and sampler that lets the duo make music from everyday sounds in response to their environment. They released their debut album Greetings on Whatever’s Clever Club in July 2020 and a follow-up album Mer on Cherche Encore in December 2020. Glass Salt recently completed an artistic residency at Artscape Gibralter Point, Toronto in Dec 2021. The premiere of their radiophonic piece Cove commissioned by Radiophrenia (Glasgow) will be broadcast on Radiophrenia in February 2022.
Poster that reads "This will lead the world to more sound and fury."

Dark Matters

Small computer board with speaker

Harvester

Two people standing along the shore

Glass Salt (Photo Credits: Hannah Fung @myth.and.memory)