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""stadt:klang - urban:sound" is an interdisciplinary art project at the threshold of architecture, music, video and performance art. It focuses on our existing interactions with various public spaces, and provokes a temporary shift in the perception of how we utilise them, particularly with relation to music creation, film production and peripheral related arts. "

"Climate change is existentially terrifying and also frustratingly abstract-a combination that makes it really hard for many people to connect with in a personal way, as one does with say, a work of art. Enter the Chicago-based duo Luftwerk-Petra Bachmaier and Sean Gallero-who have bridged that disconnect with their latest public art installation, White Wanderer, currently on view in Chicago's Riverside Plaza through October 1st. Bachmaier and Gallero are known for their luminous light-based installations in public spaces and architecture, and their latest effort is their first attempt to incorporate climate change messaging into their work. Outstream Video   00:00 00:00 "

"In Neerpelt, a small town in the very north of Belgium on the border with the Netherlands, there's the very unique Klankenbos (or Sound Forest). A public forest filled with sound art installations hidden between the trees, accessible to anyone for free any moment of the day. Something so unique, it's strange we've never written an article about it here on Everyday Listening. Time to make up for that."

In the decades following World War II, the musical score emerged as a unique and powerful medium for experimental art. A new movement of visual artists, composers, poets, and performers reimagined the score-traditionally defined as the written representation of a musical composition-as a tool for structuring experimentation in the nascent fields of performance art, conceptualism, and intermedia. They drew inspiration from unconventional musical notations devised in the early to mid-1950s by the composers Earle Brown, John Cage, and Morton Feldman. The new movement's use of experimental scores spread during the 1960s through publications, festivals, concerts, classrooms, networked correspondence, exhibitions, happenings, and a renewed awareness of score-like antecedents in the charts, diagrams, sketches, and written instructions of earlier avant-gardes, from Dada and Surrealism to the Bauhaus. By the later years of the 1960s, diverse communities of artists, musicians, poets, and dancers had transformed the possibilities of the score into an ever-expanding universe of textual, symbolic, and graphic marks. They used experimental scores to stage a multitude of practices that dismantled and recast the traditional boundaries of artistic media.

"Manual for Acoustic Planning and Urban Sound Design (MAP) is a public artwork based on working for one year within the city council in the experimental role of Dublin City Acoustic Planner & Urban Sound Designer, negotiating the projects' agenda and workflow in response to how this concept is received internally within the council. This project emphasizes a dematerialized practice through which practical outputs (in the form of public sound installations) emerge as residual artifacts that are encountered as design prototypes executed within (or even by) the council itself. This approach opens new channels for the city - as an institution - to engender a sense of responsibility and possibility regarding this mode of working with sound in the urban context as an extension of existing planning and design processes."

"Talbot Rice Gallery and Edinburgh Art Festival unveiled a new sound installation by artist Emeka Ogboh (b. 1977, Nigeria) at Edinburgh's Burns Monument on 29 July 2021. The public artwork, co-commissioned by Talbot Rice Gallery and Edinburgh Art Festival, is a response to the ongoing theatre surrounding the UK's departure from the European Union."

"For over 30 years, artist/musician team, Bill and Mary Buchen, have designed public art installations and interactive sound sculptures for parks, schools, science centers, transit stations, children's museums and playgrounds around the world. Their artworks invite active play and group participation; whether tapping rhythms on percussion instruments inspired by global music cultures or investigating environmental phenomena."

The project set out to give a rich and rigorous account of human perception of and response to soundscapes. To do this it used overlapping methods from a wide range of disciplines, ranging from the quantitative (e.g. acoustics) to the qualitative (e.g. social science) to the creative (e.g. sound art). Qualitative fieldwork (soundwalks and focus groups) determined that people conceptualised a soundscape into three components: sound sources (e.g. a market), sound descriptors (e.g. rumbling) and soundscape descriptors (e.g. hubbub). Lab-based listening tests along with the fieldwork have revealed that two key dimensions of the emotional response to a soundscape are calmness and vibrancy. In the lab these factors explain nearly 80% of the variance in listener response. Interview responses from real soundscapes further indicate that vibrancy can be expressed in two sub-dimensions expressing variation over time and over sound mix. Physiological validation of the main dimensions is provided by images of changes in the brain during listening from fMRI scans and by changes in heart rate. Artistic work and the public responses to it illustrate the huge range of sounds and soundscapes considered positive. Tools for simulating soundscapes have been developed and seem to be effective for several purposes, including design and public engagement - that is, sound play. The project results will lead to new metrics and assessment methods for soundscapes, new ideas for design and user engagement and, perhaps, better policy on environmental noise.

"Living under the paving stones, consuming our refuse, and incubating our diseases, the city rat is a ubiquitous part of global, urban capitalism. The revulsion rats inspire actually speaks of our closeness to them-rattus norvegicus burrows through the supposed human / nature divide. And just as we continually negotiate our place in a dynamic city, so have rats developed elaborate social codes intertwined with urban architecture and geography. We are not usually privy to the vocal address of one rat to another, however, as they primarily speak above the (20khz) threshold of human hearing. For Urban Intonation, I recorded rats at multiple sites on the streets of NYC with an ultrasonic microphone. I then resampled and pitch-shifted the result into the range of the human voice and mixed it for playback over a human public address system, repositioning rat noise in public space as something that is recognizable, if not intelligible, as speech. "

"The Talking Statues project gives 35 public monuments in New York City a voice, from Balto the dog to George Washington in Union Square."

"Digital Sanctuaries, Manhattan is an urban soundwalk combining the original music of Electric Kulintang (Susie Ibarra and Roberto Rodriguez) with the visual art of Makoto Fujimura and interaction design by Shankari Murali. Built for both IOS and mobile web app, Digital Sanctuaries invites the public to alight on a virtual pilgrimage through the built environment of a cityscape, finding meditative spaces in unexpected places, marked by an ever-changing musical score. As the audience engages with the music in each place, they are encouraged to discover the hidden qualities of the world without while taking time to contemplate the world within."

Angela de Weijer, a Dutch sound artist creates a work for decommissioned emergency warning sirens.

This project explores how innovative art projects on public urban screens can combine with electronic social network systems on smaller screens to initiate an international dialogue on the problem of adaptation to climate change. The main theme of this trans-disciplinary research is on the environmental and cultural significance of water in three cities in the Asia- Pacific region: Melbourne, Shanghai and Tokyo

"Public artworks don't often include life-sized balloons- but that hasn't stopped UK artists Alison Ballard and Mike Blow from creating them. POD is an interactive sound installation that allows viewers to experience the physical life of sound waves through the skins of two, six-foot-tall inflatable spheres. The surfaces of POD pulsate in rhythm with a sound file that plays from deep within the sphere. Audience members are invited to drape their faces and bodies over these surface, free to enjoy POD's gentle massage. "

"My listening protocol is not a set of fixed instructions on how to listen. This protocol is a set of notes for listening, which I use as part of my practice-based research on sound, art, public space and postcolonial entangled histories. It both reflects past listening experiences and anticipates future listening experiences."

"A modern-day zen garden opened this past Friday, October 1st, at the Fort York Historic Site in Toronto, Canada. Contemporary artist Krista Kim brings her vision of wellness to the world via CONTINUUM: a meditative 20-minute generated animation aimed at improving mental health through active self-care participation. "

"No field of study based on sensory experience seems to be overburdened by terminology to the same extent as that dealing with sound and hearing. The visual sense, of course, has received as much attention as the auditory from physics, psychology, neurophysiology, and the visual arts, which have all contributed terminology and jargon alike, but a great deal of it seems to have entered the common vocabulary already, and at least the general notions involved are seldom foreign to the average citizen or student. Terms such as perspective, foreground, background, colour, spectrum, shadow, focus, image, reflection, transparent, translucent and the wealth of descriptive visual terms, not to mention common visual impairments and the complexity of visual language found in contemporary cinema and photography - all of these have found public familiarity in a way that it is hard to imagine their sonic counterparts ever matching. Almost every school child knows what white light is, and how it is composed, but would he know what white noise is, even though the likelihood of it having an adverse effect on him is far greater? The ability to perceive three-dimensional visual perspective when projected onto a two-dimensional surface, by no means a simple achievement given the lateness of its appearance in our civilization, is irrevocably ingrained in the child's perceptual habits at an early age, and yet the ability to distinguish acoustic parameters, or experience subtle nuances of timbre (supposing he knows what timbre, the sonic equivalent of colour, is) may never be among his perceptual skills."

"'The Underground Sound Project' is a public art installation in Prospect Park, Brooklyn. It can be experienced remotely online at theundergroundsoundproject.com The work explores and reveals the world of underground sound that can be heard under our feet. Did you know deep, resonant sound can be heard inside trees? Among the roots of plants, in shifting soils, in streambeds, rivers, oceans, and even in mud?"

"Of the various forms the nascent art of sound recording took in the late nineteenth century perhaps none was so aesthetically alluring as that invented by Margaret Watts Hughes. Rob Mullender-Ross explores the significance of the Welsh singer's ingenious set of images, which until recently were thought to be lost. "

"krewe coumbite is an archive and remix process conducted by muthi reed. reed gathers and assembles media through sharing, relationship, deconstruction, making, sampling and mixing. Central to their process is the observance of Black sound, rituals and feelings. krewe coumbite is a study in dynamic being-ness (finesse, shape, free form and movement, ontology, ritual, vernacular) that is Blackness. Borrowing from the Black love strategies cultivated by maroons, rastas, social aid and pleasure clubs, mutual aid societies, movement organizers, the Black Arts Movement, Harlem Renaissance, urban rebels/rebellions of the 1960s, Jamaican Sound System, freestyle and hip hop culture of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, krewe coumbite engages local presence and the non conditions of space through occupying publics, interior time, light and sound projections, convergence and soul culture."