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Craig Smith, has digitized and shared a 27GB collection of vintage sound effects. The sounds form three collections. They consist of high-quality, first generation copies of original nitrate optical sound effects from the 1930s & '40s created for Hollywood studios. They were collected by a prominent sound editor who worked in the industry for 44 years. The fragile optical elements were donated to USC, and transferred to tape by USC Cinema students in the early 1970s. There are three collections: The Gold and Red Libraries (Gold effects start with "G", Red with "R") consist of high-quality, first generation copies of original nitrate optical sound effects from the 1930s & '40s created for Hollywood studios. They were collected by a prominent sound editor who worked in the industry for 44 years. The fragile optical elements were donated to USC, and transferred to tape by USC Cinema students in the early 1970s. The Sunset Editorial (SSE) Library was also donated to USC around 1990. It includes classic effects from the 1930s into the '80s. These effects are from 35mm magnetic film. They were often several generations removed from the originals, and not as clean, so some careful restoration was done to make them more useful. SSE effects start with "S" About Craig Smith: "I have been recording, editing, & mixing sound since 1964, and teaching sound design and technology at California Institute of the Arts since 1986. In my spare time, I experiment with implied narrative and accidental sound design -- putting together sounds & images that have nothing to do with each other to create unexpected stories."

"Visualizing Sound - Representations of Sound in Contemporary Creation stems directly from the LEV (Laboratorio de electrónica visual - Visual Electronics Lab) Festival. Launched at LABoral in 2007, the festival focuses on the convergence of electronic sound creation and visual arts. Visualizar el sonido [Visualizing Sound] brings the same line of enquiry into the white walls of the art center. The result is an exhibition where sound and image perfectly balance each other. Some works give a graphic, architectural and physical presence to sound, others reveal the sound produced by physical objects we'd otherwise regard as perfectly mute."

"What do you think we are not hearing? Can listening encourage us to challenge our assumptions, and change our behaviour and decision-making processes concerning our relations to non-human species? Can human opinions on invertebrates be shifted through listening? I have been developing a process for constructing synthesized "built" soundscapes of hidden sounds. Built Hidden Soundscape: Pipeline Road, Gamboa is a preliminary result from this research. I made the field recordings for this built soundscape while at the Digital Naturalism conference in Gamboa, Panama in August 2019. The video shows a scrolling image of a spectrogram. A spectrogram is a bioacoustic tool that shows how sounds sit together in a soundscape. The Y axis represents frequency (Hz) and the X axis represents time. This spectrogram, however, focuses on 'hidden sounds' - sounds that cannot be heard by humans without the use of technology; sounds that are easily heard by human ears are excluded from this synthesized, artificial rendering of a soundscape. The sound work consists of field recordings from Pipeline Road in Gamboa, bookended by the dynamic dawn and dusk soundscapes of Pipeline Road. This built soundscape includes ultrasonic sounds (above the range of human hearing, played back at lower frequency), substrate-borne vibrations, and otherwise very quiet sounds. "

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.

"ELECTROCHROMA is a 58ʼ30" audiovisual work that emerged from the manipulation of light to generate imagery as well as using a combination of extended techniques applied to sonic-material sources, including translation of image to sound to create the 5.1 surround audio composition. The work utilizes various analog and digital procedures and a variety of software processes to manipulate the moving image and sound. The workʼs imagery ranges from dark to light monochromatic spheres, shifting dynamics and intensity, including flickering and pulsating patterns, retinal impact, and sensory overloads. The sound composition focuses on timbre, low ends, modulated frequencies, textures, static noises, and electronic sounds moving through space. Other sonic layers were created through the use of electromagnetism, custom electronic sounds, and voices scored for the work and performed in a recording studio by artist Marylea Martha Quintana."

"Image to Audio, Spectrogram Player This app allows you to convert an image to audio file, and Decode, Play a audio file via spectrogram. You can make a sound image that is viewable on a spectrogram. With this app you can convert your images to audio and secretly send them to others. In order to convert an image, you just need to select an image from your computer, Google Drive, Webcam, and Clipboard. This app provides a standard spectrogram audio player. You can also play multiple audio/video file (mp3, m4a, mp4...) with a spectrogram. Supported formats: jpg, jpeg, png, gif, bmp, webp, mp3, m4a, ogg, mp4, webm... A spectrogram is a visual representation of the spectrum of frequencies of sound or other signal as they vary with time. Spectrograms are sometimes called sonographs, voiceprints, or voicegrams."

"If you were to choose to watch live video composer and performer Ana Carvalho's work silent, your brain would be easily guided into a synesthetic experience, assigning sounds to each rhythmic change in color, pace, frame. Her images oscillate…they dance, they breathe. As you experience this, there might be a sense that you have lost your ability to hear the outside world, as these images are clearly attached to, woven with, a part of sound."

"Can you imagine sound travels in the same way as light does? A research team at City University of Hong Kong (CityU) discovered a new type of sound wave: the airborne sound wave vibrates transversely and carries both spin and orbital angular momentum like light does. The findings shattered scientists' previous beliefs about the sound wave, opening an avenue to the development of novel applications in acoustic communications, acoustic sensing, and imaging."

""Sound maps contain sound records associated with specific geographical points. They are indicated on the map by visible markers through which you have access to playback controls for sound recordings, often they are accompanied by content in the form of texts and images. They tend to be collective and collaborative projects, possibly because they represent territories and regions that are home to communities that are frequently constituted in terms of observation. These often become fundamental factors regarding conceptualizations and content that the maps incorporate, which is why their participation becomes important, as well as for the production of audible and informative content that the map includes.""

"The design, for a house on a generic suburban lot, mixes sound on two levels. First, "sonic windows," embedded with microphones and tiny cameras, capture images and sounds from outside the house and broadcast them inside. Second, the house encourages family members to mix, layer, and juxtapose pre-recorded sounds with those collected from outside. Think bluebirds chirping along with Beyonce, or the postman slamming the mailbox shut at a climactic moment in a Beethoven symphony."

"For Landscape / Soundscape at the University of Pennsylvania's Arthur Ross Gallery, 10 sound artists were commissioned to create soundscapes responding to ten landscape photographs in the university's art collection. "I spent a lot of time just meditating on the photographic images, and I began yearning to hear some sort of sonic interpretation of the imagery," co-curator Heather Gibson Moqtaderi, who is associate curator and collections manager at Penn's University Art Collection, told Hyperallergic. "I felt that a balanced experience between sight and sound would most effectively convey this idea.""

"Interface: Echolocation Headphones. 10/12 Echolocation Headphones is a project that studies new applications for parametric sound technologies. This study emphasizes on augmentation of the auditory sense by enhancing our current ability of processing omnidirectional sound by providing a focal point to audition, similar to a visual focal point. Currently, human echolocation is being explored by the blind who have reached an increased understanding of sound and spatial relationships. In other species echolocation is facilitated by different evolutionary traits that differ from the current human senses. These headphones provide the opportunity for focal audition similar to a focal point in vision, depicting a more detailed spatial image of the parameters of the space surrounding the subject. "

"Mariska de Groot is a Dutch interdisciplinary artist who has been making and performing comprehensive analog light-to-sound instruments and installations for the last few years. Just like Dewi de Vree, who we've featured before on this blog, she is a part of iii, an artist-run platform supporting radical interdisciplinary practices engaging with image, sound and the body in the Hague."

""Sound design is the main contributing factor to the mood and atmosphere of any film," Charlie Battin wrote in a 2015 piece for the BFI Film Academy. "The visuals are what the viewer tends to mostly focus on and the sound subconsciously alters how the visuals are perceived.""

"We use diffusion models to generate spectrograms that look like images but can also be played as sound."

"Soundwalk Editions features artists and composers who use environmental field recordings as a point of departure in their work. By recording sounds outside of the conventional studio you are in the act field recording, audibly engaged with ears that gradually refine a sonic experience, like the eye looking through a camera lens. Field recording is often synonymous with phonography, in which sound takes the place of image in documenting a location, physical act, or a natural occurrence. Drawing attention to the quality and experiential nature that can exist in the soundscapes of our environment, these works allow the viewer to have an intimate experience with the various compositional approaches practiced by each individual artist. Through listening to these recordings we have the opportunity to become aware of the various dialects that can exist in the language of field recording compositions."

"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."

"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. "

"An installation at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden ponders the sounds made by plants. Visitors to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden can hear a version of the songs these corn plants have to sing. Credit Marcos Brindicci/Reuters Image"

"today there are various sophisticated methods to locate sound (acoustic camera, methods of acoustic holography, microphone arrays), but known visualizations by spectrograms still strongly remind of thermographic images. acoustic shapes, unlike thermographic ones, differ from the contour of the measured object. image overlays make it even more difficult to read and compare the results."