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"Dr. William W.H. 'Bill' Gunn (1913-1984) was a field recordist, conservationist and early populariser of nature sounds, recording landscapes in the Galapagos Islands, East Africa, Sri Lanka and locations across Canada including its Far North. A key technique in his practice and teaching was sound microscopy-slowing down the playback of his recordings to reveal details unable to be perceived at full speed. This presentation considers Gunn's slowing in relation to a range of contemporaneous practices of slowing (in speech therapy, music composition, etc.) as well as the context of his field and the 'slow violence' of ecological devastation. As listeners, we meditate on the wonder elicited from Gunn's human audience but also the absences, extractions and exclusions entwined with Gunn's exploration of musical microcosms."

"As visitors strolled through a recent display of Madame de Pompadour's coffee grinder, an 1840s Sèvres porcelain coffee set, tea canisters, sugar bowls and other European decorative arts at the Detroit Institute of Arts, the scent of roasted coffee beans arose in one room. Bach's "Coffee" Cantata played in the background. Not far away, cocoa pods were not only on display but also meant to be touched. In the final gallery, a tasting station offered two kinds of liquid chocolate, one adapted from an Aztec recipe and the other from an 18th-century French formula. Museums usually aim to offer a feast for the eyes, but this Detroit museum had much more in mind for "Bitter|Sweet: Coffee, Tea & Chocolate," which just closed at the institute. Officials, who used art objects to illustrate how the introduction of those beverages to Europe in the 16th century from Africa, Asia and the Americas changed social and consumption patterns, wanted the exhibition to be a banquet for all five senses."

"Bodyscape is inspired by the body of a dancer as sonic source. The information is taken via biosensors and microphones, which record movements and events generated by the body. In this ecosystem, the dancer produces sounds, mainly inaudible, which are then amplified and send back to the performance space, where the dancer interact with them as biofeedback. The site-specificity of the work relates to the spatial considerations and resonances. Field recordings were collected at the border of Botswana and South Africa. L'épidemie virale en Afrique du Sud, a text from the Swiss writer Friedrich Dürrenmatt, informed the journey. The text describes a virus transforming white persons into black persons. A text about privileges."

"Fuzzy Logic is a speculative project that responds to noise pollution with music composition. Traffic noise is now the inorganic combination of individually designed sounds. A recent European law states that new models of electric and hybrid vehicles will have to make a noise by 2019: a great design opportunity! Exploiting the potential of current shifts towards electric transport, the project presents an alternative: noise itself becomes the object of design, and traffic is turned into a musical experience. Future e-cars are approached as speakers on wheels and rather than design the sound of single vehicles, we can compose the sound of traffic as a whole. Indian traffic epitomizes the future of noise, in increasingly overpopulated urban ares across Asia and Africa. The focus is on the iconic indian tuktuk. Each one plays an instrument as part of a system designed to be randomly harmonic and make musical sense as a whole - regardless individual tuktuks driving patterns. Traffic becomes a jam session, a kind of moving orchestra."

'Profile,' a single-channel self-portrait by Candice Breitz (born 1972, Johannesburg, South Africa) reflects on Breitz's nomination as one of two artists chosen for the South African Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale. 'Profile' fuses self-portraiture with brand promotion, biography with racial profiling, artist statement with political campaign. It interrogates the workings of representation, addressing the complex relationship between the identity of an artist and the specificity of their practice. Rather than appearing before the camera herself, Breitz collaborates with ten prominent South African artists who could equally have been selected to represent the country

"Bells ring, but it's not your grandmother calling you to dinner from the backyard. Bells ring and people shout, but it's not in a train station. Bells ring, people shout and a motorcycle whizzes by. Cars honk. "Dolla dolla dolla," the hawkers call. Despite standing in an underground gallery at the Smithsonian's National Museum of African Art in Washington, D.C., visitors are instantly transported to the Balogun Market in Lagos, Nigeria, through Emeka Ogboh's sound art installation, "Market Symphony." Open through Sept. 24, this is the museum's first sound-art installation, thanks to curator Karen Milbourne, who has a special interest in sound art. Ogboh appeals directly to only one of the five senses-hearing-to re-create the atmosphere of an open-air market. Upending the traditional museum visitor experience presents several opportunities."

"An Alternative Genealogy of Musique Concrète "