Group items tagged

"Listening Desk is an interactive sound sculpture that invites people to access and create soundscapes with sound archives. It is installed at 10 locations around the UK: Archives+ in Manchester Central Library; Cumbria Archives in Carlisle Archive Center; Discovery Museum, Newcastle upon Tyne; Norfolk Record Office; The British Library outside the King's Library; The National Library of Scotland at Kelvin Hall, Glasgow;  Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru/The National Library of Wales; The Wellbeing Collection at University of Sussex Library; Ulster Transport Museum, Cultra, County Down, Ireland; and University of Leicester in Sir Bob Burgess Building."

"In 1948, Moses Asch founded Folkways Records with a self-proclaimed mandate to record the sounds of the entire world. From the Sounds of North American Frogs to Speech After the Removal of the Larynx, Folkways documented the audible nooks and crannies of existence on hundreds of LPs produced by field recordists, scientists, and experimentalists probing the margins of the human soundscape. Seventy-five years later, electronic music duo Matmos have diced, looped, stretched, and recontextualized these recordings on their new album Return to Archive, which was assembled entirely from the so-called non-musical sounds released on Folkways. On just the album's first track, dolphins, beetles, telephones, humans stretching the limits of their vocal cords, a shortwave radio, and metal balers co-mingle in a fantasia of sound both everyday and extraordinary. Each track on Return to Archive morphs its source material into something completely unexpected, honoring and expanding on Folkways' legacy of sonic exploration. Featuring Evicshen and Aaron Dilloway."

"The following is writing from an earlier time in my recent research project, Wayback Sound Machine: Sound through time, space, and place. It felt an appropriate beginning to share here as the first part of the ongoing series, "Wayback Sound Machine- a constellation of sounding time", that will be exploring various works and writings approaching the concept of sound back through time. I will be publishing the call for work shortly, and hope to hear from some of you Sonic Field readers. "

"Discrete Archive was created for music, writing and artefacts that explore quietness. This can mean many things, we like music that allows for space, presents sonority as object and is concerned with the materiality of sound, sound as thing. We occupy a world of noise, discerning meaning in this sea of noise is increasingly difficult.  We invite you to contemplate the world around you through stillness and quiet that sound can provide a focus for. "

"The UCSB Library invites you to discover and listen to its online archive of cylinder recordings; donate to help the collection grow; and learn about how these sounds and songs create an audio history of American culture."

"Conserve the sound« is an online museum for vanishing and endangered sounds. The sound of a dial telephone, a walkman, a analog typewriter, a pay phone, a 56k modem, a nuclear power plant or even a cell phone keypad are partially already gone or are about to disappear from our daily life. Accompanying the archive people are interviewed and give an insight in to the world of disappearing sounds."

Bureau gallery's archive devoted to sound works by artists.

"M.A.P // A.M.P Music Library aims to create a repository of activist music, which will serve as an archive to amplify the reach of music as an expression and a tool of social and political activism. This library is an effort to bring together such voices from the region that may have gone unheard. In the process, we hope to create a rich and diverse range of activist music that will span all genres and generations of music and poetry."

"Why can't you see in outer space and why can't you hear in a rainforest? A conversation, with sound illustrations, with the composer and sound artist Francisco López in advance of his performance at EMPAC in Troy, New York on April 28, 29, 30, 2011. Touching on his past and future creations and experiments including a 2001 work for the now inaccessible Brooklyn Bridge Anchorage interior and even a recording of our Clocktower clockworks. Plus a a profile of his remarkable new project, SONM (Sound Archive of Experimental Music and Sound Art), in Murcia, Spain."

""the role of smells in our perception of and engagement with the past has not been systematically explored." Their findings, presented under the title "Smell of heritage: a framework for the identification, analysis and archival of historic odours," are based on sampling volatile organic compounds (VOCs), which compose most odors, at sites including the library of St. Paul's Cathedral in London. They additionally surveyed people about their olfactory perceptions of historical books."

"Call Back Carousel is an audio time-travelogue, a slideshow of the mind's eye - projecting Kodachrome memories directly into the listeners' mind by means of sound alone. It is a way of travelling without ever having to leave the home. A vicarious vacation for the imagination. Pure audio escapism. Each episode is based on a found tape of a pre-recorded slideshow commentary. Most of these tapes were made by amateur tape recording enthusiasts and hobbyist photographers of the 60s and 70s. Their recorded commentaries would at one time have been used in conjunction with a sequence of 35mm slides but only the taped voices now remain. The recordings themselves come from my own archive of found reel-to-reel tapes that I have collected over the past twenty years."

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."

Here's an impressible batch of scanned articles about sound art available for download.

"The result was "Sound Wounds," performed at the Asian Art Museum late August, in which Kahraman invoked the war through sound and archival imagery. While conducting research for the project, she found a recording of the air raid siren. Although it made the hairs on the back of her neck stand up, she listened to it over and over in her studio so that she could access her memories."

"The 10-second recording of a singer crooning the folk song "Au Clair de la Lune" was discovered earlier this month in an archive in Paris by a group of American audio historians. It was made, the researchers say, on April 9, 1860, on a phonautograph, a machine designed to record sounds visually, not to play them back. But the phonautograph recording, or phonautogram, was made playable — converted from squiggles on paper to sound — by scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif."

"Reporter Larry Massett tells us about a man who offers a tongue-in-cheek Language Removal Service. It advertises a "laboratory that is the only one of its kind in the world - facilities include our state-of-the-art vocal observation chamber and a special storage facility for our archives, including the world-famous Raymond Chronic Static Language library." What you get after the language is gone are breaths, sighs and mouth sounds . The service is a joke - but when applied to famous voices, it's still possible to determine who you're listening to."

"Center for Visual Music is a nonprofit film archive dedicated to visual music, experimental animation and avant-garde media. CVM is commited to preservation, curation, education, scholarship, and dissemination of the film, performances and other media of this tradition, together with related historical documentation and artwork."

"SonicMemorial.org is an open archive and an online audio installation of the history of The World Trade Center. We are continuing to collect stories, ambient sounds, voicemails, and archival recordings to tell the rich history of the twin towers, the neighborhood and the events of 9/11."

video documentation of past events. Since its inception in 1994, the bi-annual Sonic Acts festival has questioned, examined, assembled and exhibited contemporary and historical developments at the cutting edge of art, technology, music and science. for the 2012 festival go to http://2012.sonicacts.com

"Open Space 2014" is an exhibition introducing works of media art and other forms of artistic expression born out of today's media environments, to a broad audience. Literally a beginner's guide to media art, the exhibition features leading works from the realm of media art, artworks incorporating cutting-edge technologies, works with a critical standpoint, and in addition, projects that are currently in progress at various research institutions. All of them are being displayed along with explanatory notes designed to help the visitor gain a better understanding, according to our aim to present media art in a fun and easily accessible way. Also on the schedule during the exhibition period are a number of related programs including talk sessions, lectures, symposia and workshops with artists and experts, as well as guided tours around the exhibits with explanations by the curatorial staff. A space that combines ICC's diverse functions, Open Space integrates galleries, a mini theater, and the video archive "HIVE." Since its launch in 2006, the exhibition has been held as an admission-free event with changing contents each year. Based on the mission of ICC, it aims to function as an open platform where possibilities of communication culture and art created with the help of advanced technologies can be presented to a large number of people.