Group items tagged

"Time and Tide Bell" is a permanent installation, existing of 12 bells around the U.K. in several very different locations, rung by the sea at high tide. The rise of the water at high tide moves the clapper to strike the bell. Played by the movement of the waves, the bell creates a varying, gentle musical pattern. As the effect of global warming increases, the periods of bell strikes will become more and more frequent, and as the bell becomes submerged in the rising water the pitch will vary."

A work by Bill Fontana. "Notre Dame has been described as the soul of Paris. As a result of the tragic fire in 2019, its bells have fallen silent. However, these bells were not damaged in the fire and are silently waiting and secretly "listening" to the sounds of Paris around Notre Dame. This is a continuous live streaming sound sculpture that makes audible the simple physical fact that these bells are secretly ringing all the time. I think of this secret ringing as being the heartbeat of Notre Dame. The sounds that the bells produce are created by their harmonic response to the ambient sounds of Paris that surround Notre Dame, as revealed by a live network of accelerometers mounted and live streaming from all ten of the bells. The physical fact that these bells are harmonically excited by the ambient sounds of Paris is a phenomenon that this artwork makes public in a way that will not only be beautiful to hear but will have a healing relevance to Notre Dame's fire, a healing relevance to the suspended sense of time created by the Corona Virus, the tragic war in the Ukraine and the ongoing environmental threat of climate change."

"The comparison of a city's clock to a person's heart, though it has been made countless times, remains evocative. When Christina Kubisch first visited MASS MoCA in 1996, she was moved by the fact that the century-old factory clock had not kept time, nor had its bells rung, since 1986, when the Sprague Electric Company vacated the 13-acre site. This 19th-century clock, located in an eighty-foot tower with a 750-pound and a 1,000-pound bell, had set the rhythm of the workday in North Adams since 1895, ringing every quarter hour. Now those bells and beautiful brass clockworks share the tower with components of The Clocktower Project: solar panels, electronic sound system, and a computer with Kubisch's unique program on its flash disc. "

"Bill Fontana's latest project, Silent Echoes Notre-Dame, is a contemporary sound installation in Notre-Dame Cathedral's bell towers. The soundscape records the sounds that Notre-Dame's bells emit in response to the environment around them. "

"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."

"Bill Fontana Recorded the Vibrations of Church Bells Inside Fire-Damaged Notre Dame. Now, He's Taking His Sound Installation on Tour"

"Darsha Hewitt is a Canadian artist who makes electromechanical sound installations, drawings, videos, an experimental performances. See her other unique work here (take the brilliant "20 Oscillators in 20 Minutes" for example, which is part experimental music performance, technical challenge, and comedy act!). She has an interest in demystifying the invisible systems embedded throughout domestic technology. This is also visible in the above artwork, Electrostatic Bell Choir (2012)."

"Sound travels in various ways, and Rob shows how string and a coat hanger can create the sound of a giant bell tolling."

"It wasn't quite as Earth-shaking as Marconi's 1901 cross-Atlantic radio transmission or Alexander Graham Bell yapping at this assistant on the first telephone call in 1876, but this week the 21st century got its inaugural transatlantic scent message. At the American Museum of Natural History in New York on Tuesday, the smell of champagne and chocolate wafted from the new "oPhone" in a message sent from Le Laboratoire art center in Paris."

"David Hendy has a good idea. He is a professor of media and communication at the University of Sussex, and he's in love with noise-but not in the way you might think. Hendy is not interested in noise as mere meaningless din, but noise as a form of media conveying the meaning of a time, like when the world entered the industrial age. When listening farther back in time, one can see that the sound of bells ringing was a tool for the church of the Middle Ages to exert its power over daily life."

"Four years after the invention of the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell caused flurries of excitement with another invention, which he described in a series of essays and lectures in the US and Britain during the autumn of 1880. The device was what he called the 'photophone'. It depended upon the discovery made by Willoughby Smith in 1873, during the course of work on the Atlantic undersea telephone cable, that the resistance of the material selenium, which was ordinarily extremely high, in fact varied with the action of light, exposure to light lowering the resistance of the material."

"Dean Shostak is one of last true masters capable of playing the glass armonica - an enchanting instrument lost to time. First devised in 1761 by Benjamin Franklin, the art of "playing glass" began to fade in popularity as musical fashions changed. Today, there are only eight glass armonica players left in the world. Along with the revival of the armonica, Shostak is also reintroducing an entire family of glass instruments, including the glass violin, the crystal hand bells and the French Cristal baschet."

"What does finance sound like? Is it the clanging of the opening and closing bells at the New York Stock Exchange? The shouting of offers to buy or sell? The beeps made by cash registers as a credit card is swiped? The whirring of fans working overtime to cool computers? What is this noise?"

"Listen to the sound of Wikipedia's recent changes feed. Bells indicate additions and string plucks indicate subtractions. Pitch changes according to the size of the edit; the larger the edit, the deeper the note. Green circles show edits from unregistered contributors, and purple circles mark edits performed by automated bots. You may see announcements for new users as they join the site, punctuated by a string swell. You can welcome him or he"

" At the turn of the millennium, improvised music from Japan became incredibly quiet. Clive Bell explains why previously noisy artists turned the volume down."

"In Hampi's Vijaya Vithala Temple, 500-year-old stone pillars miraculously produce the sounds of bells and percussion. Whether that's intentional or by chance remains a mystery."