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Vibrations conducted through a person's bones produce the uncanny sensation of low sounds emanating from within the body. The New York-based artist Sergei Tcherepnin draws on this effect in Stereo Classroom Chairs (2015), mounting a transducer to the underside of each wooden seat on which visitors are invited to sit. When not attached, a transducer plays sounds quietly, at a level that is almost inaudible. When its surface touches another object, however, the material characteristics of that object filter the sounds in various ways. Here, Tcherepnin's audio composition travels through the body of each sitter with a physical intensity. The chair amplifies the composition, while the sitter acts as the filter, amplifying low-frequency sounds and muffling higher frequencies.

Be it sirens, jackhammers, or your neighbor's too-loud TV, noise is everywhere in the urban landscape. Today, we'll talk about how to protect yourself from all that racket with guests Arline Bronzaft, Chair of the Noise Committee on the Mayor's Committee

"Close your eyes for a moment and listen to the space you are in. From my chair, I can hear the rhythmic agitation of my washing machine's spin cycle muffled only slightly by a closed door. In the next room, my fiancé picks out a lilting melody on his mandolin. Even further away, the hint of a low drone, like that of a jet passing by in the sky, reminds me of the presence of the refrigerator upstairs in the kitchen. If I concentrate more, I can hear the distant whine of leaf blowers down the street, though what they could possibly be blowing in the middle of the winter is beyond me. And right next to the click clack of my typing as I commit these words to the page is the purr of an external hard drive, a reassuring sounding of the digital age."

"Crack-k-squutch! A zombie's head explodes in a loud, disgusting gush of decaying brain matter, and the audience gleefully recoils. When it comes to Hollywood, in an era of digital special effects and computer-generated monsters, one of the last provinces of traditional analog elements is Foley art: the sounds that are added to movie scenes to give extra vividness to a head thwack, a creaking chair, or just the ever-present sounds of walking. These sounds are still created using physical props-and very often, those props come from the kitchen."

"Composer, performer, and sound artist Miya Masaoka considers the vagina to be the "third ear," a site for new ways of listening and perceiving. "