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It's one thing to record audio of a drummer and then digitally synthesize the reverberation to mimic various environments, but it's another thing entirely to film a drummer actually playing in all of those environments and then stitch it together into a single track. That's exactly what Audio Zero and Wikidrummers did with drummer Julien Audigier who played the same drum pattern in a variety of indoor and outdoor locations to show the effects of natural reverb, sometimes even blending multiple tracks into a single shot. Amazing. "

"Percussion is also a discipline that is overwhelmingly considered to be "for boys." I recently began asking myself why I chose drums as a nine-year-old, when I showed an aptitude for just about any kind of instrument. I had wanted to play piano when I was five, but was never given lessons. Why drums, then ? Why not still piano four years later ? Even as I write this, I have some regret that I never became a pianist."

"For the Venice Biennial Nevin Aladağ restages Raise The Roof which was performed for the first time in Berlin in 2007 on a rooftop in the former border section between West and East Berlin.  Seven female dancers leave their traces on the copper stages with their stiletto shoes while dancing to given songs, played on their headphones. The audience can read the different titles on the shirts of the dancers. What the audience hears is a rhythmic sound produced by the stiletto steps. Each dancer produces another frequency of a drum set, from high hat to bass drum. "

"In the spring of 2011, Wanda L. Diaz Merced spent time at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, doing research for her doctoral dissertation at Glasgow University, Scotland. Wanda, who is blind, has been interested in sonification as a data analysis tool: how sonification might help scientists, even those who can see, detect patterns in large amounts of seemingly random astrophysical data. She used sonified x-ray data from EX Hydrae that have been collected by the Chandra X-Ray Observatory. One day Gerhard Sonnert gave Wanda some advice on her research and, on the way out of her office, he noticed a ream of sheets on which sonified x-ray data were printed out in musical notation. Being a bass player, he immediately recognized that the data showed a particular Afro-Cuban rhythm called clave. It occurred to him that, in addition to being a scientific tool, sonification might have an artistic application. Gerhard asked his cousin Volkmar Studtrucker, a musician and composer, to write songs from the EX Hydrae material. Volkmar created nine musical pieces, in a variety of musical styles, which they played and recorded in a trio (Volkmar Studtrucker, piano; Gerhard Sonnert, bass; and Hans-Peter Albrecht, drums)."

"In the spring of 2011, Wanda L. Diaz Merced spent time at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, doing research for her doctoral dissertation at Glasgow University, Scotland. Wanda, who is blind, has been interested in sonification as a data analysis tool: how sonification might help scientists, even those who can see, detect patterns in large amounts of seemingly random astrophysical data. She used sonified x-ray data from EX Hydrae that have been collected by the Chandra X-Ray Observatory. One day Gerhard Sonnert gave Wanda some advice on her research and, on the way out of her office, he noticed a ream of sheets on which sonified x-ray data were printed out in musical notation. Being a bass player, he immediately recognized that the data showed a particular Afro-Cuban rhythm called clave. It occurred to him that, in addition to being a scientific tool, sonification might have an artistic application. Gerhard asked his cousin Volkmar Studtrucker, a musician and composer, to write songs from the EX Hydrae material. Volkmar created nine musical pieces, in a variety of musical styles, which they played and recorded in a trio (Volkmar Studtrucker, piano; Gerhard Sonnert, bass; and Hans-Peter Albrecht, drums)."

"I'm quite late hearing this for the first time, but I was thrilled to discover composer Pierre Sauvageot's Harmonic Fields project, a participatory landscape of wind-activated musical instruments temporarily installed on the beach near Birkrigg Common, Cumbria, England. The haphazard plinks, drum rolls, whistles and drones is often mesmerizingly beautiful, as the following video makes clear. It's a kind of weather plug-in, constructed as a sequence of very different movements in space."

"The Enlightenment is described as a "hidden concert of pure light", performed by an uninhabited orchestra of lighting elements, including stagelights and high-powered bulbs. It reminds me somewhat of Francois Bayles "Acousmonium", but with a variety of lamps instead of speakers. Neon lights instead of violins, strobe lights instead of drums, etcetera."

"For Hong Kong artist Samson Young, however, war sounds less obviously martial; indeed, it's pretty random. It's calm, somewhat foreboding - human, organic, often silent but with bursts of technological noise. And most importantly for Young, war sounds musical. Visitors to the artist's current exhibition at Team Gallery, Pastoral Music, see him sitting in the center of the room wearing fatigues, staring into an obsolete television monitor, surrounded by a surfeit of sound-making devices, some traditionally musical, like a contact mic hooked to a bass drum, and some definitely not, like soil, a room fan, Corn Flakes. What's going on exactly? The unconventional musical scores hanging - or, in some cases, drawn directly - on the walls suggest that Young's restrained movement amid the mess of sound-producing gadgets must constitute a musical performance."

"Early spring resounds with the percussive hammering of woodpeckers. Their rhythmic drumming works like many birds' songs: it broadcasts to other woodpeckers over a long distance a clear assertion of territorial and mating rights. "

"Three custom guitars, a gong, maracas shaped like large closed fists, and a series of drum-heads ornated with his classic hand and slogans like 'LOOK AT THIS' and "PLEASE WAIT" The gong states the self-explaining text 'GONG'. While crafted with a luthier's precision, the artist's mischievous design-guitars with one string, some fretless-results in unexpected sounds. The black-and-white guitars are connected to small amplifiers. Alongside the instruments, Shrigley will also present a new series of black and white drawings."

"We had a joke in the studio that they were the best band members we've ever had," laughs Kev Bales when describing the recording of Be's One album. Bales may have spent the last 30 years drumming with the likes of Spiritualized, Soulsavers and Julian Cope, but the musicians he's referring to here are a different kind of buzz band altogether: to be precise, they're 40,000 bees, and their activity forms the basis of One, a transcendental drone symphony between man and bee that is surely one of the year's most beguiling offerings."

Slow motion - paint - impact waves

QUEER TRASH SYMPOSIUM was an auspicious meeting of some very bright and very queer minds, the evening showcases the myriad ways that queers make sound, make sound queer, or skim around terms that may attempt to contain queer life.