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"The sounds of crickets courting and flies flying familiar to many of us, but have you heard a rice weevil larva eating inside a wheat kernel, a termite cutting a piece of wood, or a grub chewing on a root? Modern insect detection and control technology makes use of these subtle signals, sampled below. Most of the sound files on this page were selected from noise-free sections of recorded signal, but you can hear some typical background noises mixed with insect sounds at I below. The insect sounds have higher frequencies and shorter durations that make them relatively easy to separate from background."

"Conceptualizing sound in geologic terms is a daunting task. Both the geologic and the sonic are time-based media, defined by duration. Yet sound speaks in milliseconds, the geologic in eons. They exist in different time zones. So, given this conundrum, instead of considering how to measure sound within a geologic scale, perhaps we are better served to ask: What do geologic materials sound like or, more precisely, what do geologic materials hear? This latter question might seem ridiculously anthropomorphic, given that we are talking about material objects. So let us first consider what exactly sound and hearing are."

"Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez's (literally) transporting film-shot inside a cable car that carries pilgrims and tourists to and from a mountaintop temple in Nepal-is radically simple in conception. Each of its 11 shots lasts as long as a one-way ride, which corresponds to the duration of a roll of 16mm film. A kind of head movie that viewers are invited to complete as they watch, Manakamana is thrillingly mysterious in its effects: a staged documentary, a cross between science fiction and ethnography, an airborne version of an Andy Warhol screen test. Working within a 5-by-5-foot glass and metal box, Spray and Velez have made an endlessly suggestive film that both describes and transcends the bounds of time and space."

Salomé Voegelin is a Swiss artist and writer based in London. She is the author of Listening to Noise and Silence: towards a Philosophy of Sound Art, Continuum, NY, 2010. The book engages with the emerging practice of sound art and the concurrent development of a discourse and theory of sound. It seeks to immerse the reader in concepts of listening to sound artwork and the everyday acoustic environment, to establish an aesthetics and philosophy of sound and to promote the notion of a sonic sensibility. Other recent writings include an article on Morton Feldman in the Wire 324, February 2011 issue, and an essay on durational radio for Kunstradio ORF Austria. Her blog soundwords.tumblr.com writes the experience of listening to the everyday.

"Sound art encompasses cross-border art practices in which the acoustic element governs the recepient's overall perception as well as the structure of a given work. The visual sphere and the spatial dimension represent the most important references to sound. The most decisive factor differentiating sound art from music is the breaking up of linearity and of limited temporal duration."

"John Cage, Jem Finer, and playing music as slow and long as possible "