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"The exercises presented in this book have been developed by the author as part of his listening workshops and artistic research on acoustics and the body. Exploring issues concerning: contact, filter, and distance, each of the exercises evokes a situation where the body is used wholly as a medium for experiencing sounds in relation to one's present self. The exercises guide listeners to encounter sounds distributed in space in relation to their sources considering shifts in frequency, amplitude, and rhythm."

Lying minutes off the coast of the Bronx mainland is City Island. Spanning only 1.5 miles in length and occupying space off the coasts of both New York City and Nassau County, its singular location and history make the island a living laboratory for exploring New York City's history and future. The entire length of City Island can be easily traversed by foot and the surrounding water can be seen and heard from virtually all points. This proximity to the water lends City Island residents a unique perspective, as they enjoy many of the conveniences of an urban life, yet still maintain a close relationship with the water. This walk will incorporate anthropological 'field study' techniques. The participants will be engaged in exercises designed to observe the environment and decipher its visual and aural 'cues'. The group will uncover the relatively unknown wonders of this "island existence" that thrive within the confines of an urban environment.

"From 1976 to 1982, Tony Conrad (1940-2016) created "Music and the Mind of the World," a piano composition comprising over 200 hours of recorded music. During this time everything Conrad played on the piano was recorded (with the incidental exception of perhaps three or four hours). In this endeavor - which includes the sounds of practicing, banging on the keys, formal exercises, experiments with the harmonic sonority of the piano itself, and even "On Top of Old Smokey" - we witness what might in essence be described as the total encounter between an improvising performer and the central instrument of Western musical culture. Now, for the first time, this influential yet largely unknown work has been published and is now available online for free at the domain musicandthemindofthe.world."

"Headphones are the norm. The new addiction replacing smoking, headphones frame the head and the perception of most urbanites today in some form or other. Whether commuting with an iPod, exercising to the radio, talking on a hands-free cellphone… or actually listening to music, headphones create a mobile and continually changing architecture that follows the listener, wrapping them in a private bubble. As the world rapidly interfaces, overlaps and confronts the boundaries of Private and Public through technologies and legislation, headphones become a quiet and invisible site of investigation. The audio tracks in this collection attempt to define a body of work that is fundamentally connected to the phenomenon of headphone listening. Some work was made specifically for headphones such as Bernhard Leitner or Janet Cardiff, other work was not originally composed for headphones, but when played over headphones a unique experience of the work is created-sometimes against the original intention of the artist or at least as a surprising by-product. While the most common thread between the works is the unique spatialisation of headphones, other attributes of headphone listening-such as intimacy and privacy-are also explored and included. "

"In this project I continue to use creative methods for understanding and interpreting how listening to everyday sounds and soundscapes function as sources or triggers for the imagination*. This involves investigating the roles sound and listening play in visualisation through associative, emotional and memory responses as cognitive functions. In particular, my interest is in understanding how the qualities of these functions change as we age and what can be done to exercise our imagination. In the context of Sounds of our Cities we could sum this up in a few basic questions… one, what happens to our active childhood imaginations as we get older? Two, how do the sounds of Krottegem in Roeselare contribute to how people imagine their neighbourhood? And three, can this method be used for citizens and planners in imagining new ways to understand their city space?"