Group items tagged

"The radiofrequency spectrum is at the heart of telecommunications, used by police, emergency personnel and public transport services, as well as the armed forces. Every day, this spectrum ensures the proper functioning of mobile phones and wireless devices. Seen as an essential resource by some and as a health hazard by others, the electromagnetic fields generated by radiofrequency spectrum activity have multiplied exponentially since humans first learned to harness electricity. In his Electrosmog series, Jean-Pierre Aubé searches out ambient radio frequency activity in the urban landscape of Montréal, which for Aubé forms a singular territory, characterized by its density in the city and by the political and economic issues that accompany it. Equipped with a radio, an antenna, and home-made software, the artist sweeps the titular spectrum of radio frequencies. Every tenth of a second, the device takes a snapshot of its readings - a measure of electromagnetic activity on a specific frequency. This information is then paired with images of Montréal, digitally altered by these same measurements, to create a "documentary in sound" of the city's spaces. Montréal, well-known to the artist after years of radiofrequency experiments here, is the eighth city in which Aubé has measured and visually presented this urban Electrosmog. Electrosmog, Montréal, 01.1 MHz - 144 MHz, 2012 Text from the CCA and Elektra - video abstract original length : 11 minutes - built with Processing"

" "Devine has taken data from NASA's Kepler missions to create individual compositions that occupy each floor of the 29 metre high tower, built in 1758. Each composition can be thought of as a subset of this set of data, and a mapping of the range of frequencies and information gathered by the missions to a more manageable human scale. The compositions from each star's data are positioned according to their age, frequency range and the number of exoplanets they host, moving upwards through the tower, which could almost have been custom built for the installation. [...] As you ascend through the building, you're also moving light years through the universe, outwards towards the different solar systems with their exoplanets and changing resonances. Just as musical instruments resonate with frequencies, so can the stars and planets, and it is this resonance that Devine has scaled for the human ear.""

"Reporting the frequency range for hearing in dogs and other species is not a straightforward task - the "how" of determining hearing frequency ranges must first be explained. Testing in animals differs from the method commonly used with humans of voluntarily reporting if a sound is heard."

"What do you think we are not hearing? Can listening encourage us to challenge our assumptions, and change our behaviour and decision-making processes concerning our relations to non-human species? Can human opinions on invertebrates be shifted through listening? I have been developing a process for constructing synthesized "built" soundscapes of hidden sounds. Built Hidden Soundscape: Pipeline Road, Gamboa is a preliminary result from this research. I made the field recordings for this built soundscape while at the Digital Naturalism conference in Gamboa, Panama in August 2019. The video shows a scrolling image of a spectrogram. A spectrogram is a bioacoustic tool that shows how sounds sit together in a soundscape. The Y axis represents frequency (Hz) and the X axis represents time. This spectrogram, however, focuses on 'hidden sounds' - sounds that cannot be heard by humans without the use of technology; sounds that are easily heard by human ears are excluded from this synthesized, artificial rendering of a soundscape. The sound work consists of field recordings from Pipeline Road in Gamboa, bookended by the dynamic dawn and dusk soundscapes of Pipeline Road. This built soundscape includes ultrasonic sounds (above the range of human hearing, played back at lower frequency), substrate-borne vibrations, and otherwise very quiet sounds. "

"A new study shows microphones suspended from helium balloons in the stratosphere can detect low-frequency sounds from ocean waves. The new method shows promise for detecting acoustic signals from natural disasters and nuclear explosions that cannot always be reliably detected by sensors on the ground, according to the study's authors."

"Stars oscillate on a - very - low frequency, which has to be pitched up many times to be heard by us humans. Scientists use the Kepler Space Telescope to measure these oscillations, and by the frequency they can tell the size of the stars. They combine this with the study of planets in the zone around the star where the temperature allows water to be liquid. Will this eventually lead us to the discovery of extraterrestrial life? "

"20 Hz observes a geo-magnetic storm occurring in the Earth's upper atmosphere. Working with data collected from the CARISMA radio array and interpreted as audio, we hear tweeting and rumbles caused by incoming solar wind, captured at the frequency of 20 Hertz. Generated directly by the sound, tangible and sculptural forms emerge suggestive of scientific visualisations. As different frequencies interact both visually and aurally, complex patterns emerge to create interference phenomena that probe the limits of our perception"

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.

"Sound As Color converts audible frequencies to the visible spectrum, using color, brightness, and size to represent frequency and amplitude. The result allows listeners to enhance their sensory experience of music by "seeing" a visually appealing range of sound. This piece was shortlisted for the Kantar Information is Beautiful Awards 2017. 2017 "

"Sound As Color converts audible frequencies to the visible spectrum, using color, brightness, and size to represent frequency and amplitude. The result allows listeners to enhance their sensory experience of music by "seeing" a visually appealing range of sound. This piece was shortlisted for the Kantar Information is Beautiful Awards 2017. 2017 "

"Imagine hearing the colours you perceive. SOUND of LIGHT is a synesthetic sculpture which interprets and dynamically transforms sunlight into audio frequencies. It is a site specific installation designed for the former music pavilion in Hamm, Germany, which was built in 1912. A high-quality digital camera mounted on the top of the structure films the sky and divides it into six colours - RGB and CMY. The six hanging, coloured columns of the pneumatic structure - which stand for the primary RGB (red/green/blue) and secondary CMY (cyan/magenta/yellow) colour models - are designed to receive different frequencies and convert them from visible to audible sensory input. A series of woofers is fixed directly on the bottom of each column and convert the whole architecture into a giant vibrating loudspeak"

"Sound as Color is an exploration in converting audible frequencies to electromagnetic waves perceptible to human eye relative to that of the audible frequency range of the input sound signal."

Need to test out something using different frequencies?

"In this article we look at how bass is felt rather than heard, and, after reviewing some of the research that has been done in this area, we investigate the points at which low frequencies go beyond sound and become a tactile sensation in an experiment of our own."

"Fure, a composer and sonic artist whose works often involve the live modification of prerecorded electroacoustic tracks, unleashed an hour-long storm of sound, incorporating extremely low bass frequencies that began below the range of human hearing and slid upward to a barely perceptible 30 Hz. For a few minutes, I stood in front of a tower of speakers, having taken the precaution of inserting earplugs, and had a purely visceral encounter with sound-one that gave me the unsettling and liberating sensation of being no longer material in my own body."

"Scientists have recently made some remarkable discoveries about non-human sounds. With the aid of digital bioacoustics - tiny, portable digital recorders similar to those found in your smartphone - researchers are documenting the universal importance of sound to life on Earth. By placing these digital microphones all over Earth, from the depths of the ocean to the Arctic and the Amazon, scientists are discovering the hidden sounds of nature, many of which occur at ultrasonic or infrasonic frequencies, above or below human hearing range. Non-humans are in continuous conversation, much of which the naked human ear cannot hear. But digital bioacoustics helps us hear these sounds, by functioning as a planetary-scale hearing aid and enabling humans to record nature's sounds beyond the limits of our sensory capacities. With the help of artificial intelligence (AI), researchers are now decoding complex communication in other species."

"The music on Quartz Locked, Deep City Wandering, was sourced from non-musical, professional electronic appliances recorded back in 1987 and preserved on a C-90 cassette until this day. The original sounds were mainly derived from two electronic devices: a hacked, roadside traffic signal data logger, on the one hand, and a physician's pager, on the other. Wires were soldered to various parts of the data logger's motherboard and connected to a tape recorder's audio inputs, emitting a rich assortment of glitch sounds, static noises and buzzing a-plenty. A physician's pager, smuggled from the local hospital, was similarly hacked and manipulated in order to produce high frequency buzzing noises with striking modulation/demodulation effects. Both devices were eventually plugged together to create additional random interference patterns, while occasional tape manipulation and varispeed effect were also applied during the recording process."

"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."

""The Melody Road will allow a car passing above it to play a simple tune, which is made audible by ridges on the road's surface. The pitch of the note created is increased by increasing the frequency of the ridges, and the opposite is also true.""

"The 80-acre green space is the Buitenschot Land Art Park. Its trenches and ridges hold bike paths and sports fields, but these recreational features are a bonus. Its main purpose is to deflect ground noise, the low-frequency drone that planes make when they take off and land."