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"Jennie C. Jones  practice mines the territory of Modernism-abstraction and minimalism; experimental jazz; and seminal political and social shifts-to reveal the complex and often parallel legacies of the mid-20th century's social, cultural, and political experimentations.  Jones brings to light the unlikely alliances that emerged between the visual arts and the imprint of jazz, highlighting the way they became and continue to exist as tangible markers of social evolution and political strivings. "

""It is less about music being scientific and more about the universe being musical.""

There's a secret jazz seeping from Washington's aging Metro escalators - those anemic metal walkways that fill our transit system…they honk and bleat and squawk…why are you still wearing those earbuds?

"What do we really hear when we hear the wind? If you step from a wood into an open field, the sound changes, although it is the same wind blowing over both. A winter pine tree far from the coast makes the wind perform like an angry sea, while a neighbouring bare birch makes a gust-like sound as soft as the brushings of a jazz drummer. A single blast can turn telephone cables and barbed wire fencing into the strings of a wind-harp."

"It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing, goes the Duke Ellington song. By that logic, some bird songs really do mean something: at least a few bird species can swing in the same way that human musicians do, New Scientist can reveal. This claim has been made based on a mathematical analysis of the songs of one species, the thrush nightingale. Not all of the musicians New Scientist spoke to agree that what the thrush nightingale is doing can be called swing - but several said they have heard other species of birds singing that definitely do swing. "

It was the anthropologist's desire to understand the many ways that sound can be meaningful, coupled with the artist's ability to 'think outside the box', - leading to talk of thunderstorms harmonizing with jazz concerts and 'contrapuntal conversations' - which gave us the theme of the conference - 'The Body, the Environment, and Human Sound-making'. This conference, with its many complementary papers and presentations, you see and hear here now. Steven Feld suggested that a new form of media might help give the papers the voice they needed. We took this advice, and hope that the possibility to hear the sounds and see the visuals of many of the papers as you read them gives an important new dimension to the conference proceedings.