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"The ear has 20,000-30,000 hair cells, the nerve endings responsible for carrying the electrical impulses through the auditory nerve to the brain. These delicate receptors bend or flatten as sounds enter the ear, typically springing back to normal in a few hours, or overnight. But over time, loud sounds can cause more permanent damage as hair cells lose their resilience. Frequent and intense exposure to noise will cause these receptors to flatten down, stiffen, and eventually break. The damage can interfere with the ability to determine the location of a sound, cause extreme sensitivity and pain, and make it impossible to discern language with background noise. One in 20 Americans, or 48 million people, report some degree of hearing impairment. RELATED STORY What My Hearing Aid Taught Me About the Future of Wearables "

"Joe Banks is a sound artist, author and researcher, originally specialising in radio phenomena and electromagnetic noise. For over twenty years Joe has been performing, releasing albums and exhibiting under the guise of Disinformation. This Disinformation brand name allows for a critique of corporate identities and modern communication, and uses a sonic palette sourced from errant radio waves, natural earth signals, and interference from the sun and from the National Grid, etc. In 2012, Joe published "Rorschach Audio - Art and Illusion for Sound" on Strange Attractor press, a book that explored the subject of EVP (ghost voice) research in contemporary sound art practice. Joe's work currently focusses on language and evolutionary neuroscience. Joe lives in London, 40 metres from the spot where physicist Leo Szilard conceived the theory of the thermonuclear chain reaction."

"Ariel Guzik designs and produces mechanisms and instruments to enquire into the various languages of nature. He is also a musician, draftsman and illustrator. He is the director of the Nature Expression and Resonance Research Laboratory in Mexico (Laboratorio Plasmaht de Investigación en Resonancia y Expresión de la Naturaleza, Asociación Civil), an organisation which explores natural resonance, mechanics, electricity and magnetism and how these phenomena can be applied to music and sound experiments."

"Almost 100 years ago, shortly before the outbreak of the First World War, the Italian Futurist Luigi Russolo proposed the idea that urban and industrial sounds, including the noises of modern warfare, were a new and enthralling source of musical material. Their nature was unprecedented - their intensity, volume, texture and shape - and so musical history should come to an end. The slow evolution of musical language had suffered a massive stroke, to be replaced by a vigorously healthy art of noises. Musician and composer David Toop looks at The Art of Noise"

"To engage with the notion of musicality in Agnes Martin's work, Pace Live presented performances by the musician Laraaji and members of the group Gang Gang Dance amid the recent exhibition Agnes Martin: The Distillation of Color in New York. The performances highlighted the ways that the legacies of Martin's distinct visual language and philosophies about art making have touched some of the most innovative musical artists working today."

"In this edition of Fusion Journal we wish to explore the act of listening to the land, to others, to difference, as encountered in embodied and virtual spaces. We especially encouraged contributions that represent creative practice as well as more traditional text-based articles. How might we attempt to interpret what is being said in languages we do not understand? How might we resist - even if just for a moment - adding our own sounds to the noises of the neoliberal project of the anthropocene: the clashing music of the shopping mall, the automated voice, the shock jock, the celebrity, the power tools, the leaf blowers, the bulldozers, the mining blasts. How might we listen out, or tune in, to the small, the subtle, the unnoticed, the dying, the unusual, the banal, the mad, the unexpected?"

We Come From Your Future is a sound investigation into the future of anti-racism in the UK. It asks how the public discourse on ethnicotherness, diversity, and multiculturalism may contribute to the very conditions of racism? How has the erasure of terms like anti-racism, racist violence, and justice from the official bureaucratic language actually worked to both conceal and foment new convergences of racial tension? How has the composition and re-composition of migration in the UK contributed to new lines of anti-racist experience and opened up to new fields of struggle? What are the obstacles for a re-constitution of an anti-racist movement?

"WIZARD APPRENTICE (pronouns: she and/or they) is a music producer, live performer, and video artist. As a highly sensitive introvert, her multimedia projects are strategies for managing an overwhelming world. Her music is a combination of lyrical precision, minimalistic composition, and technically-amateurish charm. She creates media that takes advantage of user-friendly technology, skipping time consuming learning curves to focus on inventing highly relatable language for subtle personal experiences. She's not a gear-head, rather, a digital folk artist who vividly and simplistically expresses her inner world using resourcefulness and honesty. Her video work incorporates green screen graphics, digital puppetry, and compositing to produce imagery that's cerebral, campy, and hypnotic. She combines song and video to create multimedia live performances that explore intimate emotional themes."

"Nestup is an experimental markup language for musical rhythms. It's specifically designed to break away from a fixed musical grid."

"Pressure Sequence started out as a question: Dancing is body language at it's purest. But can you transform, translate this language? What happens if you strip away the visual layer? Is it possible to create a virtual dance, just out of sound? Does dance survive this transmission? Do we create new images? Is it still dance? Do we move along?"

The voice is what is really at stake in modernity, the voice as specified substance of language everywhere triumphantly pushed forward. Modern society (as has been repeated often enough) believes itself to be ushering in a civilization of the image, but what it actually establishes overall . . . is a civilization of speech. - Roland Barthes, "Lesson in Writing" (1968)

"Over the past 40 years "sound art" has been hailed as a new artistic category in numerous writings, yet one of its first significant exhibitions is mentioned only in passing, if at all. The first instance of the hybrid term sound art used as the title of an exhibition at a major museum was Sound Art at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA), shown from 25 June to 5 August 1979. Although this was not marketed as a feminist exhibition, curator Barbara London selected three women to exemplify the new form. Maggi Payne created multi-speaker works that utilized space in a sculptural fashion; Connie Beckley combined language and sounding sculptural objects, showing sound in both a conceptual and physical manifestation; and Julia Heyward's work used aspects of feminist performance art including music, narrative, and the voice in order to buck abstract aesthetics of the time. This paper uses archival research, interviews, and analysis of work presented to reconstruct the exhibition and describe the obstacles both the artists and the curator encountered. The paper further provides context in the lives of the artists and the curator as well as the surrounding artistic scene, and ultimately exposes the discriminatory reasons this important exhibition has been marginalized in the current discourse."

"Turning Towards a Radical Listening is an immersive audio-visual metaphor in which an audience is asked to reconcile how their sonic experience is represented, documented, given language and transcribed by AI algorithms over the course of apx. 70 minutes. The resulting nonsense concrete poem demands consideration of how we exist between input and output-holding space for us to tune into what can be lost in translation. "

"With this special issue of Seismograf we are happy to present a new format of articles: Audio Papers. Audio papers resemble the regular essay or the academic text in that they deal with a certain topic of interest, but presented in the form of an audio production. The audio paper is an extension of the written paper through its specific use of media, a sonic awareness of aesthetics and materiality, and creative approach towards communication. The audio paper is a performative format working together with an affective and elaborate understanding of language. It is an experiment embracing intellectual arguments and creative work, papers and performances, written scholarship and sonic aesthetics."

"No field of study based on sensory experience seems to be overburdened by terminology to the same extent as that dealing with sound and hearing. The visual sense, of course, has received as much attention as the auditory from physics, psychology, neurophysiology, and the visual arts, which have all contributed terminology and jargon alike, but a great deal of it seems to have entered the common vocabulary already, and at least the general notions involved are seldom foreign to the average citizen or student. Terms such as perspective, foreground, background, colour, spectrum, shadow, focus, image, reflection, transparent, translucent and the wealth of descriptive visual terms, not to mention common visual impairments and the complexity of visual language found in contemporary cinema and photography - all of these have found public familiarity in a way that it is hard to imagine their sonic counterparts ever matching. Almost every school child knows what white light is, and how it is composed, but would he know what white noise is, even though the likelihood of it having an adverse effect on him is far greater? The ability to perceive three-dimensional visual perspective when projected onto a two-dimensional surface, by no means a simple achievement given the lateness of its appearance in our civilization, is irrevocably ingrained in the child's perceptual habits at an early age, and yet the ability to distinguish acoustic parameters, or experience subtle nuances of timbre (supposing he knows what timbre, the sonic equivalent of colour, is) may never be among his perceptual skills."

In this podcast, we talk to Antye Greie about language, sound, and the body. At their intersection, the voice emerges, with its multiple resonances and different ways of introducing the voice of others through her own practice and space of visibility. Along the way, we look at her work and methodology, from the deconstruction of texts to the implementation of what she calls "feminist sonic technologies". Permeating everything, we encounter the memory and the experience of having been raised in the values and the political experiment of the former Eastern Bloc and feeling part of a silenced diaspora. Recorded: February 2022.

"It's 200 years since Thomas De Quincey wrote On the Knocking On the Gate in Macbeth, the first serious consideration of the strange and powerful psychological impact of sound effects - sounds which aren't language or music but still carry a level of meaning which seem to elevate them above our everyday sound world. To mark the occasion, composer Sarah Angliss meets some of the world's foremost sound designers to consider the enduring power and ubiquity of the sound effect."

60 Seconds Radio is 1,400 radio clips produced by artists from fifty countries, working in thirty languages. It is a competition and a dissemination platform.

"My foreign-born parents who have lived in the United States for over 40 years both have distinctive but hard-to-place accents that I have never been able to imitate correctly (and have not inherited). Inspired by posters advertising courses in "accent elimination," I worked with my parents and professional speech improvement coach Sam Chwat intensively for several weeks in order to "neutralize" my parents' accents and then teach each of them to me. The very existence of these courses points to the complexities of assimilation and self-image, and the tricky maneuvering between the desire to preserve the distinctive marks of one's culture, on one hand, and to decrease them in order to seem less foreign, on the other. In the video, my parents and I struggle to hear and imitate what is so close at hand and yet so difficult to access. The accent is treated very literally, like an heirloom, and the project illustrates the very awkward attempt to concretely transfer this elusive, and ultimately culturally determined, attribute."

"In his 1967 address "The Eco-Logic of Muzak," for Muzak's Scientific Board of Advisers, Dr. James Keenan, an industrial psychologist from Stanford University, spoke of Muzak as being "synomorphic with the modern world and interrelated with all matters of time and place: Muzak helps human communities because it is a nonverbal symbolism for the common stuff of everyday living in the global village."1 Keenan characterizes Muzak not merely as background music, but as a "language" that builds utopias through sweet and soothing harmonies. "