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"Artistic innovations spurred by curiosity rather than by intellectual principles arguably produce more compelling and enduring breakthroughs. And Pauline Oliveros was undeniably curious when it came to music. By the time she was 9, she picked up the accordion; soon, she learned to play the tuba and the French horn. She quickly proved to be a highly versatile and accomplished instrumentalist. The capacity that really shaped Oliveros's career as an experimental composer and electronic-music pioneer, however, was not her skill as a musician per se but her awareness of the broader sonic field that surrounded her as she played."

"Learn why listening to three-dimensional sound in the real world and listening on headphones are two different experiences - and how you can bridge the gap."

""The Ears Between Worlds Are Always Speaking is a long-form, 2 channel hyper-directional 4 act opera projected upon the ancient ruins of Aristotle's Lyceum. For this work there is no physical intervention onto the site, with the exception of sound produced by 2 LRADs - LONG RANGE ACOUSTIC DEVICES - that are mounted on rooftops around the campus periphery. At the installation, audiences experience a shifting call and response hyper-directionality of sound when walking around the ruins of the school. The Lyceum, situated between the Athens War Museum, Hellenic Armed Forces Officer's Club, and Athens Conservatory of music, offers a rich environment for engaging oral tradition, contemporary and ancient history, as well as a sense of embodied learning."

"Acousticians cannot yet comprehensively quantify the acoustic character of spaces. There is a lot we know about acoustic design, but there is a great deal to be learned. Excellent concert halls are a rarity even for the most experienced teams and well-funded projects. When the scaffolding comes down, acousticians are granted short windows of time to listen, measure, and tune. Acoustic parameters are extracted and a report is delivered, and usually relegated to a dark corner of a server. Design decisions made years earlier become irreversible in the built condition as the first audiences listen closely. Opinions either aggregate or dissipate, at best tenuously connected to measurable metrics. Design teams move on once a building is occupied; innovations become hard to mine and harder to embed deep enough to take root in our methods."

"Before I began designing sound for podcasts, I assumed that there was a certain sorcery to it. There isn't. In fact, I discovered that I already knew all the fundamentals-I had learned them in my high school english classes."

"Onda started talking to people who work in radio and learning about mysterious transmissions, coded messages from government broadcasts, and other unusual sounds that float through the radio waves. But nobody could decipher the recordings he'd been collecting."

"The German polymath and Jesuit priest Athanasius Kircher had a lifelong fascination with sound and devoted two books to the subject: Musurgia Universalis (1650), on the theoretical (and theological) aspects, and Phonurgia Nova (1673), on the science of acoustics and its practical applications. It's no surprise then to learn that his famed museum at Rome's Collegio Romano boasted- in addition to "vomiting statues", ghost-conjuring mirrors, and other curious wonders - a vast and diverse collection of musical instruments. "

"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."

"Award-winning musician Christopher Cerf has composed music for the famous children's television show Sesame Street for 40 years. During this time, he has written more than 200 songs intended to help children learn how to read and write. But these innocent children's songs were abused for inhumane purposes."

"For three centuries, farmers living in the remote mountains of northern Turkey have communicated great distances by whistling. It's a language called kuş dili that is still used to this day, though fewer people are learning it in the age of the cell phone. It's also known as bird language, for obvious reasons. Muazzez Köçek lives in Kuşköy, and she is the best whistler in her village. Muazzez shows us how she uses varied pitch frequencies and melodies to translate Turkish vocabulary into whistles with meaning. "

"Some of the toughest stuff in nature is spider silk - as strong, ounce for ounce, as nylon. And a silk web makes a great trap for prey, as well as a nice place for a spider to live. But scientists have learned that spiders can do something else quite extraordinary with their webs: They can "tune" them, like musical instruments."

Urban sound has a huge influence over how we perceive places. Yet, city planning is concerned mainly with noise, simply because annoying sounds come to the attention of city officials in the form of complaints, while general urban sounds cannot be easily captured at city scale. To capture both unpleasant and pleasant sounds, we propose a new methodology that relies on tagging information of georeferenced pictures. We propose the first urban sound dictionary and compare it to the one produced by collating insights from the literature: ours is experimentally more valid (if correlated with official noise pollution levels) and offers wider geographic coverage. From picture tags, we then study the relationship between soundscapes and emotions. We learn that streets with music sounds are associated with strong emotions of joy or sadness, while those with human sounds are associated with joy or surprise. Finally, we study the relationship between soundscapes and people's perceptions and, in so doing, we are able to map which areas are chaotic, monotonous, calm, and exciting.Those insights promise to inform the creation of restorative experiences in our increasingly urbanized world.

"I first encountered Guidonian hands as an extension of my interest in graphic scores from the 20th century avant-garde. Beyond their shared use of drawing, and inherent beauty, the two have few conceptual links. Guidonian hands were a medieval mnemonic device (a system of learning aiding retention) designed to assist singers sight-sing (the sung realization of prima vista, or sight-reading). Their development is generally credited to an 11th centruy Italian music theorist named Guido of Arezzo, though the graphic use of the hand as a musical guide long predates the development of his technique. Within a Guidonian hand, each section of the hand indicated a specific note within the hexachord system (six-notes), over three octaves. In the absence of a score, once the graphic hand was memorized by a singer, a conductor would need only point to a series of notes on their hand. They are a fascinating fragment from the development of Western theory, as well as being objects of sublime beauty."

"Filmmaker and Filmmaker contributor Alix Lambert is a guest producer on this week's Theory of Everything, where she learns that it's not just hipsters causing a revival in the audio cassette format but prisoners. Indeed, for most prisoners, cassettes are the only music delivery device they're allowed. Listen to her episode, "Analog Time," embedded here, as Lambert talks to some incarcerated men for whom cassette tapes are an escape, a salve, and even a medium of exchange."

"Build a classic batteryless AM radio receiver and learn some modifications that let you eliminate the need for the long antenna usually required."

"The "Sonògraf" is an electronic audiovisual instrument. Thought as a music learning tool for primary schools, it allows the drawing to be transformed into music, turning gestural strokes and geometric figures into electronic sounds. A set of buttons and potentiometers allow live manipulation of the "sonification" characteristics of the drawing, making it possible to speed up, slow down or pause the resulting music, as well as decide its scales and tonalities."

"Plants are the most abundant life form visible to us. Despite their ubiquitous presence, most of the times we still fail to notice them. The botanists James Wandersee and Elizabeth Schussler call it "plant blindness, an extremely prevalent condition characterized by the inability to see or notice the plants in one's immediate environment. Mathew Hall, author of Plants as Persons, argues that our neglect towards plant life is partly influenced by the drive in Western thought towards separation, exclusion, and hierarchy. Our bias towards animals, or zoochauvinism-in particular toward large mammals with forward facing eyes-has been shown to have negative implications on funding towards plant conservation. Plants are as threatened as mammals according to Kew's global assessment of the status of plant life known to science. Curriculum reforms to increase plant representation and engaging students in active learning and contact with local flora are some of the suggested measures to counter our plant blindness."

"Howard Gardner's work around multiple intelligences has had a profound impact on thinking and practice in education - especially in the United States. Here we explore the theory of multiple intelligences; why it has found a ready audience amongst educationalists; and some of the issues around its conceptualization and realization. "

"Bose Frames are Bose AR compatible - the first commercial product embedded with the Bose audio augmented reality platform. Unlike other augmented reality glasses and platforms, Bose AR doesn't change what you see, or use a lens or phone camera to superimpose objects in your sightline. Instead, it knows where you are and what you're facing using a 9-axis head motion sensor and the GPS from your iOS or Android device - and automatically adds a layer of audio, connecting that place and time to endless possibilities for travel, learning, entertainment, gaming, and more. It's all accessible through the ease of listening - clear-eyed, heads-up, hands-free. And with Bose AR experiences in development, it's coming soon to Bose Frames."