Group items tagged

"In the spring of 2011, Wanda L. Diaz Merced spent time at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, doing research for her doctoral dissertation at Glasgow University, Scotland. Wanda, who is blind, has been interested in sonification as a data analysis tool: how sonification might help scientists, even those who can see, detect patterns in large amounts of seemingly random astrophysical data. She used sonified x-ray data from EX Hydrae that have been collected by the Chandra X-Ray Observatory. One day Gerhard Sonnert gave Wanda some advice on her research and, on the way out of her office, he noticed a ream of sheets on which sonified x-ray data were printed out in musical notation. Being a bass player, he immediately recognized that the data showed a particular Afro-Cuban rhythm called clave. It occurred to him that, in addition to being a scientific tool, sonification might have an artistic application. Gerhard asked his cousin Volkmar Studtrucker, a musician and composer, to write songs from the EX Hydrae material. Volkmar created nine musical pieces, in a variety of musical styles, which they played and recorded in a trio (Volkmar Studtrucker, piano; Gerhard Sonnert, bass; and Hans-Peter Albrecht, drums)."

"Discrete Archive was created for music, writing and artefacts that explore quietness. This can mean many things, we like music that allows for space, presents sonority as object and is concerned with the materiality of sound, sound as thing. We occupy a world of noise, discerning meaning in this sea of noise is increasingly difficult.  We invite you to contemplate the world around you through stillness and quiet that sound can provide a focus for. "

"Shortwave Collective is an international, feminist artist group established in May 2020, interested in the creative use of radio. We meet regularly to discuss feminist approaches to amatuer radio and the radio spectrum as artistic material, sharing resources, considering DIY approaches and inclusive structures. ​"

"Watching people, talking with them, and actively engaging in social practices are the participatory techniques through which the ethnographer learns to see the world as his or her participants do, rich with socially constructed and historically situated meaning. Yet the focus on seeing the world as your participants do sometimes eclipses the other sensory modes that people employ to make sense of social and material interactions."

"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."

"Audible Inaudible is a term keyed by ethnomusicologist Martin J Daughtry where the violent sounds of war become muted by its auditors as a mechanism for survival. I have multiple memories that involve the terrifying sound of the air raid siren so I started the research in how to translate a sonic memory into object. This lead me to Martin's a book titled "Listening to War, Sound, Music and Survival in Wartime Iraq" where he describes an interview with a mother shielding her children from the violent sounds of war by holding them tight and pressing her arms against their ears. Her body, her flesh then acted as a perfect, natural micro environment to protect her children. I wanted to mimic this concept of "flesh as defense" so I introduced pyramid acoustic foam in the paintings; a material that "detains" sound. I started surgically cutting my linen and pushing the foam through it from the back. As it was penetrating the surface I felt as if I was conducting an operation of resistance. These calculated cuts and wounds were enabling the painting to breathe. Inhaling and exhaling it was reacting, resisting, defending and accepting these sonic wounds."

"In the spring of 2011, Wanda L. Diaz Merced spent time at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, doing research for her doctoral dissertation at Glasgow University, Scotland. Wanda, who is blind, has been interested in sonification as a data analysis tool: how sonification might help scientists, even those who can see, detect patterns in large amounts of seemingly random astrophysical data. She used sonified x-ray data from EX Hydrae that have been collected by the Chandra X-Ray Observatory. One day Gerhard Sonnert gave Wanda some advice on her research and, on the way out of her office, he noticed a ream of sheets on which sonified x-ray data were printed out in musical notation. Being a bass player, he immediately recognized that the data showed a particular Afro-Cuban rhythm called clave. It occurred to him that, in addition to being a scientific tool, sonification might have an artistic application. Gerhard asked his cousin Volkmar Studtrucker, a musician and composer, to write songs from the EX Hydrae material. Volkmar created nine musical pieces, in a variety of musical styles, which they played and recorded in a trio (Volkmar Studtrucker, piano; Gerhard Sonnert, bass; and Hans-Peter Albrecht, drums)."

""I can hear with my knee better than with my calves." This statement made by Bernhard Leitner, which initially seems absurd, can be explained in light of an interest that he still pursues today with unbroken passion and meticulousness: the study of the relationship between sound, space, and body. Since the late 1960s, Bernhard Leitner has been working in the realm between architecture, sculpture, and music, conceiving of sounds as constructive material, as architectural elements that allow a space to emerge."

Experimental Musical Instruments is an information outlet for interesting and unusual musical instruments of all sorts. Here you'll find how-to materials on instrument making, as well as books and CDs featuring the work of the most inventive instrument ma

Swartz also invites gallery visitors to handle, listen and look - often in unconventional museum spaces. More subtly, her work employs them as spectators of interactivity, a less considered version of participation, yet one often crucial to the complete experience of some of her sculptures. These modes of interactivity combine with Swartz's skillful transformation of simple, industrial materials to engage viewers with their own emotional history as well as the formal traditions of participatory art... - Rachel Arauz

Ge Wang makes computer music, but it isn't all about coded bleeps and blips. With the Stanford Laptop Orchestra, he creates new instruments out of unexpected materials-like an Ikea bowl-that allow musicians to play music that's both beautiful and expressive. "

"ernoudt Jacobs is an artist fascinated with sound in all its forms and possible expressions. He collects fields recordings around the world but he also creates installations based on Bell's photoacoustic effect that reveals the sonority of any material hit with a strong beam of light, builds sound microscope that magnifies the freezing and melting process of water or suspends coils, magnets and 1000 tin cans into the air to play with the laws of electromagnetic induction and generate tiny vibrations that produce sounds. It is as if everything in the visible and the invisible world provides him with endless opportunities for sound exploration. "

"Experiences of listening may be understood to weaken us, making us vulnerable to the intensities of worldly contact and each other. Reflecting upon particular modes of listening, from the empathic to the migratory, understandings of sharing and togetherness will be drawn out, leading to a consideration of what we might call an acoustics of interruption. Accordingly, listening is posed as a framework through which formations of social solidarity and self-organization may be generated, where material and immaterial, real and imaginary forces are equally demanded."

In February 2016, U.S.-based astronomers announced that they had detected gravitational waves, vibrations in the substance of space-time. When they made the detection public, they translated the signal into sound, a "chirp," a sound wave swooping up in frequency, indexing, scientists said, the collision of two black holes 1.3 billion years ago. Drawing on interviews with gravitational-wave scientists at MIT and interpreting popular representations of this cosmic audio, I ask after these scientists' acoustemology-that is, what the anthropologist of sound Steven Feld would call their "sonic way of knowing and being." Some scientists suggest that interpreting gravitational-wave sounds requires them to develop a "vocabulary," a trained judgment about how to listen to the impress of interstellar vibration on the medium of the detector. Gravitational-wave detection sounds, I argue, are thus articulations of theories with models and of models with instrumental captures of the cosmically nonhuman. Such articulations, based on mathematical and technological formalisms-Einstein's equations, interferometric observatories, and sound files-operate alongside less fully disciplined collections of acoustic, auditory, and even musical metaphors, which I call informalisms. Those informalisms then bounce back on the original articulations, leading to rhetorical reverb, in which articulations-amplified through analogies, similes, and metaphors-become difficult to fully isolate from the rhetorical reflections they generate. Filtering analysis through a number of accompanying sound files, this article contributes to the anthropology of listening, positing that scientific audition often operates by listening through technologies that have been tuned to render theories and their accompanying formalisms both materially explicit and interpretively resonant.

"They chased bees, raided junkyards and banged household objects. Now, half a century on, the Radiophonic Workshop are festival material. Meet the sound effect visionaries whose jobs came with a health warning"

"ELECTROCHROMA is a 58ʼ30" audiovisual work that emerged from the manipulation of light to generate imagery as well as using a combination of extended techniques applied to sonic-material sources, including translation of image to sound to create the 5.1 surround audio composition. The work utilizes various analog and digital procedures and a variety of software processes to manipulate the moving image and sound. The workʼs imagery ranges from dark to light monochromatic spheres, shifting dynamics and intensity, including flickering and pulsating patterns, retinal impact, and sensory overloads. The sound composition focuses on timbre, low ends, modulated frequencies, textures, static noises, and electronic sounds moving through space. Other sonic layers were created through the use of electromagnetism, custom electronic sounds, and voices scored for the work and performed in a recording studio by artist Marylea Martha Quintana."

"Crumpling a thin sheet produces a characteristic sound, comprised of distinct clicking sounds corresponding to buckling events. We propose a physically based algorithm that automatically synthesizes crumpling sounds for a given thin shell animation. The resulting sound is a superposition of individually synthesized clicking sounds corresponding to visually significant and insignificant buckling events. We identify visually signifi- cant buckling events on the dynamically evolving thin surface mesh, and instantiate visually insignificant buckling events via a stochastic model that seeks to mimic the power-law distribution of buckling energies observed in many materials. In either case, the synthesis of a buckling sound employs linear modal analysis of the deformed thin shell. Because different buckling events in general occur at different deformed configurations, the question arises whether the calculation of linear modes can be reused. We amortize the cost of the linear modal analysis by dynamically partitioning the mesh into nearly rigid pieces: the modal analysis of a rigidly moving piece is retained over time, and the modal analysis of the assembly is obtained via Component Mode Synthesis (CMS). We illustrate our approach through a series of examples and a perceptual user study, demonstrating the utility of the sound synthesis method in producing realistic sounds at practical computation times."

"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"

"Visual Record: The Materiality of Sound in Print investigates how artists since the 1970s have employed print-based processes to examine the relationship between sound and its visual representation. The exhibition features 15 artists, including Terry Adkins, John Cage, Bethany Collins, Christian Marclay, Glenn Ligon, Dario Robleto, and Audra Wolowiec, among others. "