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As you're tuning your speakers in preparation for Live in Concert, listen to "RAGE (After Tokyo 2020)," DJ Mars89's new mix in response to the Tokyo Olympics-and in opposition to hollow celebrations of national identity and false displays of unity. Moving between speeches, industrial noise, deconstructions of traditional Japanese instruments, and protest music, Mars89 channels the widespread anger at the Olympics: a self-aggrandizing indulgence pushed through by the country's elites during a pandemic, at incredible cost to the people. The mix is published as part of Unknown States, an issue devoted to the fictions that give rise to nations and nationalities.

"The design, for a house on a generic suburban lot, mixes sound on two levels. First, "sonic windows," embedded with microphones and tiny cameras, capture images and sounds from outside the house and broadcast them inside. Second, the house encourages family members to mix, layer, and juxtapose pre-recorded sounds with those collected from outside. Think bluebirds chirping along with Beyonce, or the postman slamming the mailbox shut at a climactic moment in a Beethoven symphony."

"Between 1967 and 1988, Maryanne Amacher produced a 22-part series she titled City-Links. In City-Links, Amacher transmitted live sonic feeds from cities (or multiple sites within the same city) via high-quality telephone lines and mixed these sources live during installations, performances, and radio broadcasts. Sonic environments she selected included harbors, steel mills, stone towers, flour mills, factories, silos, airports, rivers, open fields, utility companies, and musicians "on location". The first in the series, In City (1967), was a 28-hour live mix connecting eight locations around Buffalo via phone lines to WBFO, Buffalo public radio. A very early example of telematic performance, or 'long distance music', the project enabled Amacher to connect acoustic spaces distant from each other and thus hear synchronicity 'live' as it is."

Centuries of Sound is an attempt to produce a set of mixes for every year of recorded sound. Starting in 1860, a mix will be posted every month until we catch up with the present day. So far we are still in the very early days, where a very limited selection of recordings are available, but as we get into the 20th century I hope to include the widest possible spread, both in terms of geography and genre. This will mean that experts will be required. If you are interested in putting yourself forwards as an expert on Rembetika, early microtonal recordings, French political speeches, Tagore songs or anything else, then please do drop me a line at centuriesofsoundmail at gmail.

Craig Smith, has digitized and shared a 27GB collection of vintage sound effects. The sounds form three collections. They consist of high-quality, first generation copies of original nitrate optical sound effects from the 1930s & '40s created for Hollywood studios. They were collected by a prominent sound editor who worked in the industry for 44 years. The fragile optical elements were donated to USC, and transferred to tape by USC Cinema students in the early 1970s. There are three collections: The Gold and Red Libraries (Gold effects start with "G", Red with "R") consist of high-quality, first generation copies of original nitrate optical sound effects from the 1930s & '40s created for Hollywood studios. They were collected by a prominent sound editor who worked in the industry for 44 years. The fragile optical elements were donated to USC, and transferred to tape by USC Cinema students in the early 1970s. The Sunset Editorial (SSE) Library was also donated to USC around 1990. It includes classic effects from the 1930s into the '80s. These effects are from 35mm magnetic film. They were often several generations removed from the originals, and not as clean, so some careful restoration was done to make them more useful. SSE effects start with "S" About Craig Smith: "I have been recording, editing, & mixing sound since 1964, and teaching sound design and technology at California Institute of the Arts since 1986. In my spare time, I experiment with implied narrative and accidental sound design -- putting together sounds & images that have nothing to do with each other to create unexpected stories."

"Living under the paving stones, consuming our refuse, and incubating our diseases, the city rat is a ubiquitous part of global, urban capitalism. The revulsion rats inspire actually speaks of our closeness to them-rattus norvegicus burrows through the supposed human / nature divide. And just as we continually negotiate our place in a dynamic city, so have rats developed elaborate social codes intertwined with urban architecture and geography. We are not usually privy to the vocal address of one rat to another, however, as they primarily speak above the (20khz) threshold of human hearing. For Urban Intonation, I recorded rats at multiple sites on the streets of NYC with an ultrasonic microphone. I then resampled and pitch-shifted the result into the range of the human voice and mixed it for playback over a human public address system, repositioning rat noise in public space as something that is recognizable, if not intelligible, as speech. "

"O'Daniel has worn hearing aids since she was 3. The ones she has now are digital, and sometimes they give her a heightened sense of sound: A car engine hum becomes earsplitting. Within daily experiences of frustration, and I do a lot of compensating, there's also this kind of radical, heightened attention," O'Daniel said. "And that mix, I find just fascinating. O'Daniel has spent most of her art career focused on recreating those jarring sounds.

"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 project set out to give a rich and rigorous account of human perception of and response to soundscapes. To do this it used overlapping methods from a wide range of disciplines, ranging from the quantitative (e.g. acoustics) to the qualitative (e.g. social science) to the creative (e.g. sound art). Qualitative fieldwork (soundwalks and focus groups) determined that people conceptualised a soundscape into three components: sound sources (e.g. a market), sound descriptors (e.g. rumbling) and soundscape descriptors (e.g. hubbub). Lab-based listening tests along with the fieldwork have revealed that two key dimensions of the emotional response to a soundscape are calmness and vibrancy. In the lab these factors explain nearly 80% of the variance in listener response. Interview responses from real soundscapes further indicate that vibrancy can be expressed in two sub-dimensions expressing variation over time and over sound mix. Physiological validation of the main dimensions is provided by images of changes in the brain during listening from fMRI scans and by changes in heart rate. Artistic work and the public responses to it illustrate the huge range of sounds and soundscapes considered positive. Tools for simulating soundscapes have been developed and seem to be effective for several purposes, including design and public engagement - that is, sound play. The project results will lead to new metrics and assessment methods for soundscapes, new ideas for design and user engagement and, perhaps, better policy on environmental noise.

This site documents my work as a mixed-media artist. I've worked primarily with sound and video since the early 1990s and performed and worked on projects throughout Europe and North America. In recent years I have also concentrated on giving workshops on various aspects of sound that encourage collaboration through social communication, performance, mapping, recording and editing. - ohn grzinich

Andra McCartney is a multimedia soundscape artist, composer, performer and poet. Currently she is working on 'Soundwalking Home', a series of soundwalks through neighborhoods in which she has lived, and a soundscape documenting the Lachine Canal region, near Montreal. McCartney's installations have been shown at Maid in Cyberspace Encore (Montreal), KAAI Modern Fuel Gallery (Kingston, Ontario), miXing Women In Sound Art Festival (Chicago), The Kitchen ... Her writings have been published in Leonardo Music Journal, MusicWorks ... She has collaborated with visual artist P.S. Moore, championed the work of soundscape composer Hildegard Westerkamp, and she is actively involved with the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology. She lives in Montreal and is teaches at Concordia University, Montreal.

Fantastic Futures is a collaborative group of individuals from Iraq and the United States. Together, we've created this online platform for mixing and sharing of recorded sounds and stories across cultures. Our goal is to connect citizens from nations in conflict in an open dialogue based around the sharing of field recordings, songs, and interviews. Hopefully, this might help to collapse the barriers of physical space that contribute to the misunderstandings between cultures and to emphasize the subversive value of sharing experiences across political borders.

"Krause spends many pages challenging the human monopoly on musicianship. He asserts that in the wild, animals vocalize with a musicianly ear to the full score of the ecosystem - a mix of competition and cooperation. Since animals depend on being heard for various reasons (mating, predation, warning, play), they are forced to seek distinct niches: "Each resident species acquires its own preferred sonic bandwidth - to blend or contrast - much in the way that violins, woodwinds, trumpets and percussion instruments stake out acoustic territory in an orchestral arrangement." "

"How to create music with simple rules and a loop pedal. A mix of music, maths, and molecular dynamics."

"Conceptually the film was a joy to work on as sound designer, as the premise was essentially a musical conversation between Richard, the instruments, his musical collaborators and the New Zealand landscape, beautifully filmed by Alan Bollinger and sympathetically edited to allow room for the music & sound to fully engage. And thanks to a beautiful mix by Mike Hedges & Tim Chaprione at Park Road Post, I think the film achieves the admirable goal of experiencing the world of its music, rather than just observing it."

Improve focus and boost your productivity. Mix different sounds and create your perfect environment.

"From Here to Ear (v. 13) is the thirteenth iteration of an installation by French artist Céleste Boursier-Mougenot at the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art. Primarily a sensory experience, the exhibit is meant to engage both visually and audibly as 40 finches hop delicately through a dense matrix created from hundreds of metal hangers causing vibrations and clinks that mix with the birds natural songs"

"With work that is a delightful mix of archaic technologies, Aura Satz explores the complex marriage of human and machine and the uncertainty it engenders in bodily awareness and human agency. "

"Stereomodernism" addresses the life, struggle, triumphs, and deaths of African Americans from 1619 to the present. The mix reinstates the original framing of techno as embodied aural history-and does so from a Black theoretical perspective, as a direct foil to Rainald Goetz's 1998 novel Rave.

"Ugnayan consists of twenty separate 51-minute tracks, each to be played back on a different radio station. The idea was then to have everyone in Manila tune in to a different radio station so that all of the tracks would play back simultaneously, each from a different source. This is a stereo mix of the original tracks, recorded by Maceda and a small group in 1973, using mostly traditional Philippine instruments. Masses of layered percussion and wind sounds build up in short passages and are supplanted by new ones. There's an abundance of bamboo sound, either struck or blown, and a lot of harmonic information happening. This piece (and Maceda's work in general) is important because it attempts to bring together elements of traditional folk music and "avant-garde" composition, and they do it in the public arena. These are not just dusty academic endeavors, they were and are lively examples of other ways that music and sound can be integrated into everyday life. -Jeph Jerman, squidsear"