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"Silence has become a luxury in New York that only a scant few can truly afford, and cultural, technological and economic changes in recent years have added to the din everyone else must endure, creating not just one culprit, but many. "

"For most fans attending a baseball game is a summer diversion, an addiction, an act of devotion. I'm a music critic, so for me it's something else too: an immersion in bustling, jumbled, enveloping sound. And if you think of the Yankees as an athletic orchestra, the team has a comfortable and acoustically lively new concert hall. What if I treated a game as a kind of outdoor musical piece? "

""The Music Box," the project of which this tower is a part, is one of those things that requires a hyphen or a compound word to describe; Delaney Martin, its curator, calls it "a shantytown-sound laboratory." "

"Neuhaus builds what he calls "sound works," more than 30 so far, that transform physical "places," most of which exist for other reasons. The premise is that we perceive space with our ears as well as our eyes: We hear a room as well as see it. The change is basic but subtle. A total of five - including two opened this spring on a bridge and in a corridor in Bern - are still running. Having toyed with such terms as "installation" and "sound environment," and trying to determine whether he can be called a sculptor or not, he still has trouble defining what he does. Ask Neuhaus what he is, however, and he answers without delay: "I'm an artist." "

"But can you actually hear something that does not emit a sound? Certainly, said Chris Plack, a professor of audiology at the Manchester Centre for Audiology and Deafness, who researches acoustic reflexes and auditory processing. "Hearing," as he defines it, does not require external noise; rather, it is "having the experience of a sound.""

"The recording starts with the patter of a summer squall. Later, a drifting tone like that of a not-quite-tuned-in radio station rises and for a while drowns out the patter. "

"Hearing is a vastly underrated sense. We tend to think of the world as a place that we see, interacting with things and people based on how they look. Studies have shown that conscious thought takes place at about the same rate as visual recognition, requiring a significant fraction of a second per event. But hearing is a quantitatively faster sense. While it might take you a full second to notice something out of the corner of your eye, turn your head toward it, recognize it and respond to it, the same reaction to a new or sudden sound happens at least 10 times as fast. "

"Cardiff and Miller are artists who have become known for their work with sound, and the woods of Kassel's normally sedate Karlsaue Park are home to their latest installation, "Forest (for a thousand years),""

"since 2006, when scientists at Denali began a decade-long effort to collect a month's worth of acoustic data from more than 60 sites across the park - including a 14,000-foot-high spot on Mount McKinley - Betchkal and his colleagues have recorded only 36 complete days in which the sounds of an internal combustion engine of some sort were absent. Planes are the most common source. Once, in the course of 24 hours, a single recording station captured the buzzing of 78 low-altitude props - the kind used for sightseeing tours; other areas have logged daily averages as high as one sky- or street-traffic sound every 17 minutes."

""The Universal Sense: How Hearing Shapes the Mind.""

"A red-white-and-blue sign at the corner of West Broadway and Watts Street in SoHo reads, "Don't Honk - $350 Penalty." It is, shall we say, not always heeded. This corner is a five-way crossing, where Broome Street forks into Watts, which leads to the Holland Tunnel, and crosses West Broadway, which has two-way traffic. The tunnel entrances themselves run smoothly, if slowly; traffic police officers are there. But the New Jersey exodus has to back up somewhere, and this corner is one of those places. Amid this gridlock is a whole lot of self-expression via car horns and the occasional, ah, verbal admonition. "

Can you really detain people because their phones are beeping? And when you cannot tell who is protesting, is it still a protest?

"You can look across a vast expanse of ice, all white and blue and cold, and see nothing. The lead is choked with pack ice or sealed over with newly formed ice, and there is no movement or sound. With few birds, no whales and no bears, one might mistake the Arctic for a desert. But if you go down to the ice edge, pick a hole in the new ice deep enough to reach water and drop in a hydrophone (an underwater microphone), the cacophony is astonishing. "

"Acousticians have been designing concert halls for more than a century, but Dr. Kyriakakis does something different. He shapes the sound of music to conform to the space in which it is played. The goal is what Dr. Kyriakakis calls the "ground truth" - to replicate the original in every respect. "We remove the room," he said, "so the ground truth can be delivered." "

"Like a 3-D take on Jackson Pollock, the latest work by the artist Martin Klimas begins with splatters of paint in fuchsia, teal and lime green, positioned on a scrim over the diaphragm of a speaker."

In November, Gillis and his label, Illegal Art, released the fifth Girl Talk album, "All Day," as a free download. Within 24 hours, several sites had posted annotations of "All Day," cataloging the samples on the album -there are 373 of them. Download traffic was so heavy that MTV News ran the headline "Girl Talk Apologizes for Breaking the Internet" - hyperbole, but not far from the truth. Illegal-art.net reports that "All Day" was downloaded so often that the servers crashed. In Girl Talk's honor, Pittsburgh declared Dec. 7, 2010, "Gregg Gillis Day."

"On Tuesday evening Sergei Tcherepnin performed a new composition at Issue Project Room in Downtown Brooklyn, where he is currently an artist in residence. You probably expect me to tell you something about this performance, but I'm afraid it's not that simple. "

If you live in New York, I can understand how this kind of racket might drive you bats sometimes, but to me it was a revelation.

"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." "

Events and reading matter at the intersection of science and culture.