Group items tagged

"The acoustic properties of our houses, offices and public spaces can have a major impact on how comfortable we find them and may even affect the way we behave."

"In case you haven't been tracking the progress of group exhibitions of sound art, a short history would be: they are generally a disaster, with many works either impossible to hear adequately in the situation or impossible not to hear while you are trying to listen to something else. "It is in sound's nature to be free and uncontrollable and to go through the cracks and to go places where it's not supposed to go," as the sound artist Christian Marclay said, in an interview, in 2005. Meanwhile, the institutions that are devoted to art exhibition-galleries, museums-are all about placing art works where they intend them to stay. "I think it's great that there is this interest in sound and music," Marclay said. "But the over-all art-world structures are not yet ready for that, because sound requires different technology and different architecture to be presented.""

"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)."

"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. "

"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)."

"Playing sound effects both pleasant and awful, Julian Treasure shows how sound affects us in four significant ways. Listen carefully for a shocking fact about noisy open-plan offices."

"For this year's Venice Art Biennale, Norway is solely responsible for the Nordic Pavilion for the first time in its history. For this occasion, the Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA) has commissioned artist Camille Norment to develop the project. Camille Norment conceived a site-specific, sculptural and sonic installation entitled Rapture."

"Listening Desk is an interactive sound sculpture that invites people to access and create soundscapes with sound archives. It is installed at 10 locations around the UK: Archives+ in Manchester Central Library; Cumbria Archives in Carlisle Archive Center; Discovery Museum, Newcastle upon Tyne; Norfolk Record Office; The British Library outside the King's Library; The National Library of Scotland at Kelvin Hall, Glasgow;  Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru/The National Library of Wales; The Wellbeing Collection at University of Sussex Library; Ulster Transport Museum, Cultra, County Down, Ireland; and University of Leicester in Sir Bob Burgess Building."

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