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""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."

"Trained as a musical composer, Beer (who created a 'Vessel Orchestra' for his 2019 solo show at the Met Breuer) works with the acoustic fingerprints of architecture, asking vocalists to stimulate their natural harmonics. 'Since I was a kid, I could hear the notes of buildings,' he says, explaining that a room is like a seashell, constantly making its own sounds.  When he found himself on the wrong side of the Sydney Opera House, he led his four local singers to an external nook of the building, then asked them to lock lips and treat each other's bodies as architecture. 'The acoustic space that they're working with is the empty mouth of the other person that they're singing through.'"

"All of Toronto's music and opera presenters include an educational component in what they do. But the Toronto Symphony Orchestra's A Toronto Symphony project may be the first time that the city's children get a hand in actually shaping a mainstage performance."

"As part of the 21st Biennale of Sydney Oliver Beer will exhibit two new works: Composition for Mouths (Songs My Mother Taught Me) I & II, 2018 at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. These two films are a direct response to Beer's unprecedented access as artist in residence at the Sydney Opera House. Exploring ideas of cultural memory and 'inherited music', Beer asked singers to recall the earliest songs they remembered from childhood, incorporating the melodies into new compositional forms. Joining their lips in a tight seal to create a single mouth cavity, the singers explore the resonant frequencies of each other's faces as well as the architecture. They blend their voices to create rhythmic microtonal harmonic interactions known as 'beats' whilst combining adapted forms of their remembered music."

It is all too easy for architecture to be seen and not heard. Instragrammable visuals may be at our fingertips, but it is impossible to photograph an echo. Sad news, considering the most memorable of spaces are those that heighten more than just our optical sense. What's more, much of new architecture is focused on controlling sound, rather than celebrating it. We want to block out our neighbours, escape the city noise, or buffer any possibility of sonic surprise. Here are 10 spaces to remind us of architecture's acoustic abilities - from the unexpected quarry opera venue to the deliberate forest megaphone. If you're a musician, imagine playing in these…

"In the lineage of musique concrète, a composition created from recorded sounds rather than instrumentation and vocals, The Last Stand chronicles the lifespan of a 300-year-old White Oak from the years 1750 - 2050. The "Mother Tree" lives in Black Rock Forest, a nearly 4,000 acre diverse ecosystem in upstate New York. The story spans the Mother Tree's life from acorn to its "last stand," the final burst of life-giving energy a tree gives to its vast forest network before it dies. From the quotidian to the catastrophic, the sonic narrative spans elements that produce and hold life in nature. As the years unfold, the human impact on the forest becomes visceral: from the onset of settler colonial occupation to the physical and technological expansion of nearby United States Military Academy West Point, species disappear, storms intensify, and the drone of highways and planes becomes constant.  "