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"The community you live in strongly shapes the soundscape of your life story. Why? Because human culture and the natural world dictate not only what we hear but also how we listen"

"For many species of frogs, the auditory space is just as crowded as in our pre-pandemic cocktail parties. When male frogs call out, they are sharing space with thousands of other frogs - from their own and different species - each also calling at the same time. Within this cacophony of croaks, the female frogs must make the important choice of finding the right male for mating based on the quality of his call."

"For over a year now, London has been a simmering site of dormant musical gatherings and suspended physical proximities, prompting me to wonder what's happened to the visceral, tactile energies through which collective musical formations gain so much of their social and emotional force. As Ben Assiter points out, the migration of electronic dance music online during the pandemic accelerated currents that were already underway with the ubiquity of livestream platforms like Boiler Room. With physical assembly prohibited, the dematerialization of collective musical experience gave rise to a whole new level of face-to-screen "participation," as solitary DJs began broadcasting live from empty clubs to bedroom audiences, who in turn performed "ironic dance floor interaction[s]" in the chat boxes."

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.

"During the Covid-19 pandemic, comparisons have often been drawn between lockdown measures and prison, yet people with lived experience of prison have countered that such domestic confinement bears little resemblance to the pains of imprisonment. These different viewpoints suggest that the general public has little understanding of what happens behind prison walls. This blogpost considers how prisoner writing can describe prison to the non-prisoner reader (i.e. a reader who does not have lived experience of prison), bearing witness to the carceral experience. Drawing on examples of short stories about prison, written by current or former prisoners, I examine how these writers recreate sensory aspects of prison in their writing. Carceral texts commonly recount the sights, sounds, touches, tastes and smells of prison; but, in my experience of reading and analysing prisoner writing, it is the depiction of prison sound that is most powerful and affecting. In this blogpost, I examine how prisoner-writers translate the speech and sounds of prison into written form, to convey the carceral experience to those outside prison walls."

"24 hours with sounds from artists, made in their daily work and life during spring 2020. A different artist every hour (based on CEST). For a good experience of the hours, we recommend the use of headphones."

"A music critic's soundscape has been reshaped by the wail of ambulances. But she's learning to hear in unexpected ways."

"In an attempt to understand this new pathogen better, musician and engineer Markus Buehler and his colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have assigned each protein and structural form a musical equivalent."

"It is of vital importance to attend to the Covid soundscape while we are still in it because the Covid soundscape is bound by time and place and is ever-changing. Once Covid is eradicated, our access to the sounds surrounding it disappear as well."

"The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) lockdown meant a greatly reduced social and economic activity. Sound is of major importance to people's perception of the environment, and some remarked that the soundscape was changing for the better. But are these anecdotal reports based in truth? Has traffic noise from cars and airplanes really gone down, so that more birdsong can be heard? Have socially distanced people quietened down? This article presents a case study of the human perception of environmental sounds in an urban neighborhood in the Basque Country between 15 March and 25 May 2020."