Group items tagged

"With this special issue of Seismograf we are happy to present a new format of articles: Audio Papers. Audio papers resemble the regular essay or the academic text in that they deal with a certain topic of interest, but presented in the form of an audio production. The audio paper is an extension of the written paper through its specific use of media, a sonic awareness of aesthetics and materiality, and creative approach towards communication. The audio paper is a performative format working together with an affective and elaborate understanding of language. It is an experiment embracing intellectual arguments and creative work, papers and performances, written scholarship and sonic aesthetics."

"Audio papers resemble the regular essay or the academic text in that they deal with a certain topic of interest, but presented in the form of an audio production. The audio paper is an extension of the written paper through its specific use of media, a sonic awareness of aesthetics and materiality, and creative approach towards communication. The audio paper is a performative format working together with an affective and elaborate understanding of language. It is an experiment embracing intellectual arguments and creative work, papers and performances, written scholarship and sonic aesthetics."

Another nice looking physical representation of a sound wave is created by Andrew Spitz from { sound + design } in collaboration with interaction designer Andrew Nip. Paper Note is made using a laser cutter to create discs of paper who form the waveform when joined on a piece of string.

My work fuses the raw material of music into visual, emotional and intellectual forms by drawing with cut paper, shaping and layering positive and negative space into rhythms. The paper is meticulously cut and composed, opened and closed, with a focus on creating lines that specify coherent patterns of light and shadows on a grid, forming a visual musical structure. In essence, the paper itself becomes the instrument that draws light into visual musical patterns.

"Over the past 40 years "sound art" has been hailed as a new artistic category in numerous writings, yet one of its first significant exhibitions is mentioned only in passing, if at all. The first instance of the hybrid term sound art used as the title of an exhibition at a major museum was Sound Art at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA), shown from 25 June to 5 August 1979. Although this was not marketed as a feminist exhibition, curator Barbara London selected three women to exemplify the new form. Maggi Payne created multi-speaker works that utilized space in a sculptural fashion; Connie Beckley combined language and sounding sculptural objects, showing sound in both a conceptual and physical manifestation; and Julia Heyward's work used aspects of feminist performance art including music, narrative, and the voice in order to buck abstract aesthetics of the time. This paper uses archival research, interviews, and analysis of work presented to reconstruct the exhibition and describe the obstacles both the artists and the curator encountered. The paper further provides context in the lives of the artists and the curator as well as the surrounding artistic scene, and ultimately exposes the discriminatory reasons this important exhibition has been marginalized in the current discourse."

It was the anthropologist's desire to understand the many ways that sound can be meaningful, coupled with the artist's ability to 'think outside the box', - leading to talk of thunderstorms harmonizing with jazz concerts and 'contrapuntal conversations' - which gave us the theme of the conference - 'The Body, the Environment, and Human Sound-making'. This conference, with its many complementary papers and presentations, you see and hear here now. Steven Feld suggested that a new form of media might help give the papers the voice they needed. We took this advice, and hope that the possibility to hear the sounds and see the visuals of many of the papers as you read them gives an important new dimension to the conference proceedings.

"Instead of dealing with the aesthetic aspects of the acoustic environment, the evolution of listening habits or cultural representations of urban noise, sound will be considered as a means for action and social practice. This paper tries to develop a praxiological approach to sound. To do so, two major obstacles must be overcome. On the one hand, it is necessary to challenge the three main socially recognized categories of sounds: music, speech and noise. "

"The 10-second recording of a singer crooning the folk song "Au Clair de la Lune" was discovered earlier this month in an archive in Paris by a group of American audio historians. It was made, the researchers say, on April 9, 1860, on a phonautograph, a machine designed to record sounds visually, not to play them back. But the phonautograph recording, or phonautogram, was made playable — converted from squiggles on paper to sound — by scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif."

"This issue of Interference asked authors to consider sound as the means to which we can explain the sonic. Contributions to the study of sound, apart from practice-based works, are often disseminated through language and text. This is the case for most analysis or research into sensory based and phenomenological studies. There is of course a strong case to be made for text; it is the universal way in which contemporary knowledge is transmitted. But perhaps there is an argument to be made for new ways to not only explore sound but to disseminate ideas around the sonic. For example, in what way can 'sonic papers' represent ideas about the experience of space and place, local and community knowledge? How can emerging technologies engage with both the everyday soundscape and how we 'curate this experience'? What is the potential of listening methods as a tool to engage community with 'soundscape preservation' and as a tool to critique and challenge urban planning projects?"

"This paper would like to draw your attention to a matter that regards us all, every day: the sound of the urban environment. We are used to looking around us, we are less used to listening to what happens around us. And yet, the noises we produce reveal our way of life, and learning to master them is a necessity."

One day conference exploring how noise management and soundscape design can improve the use and enjoyment of London's green spaces and public realm." PDFs of papers and presentations can be found here

"This paper will explore how the practice of soundwalking can be a tool for memory retrieval. I ask: How are memories created and remembered in the mind and felt within the body? What happens to our perception of self, home, and knowing as we move through spaces and places of significance?"

"Did you know there are audio recordings that predate Thomas Edison's phonograph by almost 20 years? The phonautogram was invented by a Frenchman named Éduoard Léon-Scott and patented in 1857, translating sound waves (shakily) onto sheets of paper. But for the last century, no one had been able to decode the information on Léon-Scott's sheets and listen, until a team of scientists and historians figured it out."

An incredible example of what can be done with laser-cutting, Amanda Ghassaei's project "Laser Cut Record" features music inscribed directly into cut discs of maple wood, acrylic, and paper, resulting in lo-fi but playable records.

"This paper will explore how the practice of soundwalking can be a tool for memory retrieval. I ask: How are memories created and remembered in the mind and felt within the body? What happens to our perception of self, home, and knowing as we move through spaces and places of significance? "

""We are delighted to present a guest-edited issue of the Interference Journal. The editors Fernando Iazzetta, Lílian Campesato and Rui Chaves present Out of Phase, a selection of papers from the Sonologia 2016: Out of Phase conference. I would like to thank the team of editors at the Interference Journal, Tony Doyle, Rob McKay, Kate Carr, Brian Bridges and Stephen Roddy for finalising this latest issue.""

"Ears are a peculiarly individual piece of anatomy. Those little fleshy seashells, whether they stick out or hang low, can be instantly recognizable in family portraits. And they aren't just for show. Researchers have discovered that filling in an external part of the ear with a small piece of silicone drastically changes people's ability to tell whether a sound came from above or below. But given time, the scientists show in a paper published Monday in the Journal of Neuroscience, the brain adjusts to the new shape, regaining the ability to pinpoint sounds with almost the same accuracy as before."

What is phonography? In this essay, Christopher DeLaurenti, a phonographer with three decades of experience, maps an axiomatic 13-lesson pedagogy through an abbreviated history of field recording, from Jesse Walter Fewkes in 1890 to Tony Schwartz in the early 1960s. This paper surveys various meanings and uses of the term phonography from a text published in 1701 to the formation in 2000 of the phonography listserv, an online community of makers of field recordings.

"Sound, as a modality of emotion, is central to the everyday constitution of space. For an increasing population in Canada, however, incarceration forms the basis of everyday life. This paper explores the connections between sound and emotion as they play out in the under-researched context of prisons. I use a participant's term, "feeling the range," to identify the atmospheric, haptic, and emotive potential of sound as a vital tool of spatial knowledge. "

In Resonance: The Journal of Sound and culture "This paper explores the cultural ramifications of music generated by artificial intelligence (AI). Deploying complex algorithms to create original music productions, AI's automation of human authorship may suggest a radically new sonic form. However, its creators have preferred to use its tools to mimic established musical genres from the past. "