Group items tagged

"Discrete Archive was created for music, writing and artefacts that explore quietness. This can mean many things, we like music that allows for space, presents sonority as object and is concerned with the materiality of sound, sound as thing. We occupy a world of noise, discerning meaning in this sea of noise is increasingly difficult.  We invite you to contemplate the world around you through stillness and quiet that sound can provide a focus for. "

"Libraries, as 'sanctuaries of quiet', are unique places, both culturally and acoustically: they soundproof our thoughts from the distraction and the noise outside their walls. However, they also coerce us into behaving quietly, amplifying the sounds we make beneath their domed acoustic chambers. Manchester Central Library's main reading room, placed on the top floor and filled with natural light, was designed to impose a state of quiet on the reader, with every small sound amplified by the unique acoustic of the domed roof."

"Severance provides a stellar example of how a quiet, subtle, appropriate, yet detailed soundtrack can have every bit as much impact as a Marvel movie."

"n urban areas, silent places where one can enjoy some quietude are getting more and more scarce. There's a lot of what some might call "noise pollution", sound harmful to human health and disturbing a balanced life. With cities still getting more crowded and thus louder every year, no wonder that this is quite a hot topic, also with artists. We saw Music for Forgotten Places by composer Oliver Blank last year for example, a project where one can dial a phone number on a sign to hear some music for a silent place in the city, and take a mindful moment in a busy city."

"Human industry is now noisy enough to drown out whale songs. What would happen in the ocean if we went quiet? "

" At the turn of the millennium, improvised music from Japan became incredibly quiet. Clive Bell explains why previously noisy artists turned the volume down."

"The ocean might seem like a quiet place, but listen carefully and you might just hear the sounds of the fish choir. Most of this underwater music comes from soloist fish, repeating the same calls over and over. But when the calls of different fish overlap, they form a chorus."

"What do you think we are not hearing? Can listening encourage us to challenge our assumptions, and change our behaviour and decision-making processes concerning our relations to non-human species? Can human opinions on invertebrates be shifted through listening? I have been developing a process for constructing synthesized "built" soundscapes of hidden sounds. Built Hidden Soundscape: Pipeline Road, Gamboa is a preliminary result from this research. I made the field recordings for this built soundscape while at the Digital Naturalism conference in Gamboa, Panama in August 2019. The video shows a scrolling image of a spectrogram. A spectrogram is a bioacoustic tool that shows how sounds sit together in a soundscape. The Y axis represents frequency (Hz) and the X axis represents time. This spectrogram, however, focuses on 'hidden sounds' - sounds that cannot be heard by humans without the use of technology; sounds that are easily heard by human ears are excluded from this synthesized, artificial rendering of a soundscape. The sound work consists of field recordings from Pipeline Road in Gamboa, bookended by the dynamic dawn and dusk soundscapes of Pipeline Road. This built soundscape includes ultrasonic sounds (above the range of human hearing, played back at lower frequency), substrate-borne vibrations, and otherwise very quiet sounds. "

"Montefiore Hospital in the UK teamed up with ambient music artist Brian Eno in April 2013 to create a Quiet Room where patients can find relaxation and calm. Eno designed a light and sound installation for the room and for the reception area, including an original soundtrack of soothing instrumental tunes. Once the room has had a few inhabitants, there are plans to examine whether the patients who have sought solace there exhibit any beneficial physiological changes."

""we tend to be indifferent to acoustics" in contemporary residences, and think only of "competing with traffic outside". Normally, he continues, "architecture is about being quiet", whereas there's a rich history of sound and architecture - especially in pre-literate societies. He talks of the clarity of sound in the Greek amphitheatre, of the intentional use of sound spaces in Medieval and Gothic cathedrals, which were "designed by acoustics as much as visual principles - they were considered 'sacred resonators'"."

"David Hendy, media historian at the University of Sussex, host of the thirty-part BBC Radio series, Noise: A Human History, and the author of Noise: A Human History of Sound and Listening, talks about the social history of noise and kicks off the call-in on the question of sound and creativity. What sounds sparks your creativity or do you need absolute quiet?"

"I just came back from New York City, a place with an overwhelming sound, everywhere you go. And each location in a city like that has its own resonance, its own sonic identity. That's hard to hear though if there is so much noise around it becomes a cacophony. But what if we could isolate this resonance and listen to the astonishing differences in the sound of urban spaces? Davide Tidoni did just that with A Balloon for Linz. Luckily Linz is not NYC, and he was able to find spots which were quiet enough to make a clear recording (using his nice helmet mount microphone). You might recognize the concept as Davide did something similar before."

"There is a lot of noise in this city of ours, what with sirens screaming, buses screeching and LOUD music blaring out of headphones on already rackety subway cars. No escaping it. Not in libraries, not in the sanctity of your apartment, not even in yoga class. (What exactly is the point of Savasana? After you quiet the voices screaming in your head, all you can hear is bleeping cars and police sirens.) "

Synopsis: this bitter-sweet comedy tells the story of a man who suffers from hyper-acoustic sensitivity, which makes his life in Tel Aviv, one of the noisiest urban locations on earth, a living hell. His quest to live in peace and quiet by politely asking neighbors for basic consideration, or by addressing the boisterous passing-by to re-consider the mere fact they are 'not alone in the world', or even by trying to plea to the authorities: Police and Municipality - or even worse: talking the law into his own hands: all means have proved nothing but his bitter impotency in the face of the irrepressible Israeli "noise-mania". So he decides to act. He constructs a special surveillance apparatus in order to monitor and control the invading street-neighbor-noise, and with the help of a "God-like" megaphone he takes control over the intruding street noise. His fantasy to silence also the noise within his own family life, turns co-existence with him unbearable. It doesn't take long before it becomes inevitable that he would have to pay the price.

"While we all can appreciate getting some peace and quiet every now and then, you might be surprised to learn that there's only so much of it the brain can take."

"Untitled V is a sound sculpture that consists of miniature speakers acoustically activated by a motor driven mechanism. A nylon thread is fastened through a hole at the center of the membrane; the end of the nylon thread is loosely secured to a motor turned rosined wheel to produce friction. Sound is produced by the action of the rim of the rotating wheel rubbing the thread as the wheel is turned. The two surfaces alternating between sticking to each other and sliding over each other, with a corresponding change in the force of friction. The motor speed is reduced at the lowest speed. The slow turn of the wheel creates changes in the tension of the thread, resulting as sounds (crackling impulse) in the membrane of the speaker. Untitled V creates a very quiet listening experience. "

Eno uses visual art and music to make hospital stays more relaxing for patients. (Good history on this project.)

"The first audio recordings on Mars reveal a quiet planet with occasional gusts of wind where two different speeds of sound would have a strange delayed effect on hearing, scientists said Friday."

"Nature has published a new article about the acoustic environment of Mars, called "In situ recording of Mars soundscape", from a long term research done by a vast group of astrophysicists and space explorers, primarily based on recordings taken by NASA's Perseverance rover, which has been on the planet since February 2021 and has discovered that the "red planet" has two different speeds of sound, as well as some special acoustic proprieties. "

"Scientists from Chalmers have demonstrated a new kind of detector for sound at the level of quietness of quantum mechanics. The result offers prospects of a new class of quantum hybrid circuits that mix acoustic elements with electrical ones, and may help illuminate new phenomena of quantum physics. The results have been published in Nature Physics. ​The "quantum microphone" is based on a single electron transistor, that is, a transistor where the current passes one electron at a time. The acoustic waves studied by the research team propagate over the surface of a crystalline microchip, and resemble the ripples formed on a pond when a pebble is thrown into it. The wavelength of the sound is a mere 3 micrometers, but the detector is even smaller, and capable of rapidly sensing the acoustic waves as they pass by."