Group items tagged

" "Devine has taken data from NASA's Kepler missions to create individual compositions that occupy each floor of the 29 metre high tower, built in 1758. Each composition can be thought of as a subset of this set of data, and a mapping of the range of frequencies and information gathered by the missions to a more manageable human scale. The compositions from each star's data are positioned according to their age, frequency range and the number of exoplanets they host, moving upwards through the tower, which could almost have been custom built for the installation. [...] As you ascend through the building, you're also moving light years through the universe, outwards towards the different solar systems with their exoplanets and changing resonances. Just as musical instruments resonate with frequencies, so can the stars and planets, and it is this resonance that Devine has scaled for the human ear.""

"Scientists have recently made some remarkable discoveries about non-human sounds. With the aid of digital bioacoustics - tiny, portable digital recorders similar to those found in your smartphone - researchers are documenting the universal importance of sound to life on Earth. By placing these digital microphones all over Earth, from the depths of the ocean to the Arctic and the Amazon, scientists are discovering the hidden sounds of nature, many of which occur at ultrasonic or infrasonic frequencies, above or below human hearing range. Non-humans are in continuous conversation, much of which the naked human ear cannot hear. But digital bioacoustics helps us hear these sounds, by functioning as a planetary-scale hearing aid and enabling humans to record nature's sounds beyond the limits of our sensory capacities. With the help of artificial intelligence (AI), researchers are now decoding complex communication in other species."

"Composer R. Murray Schafer will inspire you to listen to the music of sound. His 1977 book "The Tuning of the World" is full of original, evocative observations and insights about the roles music and sound play in human lives. Schafer, considered by some to be Canada's pre-eminent composer, makes a rare visit to New York, and talks with host David Garland about the ideas behind "The Tuning of the World," and about his music, which includes Patria, a cycle of music and theater pieces on an extraordinarily grand scale."

"Conceptualizing sound in geologic terms is a daunting task. Both the geologic and the sonic are time-based media, defined by duration. Yet sound speaks in milliseconds, the geologic in eons. They exist in different time zones. So, given this conundrum, instead of considering how to measure sound within a geologic scale, perhaps we are better served to ask: What do geologic materials sound like or, more precisely, what do geologic materials hear? This latter question might seem ridiculously anthropomorphic, given that we are talking about material objects. So let us first consider what exactly sound and hearing are."

Kathryn Walter is a Canadian artist who maintains a studio practice that intersects visual art, design and material culture. She operates the FELT studio as a laboratory to explore modern industrial felt through exhibitions, historical research, architectural commissions and a product line. Influenced by her background in sculpture, Walter has created a body of work ranging from intimate artworks to large-scale installations. She has collaborated with architects and created felt walls for residential, institutional and commercial sites including Google (Montreal), Red Bull (Toronto), The Museum of Tolerance (Los Angeles); and CUNY Law School and The New School (New York). Walter has shown her work in exhibitions at the Royal Ontario Museum (Toronto) and the Cooper Hewitt Nation Design Museum (New York). She received a BFA from Emily Carr College of Art and Design (Vancouver) and an MFA from Concordia University (Montreal). She lives and works in Toronto. www.feltstudio.com

"A tree's year rings are analysed for their strength, thickness and rate of growth. This data serves as basis for a generative process that outputs piano music. It is mapped to a scale which is again defined by the overall appearance of the wood (ranging from dark to light and from strong texture to light texture). The foundation for the music is certainly found in the defined ruleset of programming and hardware setup, but the data acquired from every tree interprets this ruleset very differently."

"The SoundObject series captures the auditory component of making the ceramic objects. The work pairs sound and image as the final product. Each element of the project is documented and recorded with an iPhone. The intent is to view it on that scale. "

"Stonehenge was the ultimate venue for ceremonies and rituals when it was built more than 4000 years ago. But what did they sound like? Now a 1:12 scale model of the site, with the stones in their original positions, reveals the surprising acoustic qualities of the monument."

"Acoustic communication is crucial to humans and many other tetrapods, including birds, frogs, crocodilians, and mammals. However, large-scale patterns in its evolution are largely unstudied. Here, we address several fundamental questions about the origins of acoustic communication in terrestrial vertebrates (tetrapods), using phylogenetic methods."

"The project - which involves large-scale noise monitoring - leverages the latest in machine learning technology, big data analysis, and citizen science reporting to more effectively monitor, analyze, and mitigate urban noise pollution. Known as Sounds of New York City (SONYC), this multi-year project has received a $4.6 million grant from the National Science Foundation and has the support of City health and environmental agencies."

Urban sound has a huge influence over how we perceive places. Yet, city planning is concerned mainly with noise, simply because annoying sounds come to the attention of city officials in the form of complaints, while general urban sounds cannot be easily captured at city scale. To capture both unpleasant and pleasant sounds, we propose a new methodology that relies on tagging information of georeferenced pictures. We propose the first urban sound dictionary and compare it to the one produced by collating insights from the literature: ours is experimentally more valid (if correlated with official noise pollution levels) and offers wider geographic coverage. From picture tags, we then study the relationship between soundscapes and emotions. We learn that streets with music sounds are associated with strong emotions of joy or sadness, while those with human sounds are associated with joy or surprise. Finally, we study the relationship between soundscapes and people's perceptions and, in so doing, we are able to map which areas are chaotic, monotonous, calm, and exciting.Those insights promise to inform the creation of restorative experiences in our increasingly urbanized world.

"A behind the scenes look at how peppercorns, cardamom, turmeric, paprika, cumin seeds, ginger, chilli and coriander became a physical music scale."

"Long Wave Synthesis. A huge land-art scale sound art installation that investigates infrasound, and probes the relations between how we perceive the landscape and long-wave vibrations. "

"WaveCloud-M is Matlab-oriented simulator which uses the Finite Difference Time Domain (FDTD) method to solve the linear acoustic wave-equation numerically. It originates from a simulation tool which I designed in 2010 to model rooms for my PhD thesis, which is called WaveCloud (without the M). The original WaveCloud project relies heavily on parallisation on a GPU and facilitates a means for large-scale modelling. Even though it is a powerful tool, it relies on specialised hardware and can be somewhat cumbersome as it requires some machine-specific tweaking. I have listened to feedback from many users, and accordingly, I decided to create a new version of WaveCloud, which can be run 'out of the box' from within Matlab, and does not require building any third-party components. This version only shares the name with the original WaveCloud, and its engine was re-designed from the core."

"The "Sonògraf" is an electronic audiovisual instrument. Thought as a music learning tool for primary schools, it allows the drawing to be transformed into music, turning gestural strokes and geometric figures into electronic sounds. A set of buttons and potentiometers allow live manipulation of the "sonification" characteristics of the drawing, making it possible to speed up, slow down or pause the resulting music, as well as decide its scales and tonalities."

"Atmosphere of Sound: Sonic Art in Times of Climate Disruption" is a multi-year research project culminating in a large-scale exhibition of sound-based art. UCLA Art | Sci Center proposes to explore the relationship between sound as a post-object art form, and our shifting relationship to the world of things as necessitated by climate change.

"VOSIS is a synthesizer that creates complex wavetables by scanning and filtering greyscale pixel data from images, videos, or live camera input. The audification and filtering of pixel luminance correlates visual shape to sound timbre. Scan rate in terms of octave, interval, and scale allows for use as a musical instrument. Thus, VOSIS is a tool for image sonification, sound design, and visual music composition."

"TOKYO -- When an earthquake measuring a lower 5 or stronger on the 7-point Japanese seismic intensity scale is predicted, public broadcaster NHK airs an emergency earthquake alert chime on TV and radio, known for its distinctive melody. Even in noisy environments, this sound is clear and can evoke a sense of fear. But why is that?"

"With Resonance Audio, bring dynamic spatial sound into your VR, AR, gaming, or video experiences at scale."

"Acclaimed Japanese artist Ryoji Ikeda creates new dimensions where art and quantum physics itersect. "