Group items tagged

"All animals use their senses to perceive the world, humans included. But not every animal senses the same thing. In Pulitzer prize-winning science journalist Ed Yong's new book, he explores the way each species sees the world through its own sensory viewpoint and explains why that should both delight and humble us."

"Interface: Echolocation Headphones. 10/12 Echolocation Headphones is a project that studies new applications for parametric sound technologies. This study emphasizes on augmentation of the auditory sense by enhancing our current ability of processing omnidirectional sound by providing a focal point to audition, similar to a visual focal point. Currently, human echolocation is being explored by the blind who have reached an increased understanding of sound and spatial relationships. In other species echolocation is facilitated by different evolutionary traits that differ from the current human senses. These headphones provide the opportunity for focal audition similar to a focal point in vision, depicting a more detailed spatial image of the parameters of the space surrounding the subject. "

"As visitors strolled through a recent display of Madame de Pompadour's coffee grinder, an 1840s Sèvres porcelain coffee set, tea canisters, sugar bowls and other European decorative arts at the Detroit Institute of Arts, the scent of roasted coffee beans arose in one room. Bach's "Coffee" Cantata played in the background. Not far away, cocoa pods were not only on display but also meant to be touched. In the final gallery, a tasting station offered two kinds of liquid chocolate, one adapted from an Aztec recipe and the other from an 18th-century French formula. Museums usually aim to offer a feast for the eyes, but this Detroit museum had much more in mind for "Bitter|Sweet: Coffee, Tea & Chocolate," which just closed at the institute. Officials, who used art objects to illustrate how the introduction of those beverages to Europe in the 16th century from Africa, Asia and the Americas changed social and consumption patterns, wanted the exhibition to be a banquet for all five senses."

"Electromagnetic fields are everywhere and this workshop provides the basic tools for sensing the invisible universe that surrounds us by providing sonic, haptic and visual feedback on our bodies. "

"Listening is Making Sense lets you listen in on vibrations carried through thick wooden beams. The only way to experience the installation is by getting into physical contact with the resonant matter, by placing your ear directly on the wood."

"Artificial synesthesia (syn = together, and aisthesis = perception in Greek) is a deliberately evoked or induced sensory joining in which the real information of one sense is accompanied by a perception in another sense through the use of a cross-modal mapping device. It is also known as virtual synesthesia or synthetic synesthesia. The additional perception is regarded by the trained synesthete as real, often outside the body, instead of imagined in the mind's eye. Its reality and vividness are what makes artificial synesthesia so interesting in its violation of conventional perception. Synesthesia in general is also fascinating because logically it should have been a product of the human brain, where the evolutionary trend has been for increasing coordination, mutual consistency and perceptual robustness in the processing of different sensory inputs."

"Hearing is a vastly underrated sense. We tend to think of the world as a place that we see, interacting with things and people based on how they look. Studies have shown that conscious thought takes place at about the same rate as visual recognition, requiring a significant fraction of a second per event. But hearing is a quantitatively faster sense. While it might take you a full second to notice something out of the corner of your eye, turn your head toward it, recognize it and respond to it, the same reaction to a new or sudden sound happens at least 10 times as fast. "

At a time when technological progress is bringing city sounds to the threshold of bedlam it is no longer sufficient to design environments that satisfy the eye alone. Today's city dweller is bombarded by a continuous stream of invisible but highly attention-demanding sounds, smells, and microclimates. His experience of the city is a crazy quilt of sense impressions, each of which contributes to the total picture. It is important to explore the consequences of this invasion of nonvisual sensations on the quality of city life and to ask how manipulation of them might improve that quality. This study explores two aspects of the problem: What is the perceived variety and character of city sounds? How do sounds influence perception of the visible city? Our research is not a scientific experiment, but an exploratory study in which we have attempted to identify those issues that deserve more careful attention in later experimental research and city design.

At a time when technological progress is bringing city sounds to the threshold of bedlam it is no longer sufficient to design environments that satisfy the eye alone. Today's city dweller is bombarded by a continuous stream of invisible but highly attention-demanding sounds, smells, and microclimates. His experience of the city is a crazy quilt of sense impressions, each of which contributes to the total picture. It is important to explore the consequences of this invasion of nonvisual sensations on the quality of city life and to ask how manipulation of them might improve that quality. This study explores two aspects of the problem: What is the perceived variety and character of city sounds? How do sounds influence perception of the visible city? Our research is not a scientific experiment, but an exploratory study in which we have attempted to identify those issues that deserve more careful attention in later experimental research and city design.

Like the landscape, each city has a unique soundscape. In addition to the typical sounds of traffic and people, San Francisco has some identifiably unique sounds like cable cars, fog horns, trolleys and on occasion, the Blue Angels performing overhead. Almost all of us delight in these sounds because they help define the sense of place. They heighten our everyday experience. Sounds are an integral part of our experience, as you know if you've ever been to a carnival, sporting event or marketplace. And recalling sounds often brings back vivid visual memories of a place or time.

"artist anne patterson has synesthesia, meaning that her sensory perceptions overlap; when she hears sound, she sees color. trained as an architect and theater production designer, this unique combination of senses has led to an artistic practice hovering somewhere between the theatrical and experiential. she continues to explore synesthetic environments with 'pathless woods', a colorful installation that began with her acclaimed 2013 project 'graced with light' at grace cathedral in san francisco."

Based in Brooklyn, New York, much of multi-media artist Sari Carel's work focuses on translation from one modality to another. Her projects consider interspecies communication, relationships between people and place, and how the senses inform our perception. Also an environmental activist, Sari is a sharp observer of ecosystems, be they natural or human.

Five ways of mapping the world. One story about people who make maps the traditional way-by drawing things we can see. And other stories about people who map the world using smell, sound, touch, and taste. The world redrawn by the five senses.

Article featuring Kevin Beasley, Nikita Gale and Christine Sun Kim. "SOUND DOES NOT EXIST IN A VACUUM-it requires a medium through which to propagate. Innovations in electroacoustics have worked to partition and privatize the sonic realm, separating voices and music from their host bodies and feeding them cleanly to the ear via high-fidelity speakers, noise-canceling headphones, and other means. But sound represents only one facet of a listening experience."

"Kjetil Trædal Thorsen, founding partner and architect at Snøhetta, talks sound and space with reSITE at RESONATE. He emphasizes the importance of "transpositioning" in an increasingly specialized world to ensure architecture remains collaborative and interdisciplinary. Kjetil also encourages the use of all senses, especially sound, in his work."

An example of data sonified: "Did you ever wonder what the history of all life sounds like? Well this sonified data set gives you a sense of the sound of all the major extinctions since the beginning of life (well, about 550 million years). There is also a pseudo-tutorial on what kinds of steps you'll need to do to be able to make this sort of thing yourself, if you'd like to play with a little Python!"

A personal essay about hearing loss, disability, the amplification of the sound of one's body, the way that hearing and mishearing leads to metaphor, and the losses and gains of disability as well as normative sensing.

"Ed Yong's book urges readers to break outside their "sensory bubble" to consider the unique ways that dogs, dolphins, mice and other animals experience their surroundings."

"Born blind, Juan Pablo Culasso has never seen a bird. But through his gifted sense of hearing, he can identify more than 3,000 different bird sounds and differentiate more than 720 species. The 29-year-old said he realized he had perfect, or absolute pitch, when he was a boy. Tossing stones in a river, he was able to tell his father exactly the note each one made when it hit the water. Absolute pitch, the rare ability to hear a tone and immediately know it's a C-sharp, for example, is so unusual that only one of every 10,000 people has it, Culasso said, adding that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was among them."