Group items tagged

"Stimulate your sense of taste, touch, smell and hearing in this immersive art experience at Tate Britain."

"We've all experienced it, whether we think of ourselves as olfactory aficionados or not: flashbacks and recollections triggered by perfume. Scent can literally manipulate emotions by sending signals to our hippocampus, the part of the brain that guards the pathways to the different elements that make up a memory. These memories intertwine with smells, conjuring up the past like a visceral film reel."

"It wasn't quite as Earth-shaking as Marconi's 1901 cross-Atlantic radio transmission or Alexander Graham Bell yapping at this assistant on the first telephone call in 1876, but this week the 21st century got its inaugural transatlantic scent message. At the American Museum of Natural History in New York on Tuesday, the smell of champagne and chocolate wafted from the new "oPhone" in a message sent from Le Laboratoire art center in Paris."

"That color and smell have a sensory connection is long-established, but there's debate about whether associating the smell of strawberries with red or smoke with black is something structured in our brains, based in language, or resulting from experience. A study published this week in the peer-reviewed, open-access PLoS One called "Cross-Cultural Color-Odor Associations" suggests it may be cultural."

"UK chemists even followed their noses to the Tate, where they tested three decades-old plastic sculptures."

""the role of smells in our perception of and engagement with the past has not been systematically explored." Their findings, presented under the title "Smell of heritage: a framework for the identification, analysis and archival of historic odours," are based on sampling volatile organic compounds (VOCs), which compose most odors, at sites including the library of St. Paul's Cathedral in London. They additionally surveyed people about their olfactory perceptions of historical books."

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."

"In November 2005, SHOWstudio embarked on an ongoing series devoted to exploring The Sound of Clothes. Continuing over a number of fashion seasons, each project aimed to explore a range of audio possibilities, such as discovering and capturing the actual sound a garment makes."

"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."

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.

"Most people report vivid visual dreams during REM sleep, with scenery that seems to structure the narrative of the dream. However, the extent to which we experience auditory content in dreams is relatively unstudied, or underreported."

"An ear-oriented multi-sensory event, SoundPedro will be presenting artists whose work addresses sound and aural perception in combination with other senses."

"What Do I Hear? was the pilot research project of a multinational collaboration that aimed to explore formative and theoretical questions of accessibility and inclusivity through sensory translation in the presentation and creation of art."

"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."

"Touch reorients us to the fundamental condition of being - to the inevitability of others, human and nonhuman. In touching, we are most vulnerable because we are always also being touched back. The analogy that Merleau-Ponty uses in his posthumously published work, The Visible and the Invisible (1964), is this: when my one hand touches the other, which one is doing the touching, and which one is being touched? We have eyelids; we can pinch our noses and shut our ears; but there are no natural skin-covers. We cannot turn off our sense of touch. To be a human in the world is to be tactile, to always be touching and touched with every single pore of our bodies. Advertisement "

"An immersive marvel of sonic ethnography, Expedition Content draws on audio recordings made by recent college graduate and Standard Oil heir Michael Rockefeller as part of the 1961 Harvard-Peabody Expedition to Netherlands New Guinea that set up tents among the indigenous Hubula (also known as Dani) people. "

"Watching people, talking with them, and actively engaging in social practices are the participatory techniques through which the ethnographer learns to see the world as his or her participants do, rich with socially constructed and historically situated meaning. Yet the focus on seeing the world as your participants do sometimes eclipses the other sensory modes that people employ to make sense of social and material interactions."