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"Some questions we aim to address are; How can we analyze and address the increasingly homogenized sounds of urban environments from traffic and other forms of urban "noise"? How can we creatively respond to the effect of urban noise on the loss of character or identity of a place? What are desirable sound environments? How can we establish new codes or behaviors that help shape our sound environments? How can we adapt or modify existing the architectural to develop new acoustic spaces? How can we identify unique or characteristic social patterns that help shape the sonic identity of a place? What role does technology play in this process, specifically newly available and more affordable digital recording technologies? "

This installation plays the keys of a piano based on the movements and shapes of the clouds. A camera pointed at the sky captures video of the clouds. Custom software uses the video of the clouds in real-time to articulate a robotic device that presses the corresponding keys on the piano. The system is set in motion to function as if the clouds are pressing the keys on the piano as they move across the sky and change shape. The resulting sound is generated from the unique key patterns created by ethereal forms that build, sweep, fluctuate and dissipate in the sky. This installation was commissioned by L'assaut de la Menuiserie, Saint-Etienne, France and completed with support from the Visualization and Digital Imagining Lab and Weber Music Hall, University of Minnesota.

"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."

"In November 2019, visitors to the Tate Exchange were invited to experience urban noise as a multi-sensory art installation. The artwork KIMA Noise was developed by the Analema Group over the last two years in collaboration with Dr Stephen Stansfeld (Queen Mary). Audiences were drawing their graphic impressions of urban noise as a real-time sound sculpture. Audiences could experience urban sound from around the Tate as trajectories of sound, travelling through the space of Tate Exchange at Tate Modern. Four real-time streams, from construction noise, to railroad tracks were visualised on the panoramic windows of the Tate's monumental architecture. Through direct experience, the audience learned about the effects of noise, while shaping and designing their own soundscape."

"Viennese artist Bernhard Leitner talks about how he uses sound as a building material to create new worlds, and as a tool of design itself. He has worked for the New York Department of City Planning and researched how three-dimensional movements of sounds shape new architectural spaces, with physical-acoustic analyses of spaces."

"Hear from Meyer Sound and Foster + Partners on how they manipulate and shape spaces through invisible architecture. The creation of spaces that take people into environments that they've never experienced comes with the technological advancements in sound engineering."

"While the acoustic environment and urban soundscapes shape our everyday life, architecture practice usually neglects the experience of acoustic space in its design process. My research addressed the challenge of integrating spatial acoustics and the experience of environmental sound in architecture practice. Drawing from acoustic ecology, creative approaches embody the aural experience of the environment into the design process of architecture. "

"Lumière is a concert series exploring the artistic dialogue between high precision lasers and percussive sounds. It is based on a unique vector graphics software, which the artist is developing since 2010. The software allows to generate rapid successions of visual shapes and associated sonic events, and to manipulate them in real time. Lumière is permanent work in progress, with each performance being a snapshot of the current state. Since the premiere in 2013 Lumière got three fundamental revisions, and countless 'minor updates'."

"today there are various sophisticated methods to locate sound (acoustic camera, methods of acoustic holography, microphone arrays), but known visualizations by spectrograms still strongly remind of thermographic images. acoustic shapes, unlike thermographic ones, differ from the contour of the measured object. image overlays make it even more difficult to read and compare the results."

""The Universal Sense: How Hearing Shapes the Mind.""

The urban and the sound are very much one and the same. Noises and tweets, squeaks and bangs, whispers and rattle are constantly present and play an important part in the shaping of the environment. consciously or unconsciously we are attracted or repulsed by certain sounds in specific configurations. But how is it interlinked with time and space, how does it tie in with time and certainly space, the much talked focus in the urban discussion.

"All of Toronto's music and opera presenters include an educational component in what they do. But the Toronto Symphony Orchestra's A Toronto Symphony project may be the first time that the city's children get a hand in actually shaping a mainstage performance."

"Artistic innovations spurred by curiosity rather than by intellectual principles arguably produce more compelling and enduring breakthroughs. And Pauline Oliveros was undeniably curious when it came to music. By the time she was 9, she picked up the accordion; soon, she learned to play the tuba and the French horn. She quickly proved to be a highly versatile and accomplished instrumentalist. The capacity that really shaped Oliveros's career as an experimental composer and electronic-music pioneer, however, was not her skill as a musician per se but her awareness of the broader sonic field that surrounded her as she played."

"Three custom guitars, a gong, maracas shaped like large closed fists, and a series of drum-heads ornated with his classic hand and slogans like 'LOOK AT THIS' and "PLEASE WAIT" The gong states the self-explaining text 'GONG'. While crafted with a luthier's precision, the artist's mischievous design-guitars with one string, some fretless-results in unexpected sounds. The black-and-white guitars are connected to small amplifiers. Alongside the instruments, Shrigley will also present a new series of black and white drawings."

"Sound journeys is an experiment into how sound shapes the way we understand the world, created by The Principals in collaboration with sound recordist Chris Watson (sound recordist for David Attenborough and formerly of the band Cabaret Voltaire). Shot and edited by Samuel Russell, title design by Olivier Lebrun, sound and lighting technicians Pablo Gnecco and Nate Turley. Sponsored by Ford and B&O Play."

Amazing online tool that allows you to create vocal sounds my manipulating the shape of the interior parts of the mouth (tongue, palette, throat, etc) and also the lips.

"While exploring language and its political, social and cultural roots in many of her artworks, artist Inmi Lee became fascinated with the question, What does the pure form of sound look like? For her piece, Mother, she attempted to answer this question: a collaboration with code artist Kyle McDonald, Mother translates sounds into objects. Claims Lee, "It's one thing to hear a sound- it goes into your ear and dissipates." Representations of sound, however, "Reveal certain relationships between sound and shape.""

"Three geometric objects out of aluminium: a sphere, a cube and a tetrahedron, they all have the same volume. Together they form a new instrument which shows how form changes its acoustic characteristics by using its individual resonance. With the use of electronics the shapes can be used as instruments or acoustic (reverb) chambers. "

" I'm curating a collection of auditory illusions found in indigenous folk practices, popular music, and scientific research.  The focus is on finding examples from each sphere that are as beautiful and engaging as they are educational. As the collection takes shape this blog will be structured as an archive of illusions and phenomena, searchable by terms from both science and culture."

"Almost 100 years ago, shortly before the outbreak of the First World War, the Italian Futurist Luigi Russolo proposed the idea that urban and industrial sounds, including the noises of modern warfare, were a new and enthralling source of musical material. Their nature was unprecedented - their intensity, volume, texture and shape - and so musical history should come to an end. The slow evolution of musical language had suffered a massive stroke, to be replaced by a vigorously healthy art of noises. Musician and composer David Toop looks at The Art of Noise"