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"Forgotten Songs commemorates the songs of fifty birds once heard in central Sydney before they were gradually forced out of the city by European settlement. The calls, which filter down from the canopy of birdcages suspended above Angel Place, change as day shifts to night; the daytime birds' songs disappearing with the sun and those of the nocturnal birds which inhabited the area sounding into the evening. "

On 29 January 2020, as the United Kingdom departed the European Union (EU) and as a final gesture of farewell, Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) took to their feet in Brussels, held hands and sang Robert Burns' 'Auld Lang Syne' - a song which has come to represent solidarity, friendship and open doors. The following week, Nigerian artist Emeka Ogboh stood in the Robert Burns Monument in Edinburgh and conceived of Song of the Union, a sound installation featuring singers from all 27 EU member states living in Scotland today, as well as one from the recently departed UK. The resulting polyphonic choir gives voice to those who were unable to vote in the 2016 Brexit referendum, and has been created at a time when the post-Brexit reality is still far from resolved.

"Two Trains: Sonification of Income Inequality on the NYC Subway by Data-Driven DJ aka Brian Foo: The goal of this song is to emulate a ride on the New York City Subway's 2 Train through three boroughs: Brooklyn, Manhattan, and the Bronx. At any given time, the quantity and dynamics of the song's instruments correspond to the median household income of that area. For example, as you pass through a wealthier area such as the Financial District, the instruments you hear in the song will increase in quantity, volume, and force. Stylistically, I want the song to exhibit the energy and orderly chaos of the NYC subway system itself. "

"It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing, goes the Duke Ellington song. By that logic, some bird songs really do mean something: at least a few bird species can swing in the same way that human musicians do, New Scientist can reveal. This claim has been made based on a mathematical analysis of the songs of one species, the thrush nightingale. Not all of the musicians New Scientist spoke to agree that what the thrush nightingale is doing can be called swing - but several said they have heard other species of birds singing that definitely do swing. "

The Song Books by the sound artist Rolf Julius (born in 1939) consist of several bound sheets of Japanese paper, of which each sheet is marked by a different kind of spot.[1] These red or black spots are prints of the processed photographs of color pigment clusters. Julius had already used these types of pigment clusters in earlier sound art installations, combining them with different sounds. There were similar sheets in his Piano Piece No. 1 (1998), whose title indicates that they can be performed musically.[2] It would hardly be possible to detect this solely on the basis of their visual form. According to Erhard Karkoschka, Julius's musical graphics can therefore be classified as pure musical graphics, that is, as musical graphics without a staff.[3] It must above all be stressed that musical graphics constitute individual solutions to problems with notation as perceived by an artist, and therefore stand out due to their different relationship to conventional notation. When interpreting musical graphics with so few parameters, which is the case for the Song Books, the performers have to develop a convincing translation for the ambiguous parameters. In the Song Books, the repetition of a similar form-in this case, the various spots-directs the performer's gaze toward minimal differences, such as the different sizes or fraying of the spots,[4] which are then translated into sound.

"Award-winning musician Christopher Cerf has composed music for the famous children's television show Sesame Street for 40 years. During this time, he has written more than 200 songs intended to help children learn how to read and write. But these innocent children's songs were abused for inhumane purposes."

"This is the most awesomely surreal architectural proposal of 2015: an extremely remote Cold War-era submarine surveillance station on the Isle of Lewis in the Scottish Outer Hebrides might soon be transformed into a kind of benthic concert hall for listening to whale song."

"Composition for Mouths (Songs My Mother Taught Me)"

"As part of the 21st Biennale of Sydney Oliver Beer will exhibit two new works: Composition for Mouths (Songs My Mother Taught Me) I & II, 2018 at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. These two films are a direct response to Beer's unprecedented access as artist in residence at the Sydney Opera House. Exploring ideas of cultural memory and 'inherited music', Beer asked singers to recall the earliest songs they remembered from childhood, incorporating the melodies into new compositional forms. Joining their lips in a tight seal to create a single mouth cavity, the singers explore the resonant frequencies of each other's faces as well as the architecture. They blend their voices to create rhythmic microtonal harmonic interactions known as 'beats' whilst combining adapted forms of their remembered music."

"In fact, listening to that one song -- "Weightless" -- resulted in a striking 65 percent reduction in participants' overall anxiety, and a 35 percent reduction in their usual physiological resting rates."

"This acoustic world is open to everyone, but most of us never enter it. It just seems so counter-intuitive-not to mention a little hokey-to listen to trees. But Haskell does listen, and he describes his experiences with sensuous prose in his enchanting new book The Songs of Trees. A kind of naturalist-poet, Haskell makes a habit of returning to the same places and paying "repeated sensory attention" to them. "I like to sit down and listen, and turn off the apps that come pre-installed in my body," he says. Humans may be a visual species, but "sounds reveals things that are hidden from our eyes because the vibratory energy of the world comes around barriers and through the ground. Through sound, we come to know the place.""

"Infographics show the human-like musical structure of humpback whale songs, as they synchronize their music across hundreds of miles."

"taracatá trabaja uses the traditional Argentinian folk song, Malambo del Hornerito, as a point of departure. It is an ode to the Argentinian national bird-the serially procreating, monogamous, and hard working hornero who builds his home from spit and dirt. Created through long-distance collaboration, the musical composition of taracatá trabaja is derived from the two onomatopoeias in the folk song: taracatá, characterizing the sound of laborious work (i.e. fields being plowed and nails being hammered) and chapalea, a verb evolving from the sound of squelching in mud. In taracatá trabaja, the hand drawn hornero rests on the porcelain surface along the music score, reminding one of the complexities of making a home, and of labor and its imbued ideas of meritocracy, while reclaiming pleasure, well being and dignity."

Christopher Cerf, an award-winning composer for the American children's television series Sesame Street, was so disturbed by the use of his songs as psychological torture by the US during interrogation operations in Guantanamo in 2003, that he embarked on a journey with Al Jazeera World to interview a number of scientists, US Army personnel, and ex-detainees, to learn more about the psychological effects of music, and to uncover the history and use of music in torture. Among the people Cerf interviews are a US Army interrogator, a former Guantanamo prison guard, an ex-Guantanamo and Bagram detainee who recounts the use of Metallica and Marilyn Manson in torture during his time in prison, and the heavy metal band Drowning Pool, whose song "Bodies" was dubbed an unofficial soundtrack of the US military, and whose music was also used to torture prisoners.

"Considering human imagination the last piece of wilderness, do you think AI will ever be able to write a good song?"

"As in sacred music in the West, Tibetan music has complex systems of musical notation and a long history of written religious song. "A vital component of Tibetan Buddhist experience," explains Google Arts & Cultures Buddhist Digital Resource Center, "musical notation allows for the transference of sacred sound and ceremony across generations. A means to memorize sacred text, express devotion, ward off feral spirts, and invoke deities.""

"I'm a huge fan of Joan La Barbara. Her LP The Voice Is The Original Instrument is one of my favorite documents of the 1970's NY avant-garde. La Barbara is a master of advanced vocal technique. In addition to her own remarkable creative output, she's had a long career working with many of the greatest names in avant-garde composition - John Cage, Robert Ashley, Morton Feldman, Philip Glass, Alvin Lucier, Gordon Mumma, David Behrman, David Tudor, and her husband Morton Subotnick. In my wanderings around the internet I've come across some of her wonderful scores and images of performances etc. I thought I'd pass them along. To see and learn more visit her website.   Voice Piece: One-Note Internal Resonance Investigation (1975)   Persistence of Memory (2009)   Circular Song (1975)   In the Shadow and Act of the Haunting Place (1995)   Performing in Berlin 1981   With Gordon Mumma and David Behrman in 1974   Working on Philip Glass' Einstein on the Beach in 1976   In 1974 with Philip Glass Ensemble with Dickie Landry, Richard Peck and Jon Gibson   With David Tudor, Paris 1974   With Dana Reitz and Phill Niblock (1975)   Playing chess with John Cage   Performing in 1976   Performing in 1976   In the studio with Morton Subotnick in 1984 Share this: TwitterFacebook Related at home with morton subotnick and joan la barbara January 29, 2016 Liked by 1 person joan la barbara's voice is the original instrument reissued by arc light editions May 4, 2016 Liked by 2 people on the early immersive music of joan la barbara, via mode records April 2, 2018 Liked by 2 people Post navigation Rising Tones Cross (Full Film)at home with morton subotnick and joan la barbara 2 thoughts on "the beauty of joan la barbara (scores and photographs)" Feminatronic February 9, 2016 at 8:46 pm Reblogged this on Feminatronic and commented: Something a little different as my Todays Discovery is this webs

"In the spring of 2011, Wanda L. Diaz Merced spent time at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, doing research for her doctoral dissertation at Glasgow University, Scotland. Wanda, who is blind, has been interested in sonification as a data analysis tool: how sonification might help scientists, even those who can see, detect patterns in large amounts of seemingly random astrophysical data. She used sonified x-ray data from EX Hydrae that have been collected by the Chandra X-Ray Observatory. One day Gerhard Sonnert gave Wanda some advice on her research and, on the way out of her office, he noticed a ream of sheets on which sonified x-ray data were printed out in musical notation. Being a bass player, he immediately recognized that the data showed a particular Afro-Cuban rhythm called clave. It occurred to him that, in addition to being a scientific tool, sonification might have an artistic application. Gerhard asked his cousin Volkmar Studtrucker, a musician and composer, to write songs from the EX Hydrae material. Volkmar created nine musical pieces, in a variety of musical styles, which they played and recorded in a trio (Volkmar Studtrucker, piano; Gerhard Sonnert, bass; and Hans-Peter Albrecht, drums)."

"If soundscape ecologist Bernie Krause's theories are true, then animal song is part of a far more complex and all-encompassing sound world."

"Natural sounds, and bird song in particular, play a key role in building and maintaining our connection with nature, but widespread declines in bird populations mean that the acoustic properties of natural soundscapes may be changing. Using data-driven reconstructions of soundscapes in lieu of historical recordings, here we quantify changes in soundscape characteristics at more than 200,000 sites across North America and Europe. We integrate citizen science bird monitoring data with recordings of individual species to reveal a pervasive loss of acoustic diversity and intensity of soundscapes across both continents over the past 25 years, driven by changes in species richness and abundance. These results suggest that one of the fundamental pathways through which humans engage with nature is in chronic decline, with potentially widespread implications for human health and well-being. "