"In Hampi's Vijaya Vithala Temple, 500-year-old stone pillars miraculously produce the sounds of bells and percussion. Whether that's intentional or by chance remains a mystery."
"Living under the paving stones, consuming our refuse, and incubating our diseases, the city rat is a ubiquitous part of global, urban capitalism. The revulsion rats inspire actually speaks of our closeness to them-rattus norvegicus burrows through the supposed human / nature divide. And just as we continually negotiate our place in a dynamic city, so have rats developed elaborate social codes intertwined with urban architecture and geography.
We are not usually privy to the vocal address of one rat to another, however, as they primarily speak above the (20khz) threshold of human hearing. For Urban Intonation, I recorded rats at multiple sites on the streets of NYC with an ultrasonic microphone. I then resampled and pitch-shifted the result into the range of the human voice and mixed it for playback over a human public address system, repositioning rat noise in public space as something that is recognizable, if not intelligible, as speech.
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"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."
"PhD student Kate Carr has started an new podcast series 'Interiorities' playing sonic experiments and documents from this Covid-19 time of 'lockdown'.
Episodes are being released each Sunday through April on Mixcloud and fortnightly from May.
Sound works so far include contributions by Angus Carlyle, Leo Okagawa, Mark Peter Wright, Salomé Voegelin, Stephanie Merchak, Margaret Harmer, Paula Garcia Stone, Iris Garrelfs, Martin Kay, Francois Houle & Scant Intone and many many more."
"Between 1967 and 1988, Maryanne Amacher produced a 22-part series she titled City-Links. In City-Links, Amacher transmitted live sonic feeds from cities (or multiple sites within the same city) via high-quality telephone lines and mixed these sources live during installations, performances, and radio broadcasts. Sonic environments she selected included harbors, steel mills, stone towers, flour mills, factories, silos, airports, rivers, open fields, utility companies, and musicians "on location". The first in the series, In City (1967), was a 28-hour live mix connecting eight locations around Buffalo via phone lines to WBFO, Buffalo public radio. A very early example of telematic performance, or 'long distance music', the project enabled Amacher to connect acoustic spaces distant from each other and thus hear synchronicity 'live' as it is."
"In 2006, the authors initiated the Landscape & Perception (L&P) project under the aegis of the Royal College of Art (RCA), London. The project is a pilot study of raw visual and acoustic elements mainly on and around the Carn Menyn ridge, Mynydd Preseli, south-west Wales, the source area of some of the Stonehenge bluestones, an area still relatively untouched by modern development. Sites in the surrounding Pembrokeshire countryside were also briefly visited. The project asked: "What might Stone Age eyes and ears have perceived in this landscape, and what aspects made it become important to the builders of Stonehenge?" The L&P project was primarily conceived to encourage a younger generation of audio-visual practitioners to use direct, natural sensory source material for their digital work, to offset the increasing overuse of disembodied digital sources. In the course of the fieldwork, it was felt that observations had been made that could perhaps be archaeologically relevant in a landscape that until very recently has been subjected to surprisingly little archaeological study. In July 2013, the fieldwork part of the project extended to acoustic tests of the bluestones in situ at Stonehenge. This paper is a preliminary report concerning selected, potential archaeology relevant aspects of the project's fieldwork to date."
"A prehistoric necropolis yields clues to the ancient use of sound and its effect on human brain activity.
Researchers detected the presence of a strong double resonance frequency at 70Hz and 114Hz inside a 5,000-years-old mortuary temple on the Mediterranean island of Malta. The Ħal Saflieni Hypogeum is an underground complex created in the Neolithic (New Stone Age) period as a depository for bones and a shrine for ritual use. A chamber known as "The Oracle Room" has a fabled reputation for exceptional sound behavior."
"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."
"Maravilla works across painting, sculpture, and sound-based performances all veiled with autobiography, whether informed by the Mayan architecture and stone totems that surrounded him as a child or his cancer diagnosis as a young adult. His pieces are predominately therapeutic and rooted in Indigenous ritual and mythology, recurring themes the team at Art21 explores in a new documentary."
"Stonehenge is a ruin. Whatever sound it originally had 3,000 years ago has been lost but now, using technology created for video games and architects, Dr Rupert Till of the University of Huddersfield has - with the help of some ancient instruments - created a virtual sound tour of Stonehenge as it would have sounded with all the stones in place."