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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.

"Developed by Pauline Oliveros in collaboration with Leaf Miller and released in 2007, the AUMI is a camera-based software that enables various forms of instrumentation. It was first created in work with (and through the labor of) children with physical disabilities in the Abilities First School (Poughkeepsie, New York) and designed with the intention of researching its potential as a model for social change."

"4DSOUND's John Connell reflectes on the potential of working with spatial sound technologies to encourage new states of awareness and reciprocity"

Art cannot be created or destroyed - only remixed. In a convincing talk from TEDGlobal 2012, director Kirby Ferguson highlights that remixing, referencing and reproducing previous innovations allows artists to engage in a cultural dialogue and allows art, technology and society to continue evolving.

"Silence has become a luxury in New York that only a scant few can truly afford, and cultural, technological and economic changes in recent years have added to the din everyone else must endure, creating not just one culprit, but many. "

"The sounds of crickets courting and flies flying familiar to many of us, but have you heard a rice weevil larva eating inside a wheat kernel, a termite cutting a piece of wood, or a grub chewing on a root? Modern insect detection and control technology makes use of these subtle signals, sampled below. Most of the sound files on this page were selected from noise-free sections of recorded signal, but you can hear some typical background noises mixed with insect sounds at I below. The insect sounds have higher frequencies and shorter durations that make them relatively easy to separate from background."

"This issue of Interference asked authors to consider sound as the means to which we can explain the sonic. Contributions to the study of sound, apart from practice-based works, are often disseminated through language and text. This is the case for most analysis or research into sensory based and phenomenological studies. There is of course a strong case to be made for text; it is the universal way in which contemporary knowledge is transmitted. But perhaps there is an argument to be made for new ways to not only explore sound but to disseminate ideas around the sonic. For example, in what way can 'sonic papers' represent ideas about the experience of space and place, local and community knowledge? How can emerging technologies engage with both the everyday soundscape and how we 'curate this experience'? What is the potential of listening methods as a tool to engage community with 'soundscape preservation' and as a tool to critique and challenge urban planning projects?"

"THE WORLD LISTENING PROJECT (WLP) is a not-for-profit organization devoted to understanding the world and its natural environment, societies and cultures through the practices of listening and field recording. The WLP was founded in 2008 and is supported by the Midwest Society for Acoustic Ecology, a membership organization and regional chapter of the American Society for Acoustic Ecology, affiliated with the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology. The WLP maintains a website and online forum about its artistic and educational activities. These include the use of radio and web-based technologies, conducting public workshops, forums, and lectures, as well as participating in exhibitions, symposiums, and festivals. To learn more and become involved in the WLP's activities please subscribe to our discussion group."

"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. "

"Silencing of the Reefs is a long-term (started in August 2011) project by sound artist Jana Winderen, supported by TBA21. Jana Winderen listens into the lively, diverse and dynamic, though threatened acoustic environments of coral reefs and their neighbouring ecosystems. By using the latest technology in terms of recording equipment and hydrophones, she is able to get the best-quality recordings possible."

video documentation of past events. Since its inception in 1994, the bi-annual Sonic Acts festival has questioned, examined, assembled and exhibited contemporary and historical developments at the cutting edge of art, technology, music and science. for the 2012 festival go to http://2012.sonicacts.com

Bu Kim Cascone "With the advent of cheap digital recording gear, many have taken to recording their environments and presenting it as sound art. Without considering how technology leaches the soul of an environment, much of today's field recording based sound art will ultimately fail to capture the holistic nuance and subtleties found in nature. What this essay calls for is a resurrection and development of the post-digital aesthetic in the form of "Transcendigitalism.""

When a plant reacts to a butterfly larvae feeding on its leaves, it releases chemical substances, or compounds. The characteristics of these compounds have been analyzed in collaboration with the Ecological Chemistry Research Group at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, and then transposed into amplitude and intensity of sinus tones, recorded at EMS (Electroacoustic Music in Sweden), Stockholm. Thus these beautiful graphic score and soundtrack by Swedish artist Christine Ödlund are direct transpositions of "the plant's life, struggle and death"."

"CalArts opens its Digital Arts and Technology Expo, and one project is continuing to pique our interest in bio-orchestras. "Cultivating Frequencies," a collaboration among music technologist Colin Honigman and designers Sean Chen, Marc Dubui, and Wen Han, is turning a garden into a generative music machine, including a interactive element that turns the individual plants into-touch sensitive instruments."

"Darsha Hewitt is a Canadian artist who makes electromechanical sound installations, drawings, videos, an experimental performances. See her other unique work here (take the brilliant "20 Oscillators in 20 Minutes" for example, which is part experimental music performance, technical challenge, and comedy act!). She has an interest in demystifying the invisible systems embedded throughout domestic technology. This is also visible in the above artwork, Electrostatic Bell Choir (2012)."

"For Hong Kong artist Samson Young, however, war sounds less obviously martial; indeed, it's pretty random. It's calm, somewhat foreboding - human, organic, often silent but with bursts of technological noise. And most importantly for Young, war sounds musical. Visitors to the artist's current exhibition at Team Gallery, Pastoral Music, see him sitting in the center of the room wearing fatigues, staring into an obsolete television monitor, surrounded by a surfeit of sound-making devices, some traditionally musical, like a contact mic hooked to a bass drum, and some definitely not, like soil, a room fan, Corn Flakes. What's going on exactly? The unconventional musical scores hanging - or, in some cases, drawn directly - on the walls suggest that Young's restrained movement amid the mess of sound-producing gadgets must constitute a musical performance."

I see them in the streets and in the subway, at dollar stores, hospital rooms, and parties. I see them silently dangling from electrical cables and tethered to branches of trees. Balloons are ghost-like entities floating through the cracks of places and memories. They are part of our rituals of loss, celebration and apology. Yet, they are also part of larger systems, weather sciences, warfare and surveillance technologies, colonialist forces and the casual UFO conspiracy theory. For a child, the ephemeral life of the balloon contrasts with the joy of its bright colors and squeaky sounds. Psychologists encourage the use of the balloon as an analogy for death, while astronomers use it as a representation for the cosmological inflation of the universe. In between metaphors of beginning and end, the balloon enables dialogues about air, breath, levity, and vibration.

"An ongoing project that started life during a one week residency at the Soundfjord Gallery. My proposal was as follows: A letter written to the journal IEEE in 1969 suggests the curious possibility of clay sound recordings from antiquity. Claiming to have evidence, an enigmatic scholar named Richard G. Woodbridge III outlines a hypothesis: sound, by causing a shimmering of airwaves, leaves traces on materials the waves break upon; wet paint, for example, or the soft, wet clay spun by a potter. Using suitable technology a contemporary listener might hear these traces, so allowing a rehearing of whatever sonic activity was occurring in that original impact of sound wave and substance."