Group items tagged

"Using examples from birdsong, the natural lilt of emphatic language and even a cooking pan lid, singer-songwriter and TED Fellow Meklit Hadero shows how the everyday soundscape, even silence, makes music. "The world is alive with musical expression," she says. "We are already immersed." "

"Dr. JoAnn Kuchera-Morin works on the AlloSphere, one of the largest scientific and artistic instruments in the world. Based at UC Santa Barbara, the AlloSphere maps complex data in time and space. Dr. Kuchera-Morin, a composer, demoed the AlloSphere at TED2009 in February, showing five films of scientific data mapped visually and sonically into compelling art."

"Listening - to loved ones, strangers, faraway places - is an act of generosity and a source of discovery. In this episode, TED speakers describe how we change when we listen deeply."

"Meet the "motion microscope," a video-processing tool that plays up tiny changes in motion and color impossible to see with the naked eye. Video researcher Michael Rubinstein plays us clip after jaw-dropping clip showing how this tech can track an individual's pulse and heartbeat simply from a piece of footage. Watch him re-create a conversation by amplifying the movements from sound waves bouncing off a bag of chips. The wow-inspiring and sinister applications of this tech you have to see to believe."

"Playing sound effects both pleasant and awful, Julian Treasure shows how sound affects us in four significant ways. Listen carefully for a shocking fact about noisy open-plan offices."

Ge Wang makes computer music, but it isn't all about coded bleeps and blips. With the Stanford Laptop Orchestra, he creates new instruments out of unexpected materials-like an Ikea bowl-that allow musicians to play music that's both beautiful and expressive. "

"Artist Neil Harbisson was born completely color blind, but these days a device attached to his head turns color into audible frequencies. Instead of seeing a world in grayscale, Harbisson can hear a symphony of color - and yes, even listen to faces and paintings. "

"Bernie Krause has been recording wild soundscapes -- the wind in the trees, the chirping of birds, the subtle sounds of insect larvae -- for 45 years. In that time, he has seen many environments radically altered by humans, sometimes even by practices thought to be environmentally safe. A surprising look at what we can learn through nature's symphonies, from the grunting of a sea anemone to the sad calls of a beaver in mourning. "

"Bernie Krause is an American musician and soundscape ecologist. He has been recording, researching and archiving soundscapes for over 40 years. ....It celebrates the work of Krause's work, adding a simple but fitting and room-filling spectrogram to the recorded soundscapes, emerging the listener in sound, and being able to recognise the animals with visual cues. Here's a 360-degrees video, if your browser can play that: The idea is quite simple, but the soundscapes are compelling and diverse. While it can sometimes be hard to get an audience interested in sound-based works in a museum, United Visual Artists did a great job of adding a simple visual counterpart to keep those who aren't used to only listen to sound, interested. If you want to know more about the work of Bernie Krause, I suggest watching this TED Talk about "The voice of the natural world"."

"Composer and artist, Lawrence English is interested in audition, which is the act of perceiving with our ears to extract information from the world around us. Unlike our eyes, our ears have no lids but does this mean we're always listening and what is this thing called listening anyway - is it merely hearing or is it something more decisive? Most of all he ponders, can we listen to a listener's listening?"

"Professor Trevor Cox is a British academic and science communicator, a Senior Media fellow for EPSRC, and is President of the Insitute of Acoustics for the 2010-12 period. Cox has presented a range of popular science documentaries for BBC Radio 4, BBC Radio 3 and BBC World Service, including Sounds of Science, Aural Architecture, Life's Soundtrack, Science vs Strad, The Pleasure of Noise, World Musical Instruments, Dragon's Lab, Biomimicry and Save our Sounds. He was co-originator and judge of BBC Radio 4' 'So You Want To Be A Scientist?', a competition to find Britain's best amateur scientist. He has gained worldwide news coverage for stories such as "Does a duck quack echo?" and "The Worst Sound in the World". He has also investigated the World's scariest scream. In addition, he has appeared in features on BBC1, Teachers TV, Discovery and National Geographic channels, and as an expert in news items on a variety of television and radio channels"

"From the beep of cardiac monitors to the blare of alarms, hospitals are often jarring places to be from an auditory perspective. And for patients, the combined dissonant sounds can become overwhelming and even run antithetical to the healing process."

"Julian Treasure, chairman of The Sound Agency and author of the book 'Sound Business,' proposes we design health care facilities with acoustic healing in mind. "