Group items tagged

Blog post focusing on artists exploring the amplification of long wires (like electrical lines, wire fences, etc) it includes Alan Lamb, Alastair Galbraith, and Alvin Lucier.

"Welcome to the community webspace of The WIRED Lab, a project focusing on Alan Lamb's work with The Wires. This *beta* site complements the WIRED project with an additional (to be launched!) website documenting Lamb's practice & other lab projects. "

"A UK mathematician has made a public appeal for people to phone a dedicated number so data can be gathered to hone a tool that can diagnose Parkinson's disease by analyzing voice patterns."

"Ionized air and wires may take headphones to the next level."

"The music on Quartz Locked, Deep City Wandering, was sourced from non-musical, professional electronic appliances recorded back in 1987 and preserved on a C-90 cassette until this day. The original sounds were mainly derived from two electronic devices: a hacked, roadside traffic signal data logger, on the one hand, and a physician's pager, on the other. Wires were soldered to various parts of the data logger's motherboard and connected to a tape recorder's audio inputs, emitting a rich assortment of glitch sounds, static noises and buzzing a-plenty. A physician's pager, smuggled from the local hospital, was similarly hacked and manipulated in order to produce high frequency buzzing noises with striking modulation/demodulation effects. Both devices were eventually plugged together to create additional random interference patterns, while occasional tape manipulation and varispeed effect were also applied during the recording process."

Not sure if anything ever became of this NYC pirate radio project: "THE THING in collaboration with r a d i o q u a l i a, and Jan Gerber started on May 5 2002 to build a radio network in NYC using internet audio (via wireless and wired connections) and miniFM. Initially the network will consist of 2-5 transmitters based around New York."

"Two Japanese researchers recently introduced a prototype for a device they call a SpeechJammer that can literally "jam" someone's voice - effectively stopping them from talking. Now they've released a video of the device in action."

"the human telephone was like an electromagnetic update to the oracle at Delphi: a lone female figure with access to distant voices, dancing slowly across a dance floor secretly wired from below, an interactive surface whose hidden technology extended up into her very clothing. "

THE BOUNCY BEEPS of Pac-Man. The percussive build-up in Legend of Zelda. The effusive gibberish of The Sims. The sounds in videogames tell us to speed up, start over, and of course, to keep playing. But how does one set of beeps so effectively tell you you've gained power, while another indicates your character has died? And how, exactly, does someone create the sound of the Dark Knight punching the Joker in the face? The answer: Genius sound design.

"For an exhibition at the Hessel Museum of Art, the artist wired five groups of corn plants to five music devices, forming a biofeedback system. Control signals were generated by measuring the electrical resistance of the plants' vegetable tissue, which in turn activated the MIDI synthesizers. Viewers were encouraged to interact with and touch the plants, which affected the sounds being played. The audience and cornfield were not just participants but actors, acting together-in concert-to produce the work."

"THE WORLD IS buzzing with activity that's invisible to us. Take slime mold. The fungus, also known as Physarum polycephalum, can be found hiding in dark, dank places like a pile of damp leaves or the belly of a log. Though it's not invisible-the mold has a mossy yellow color-to the naked eye and ear, it doesn't appear to move or make a sound. Of course that's not true. Slime mold is a living, ever-shifting organism."

"Let's be blunt: The tongue is really dumb. Unlike the rest of our sensory organs, which are exquisitely sensitive, that lump of exposed muscle sitting in the mouth is a crude perceptual device, able to only detect five different taste sensations. (Your cochlea, in contrast, contains thousands of different hair cells, each of which is tuned to particular wavelengths of sound.)"

"What do we really hear when we hear the wind? If you step from a wood into an open field, the sound changes, although it is the same wind blowing over both. A winter pine tree far from the coast makes the wind perform like an angry sea, while a neighbouring bare birch makes a gust-like sound as soft as the brushings of a jazz drummer. A single blast can turn telephone cables and barbed wire fencing into the strings of a wind-harp."

"Fermentophone is a multi-sensory installation in which an algorithmically generated musical composition is performed by living cultures of bacteria and yeast. The installation comprises a series of different vessels containing actively fermenting foodstuffs and beverages, which are wired with electronic sensors. Each colorful, odorous, and edible ferment has its own musical vocabulary which is expressed according to microbial activity.( The installation was presented at the Hacking Arts festival at the MIT Media Lab."

Salomé Voegelin is a Swiss artist and writer based in London. She is the author of Listening to Noise and Silence: towards a Philosophy of Sound Art, Continuum, NY, 2010. The book engages with the emerging practice of sound art and the concurrent development of a discourse and theory of sound. It seeks to immerse the reader in concepts of listening to sound artwork and the everyday acoustic environment, to establish an aesthetics and philosophy of sound and to promote the notion of a sonic sensibility. Other recent writings include an article on Morton Feldman in the Wire 324, February 2011 issue, and an essay on durational radio for Kunstradio ORF Austria. Her blog soundwords.tumblr.com writes the experience of listening to the everyday.

The historian and radio broadcaster talks about the power of eavesdropping and the roar of the crowd, as heard in Noise: A Human History, his new 30 part series for BBC Radio 4. By Nathan Budzinski.

""When I'm on location, it's a totally solitary activity. You put some headphones on, and at that moment, nobody can hear the world like you can." Chris Watson is talking to me over Skype from his home in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, explaining the details of a soon to be released smartphone app, which contains a cherry-picked collection of his sound recordings made as far back as the 1990s. Many originally appeared on CD (via Touch, who now also have an iPhone app), but Watson is enthusiastic about finding new formats such as this for his work. "The app is going to be used by individuals, and that means there's an individual at either end of the chain," he says. "I like the idea that wherever you are, you can drop into this environment." "

"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."