On the seventieth anniversary of the first performance of Cage's 4'33", this issue of Australian Humanities Review features a collection of essays by authors from a range of humanities disciplines who have been willing to adventurously think about, theorise or creatively experiment with the legacy of Cage's work, which, whether praised, censured or misunderstood, has had an undeniable influence on the music and performance that came after it. In the time since its first performance, the aesthetic, cultural and conceptual reach of Cage's 4'33" has been immense. Cage's experimental oeuvre (music, writings, teaching) is internationally significant, having been exported from America to the world, including Australia. The special section includes short essays by Shayne Bowden, Rachel Campbell and James Hazel Maher, Kim Cunio, Dieter Daniels, Richard Elliott, Daniel Fishkin, Mack Hagood, Peter Jaeger, Douglas Kahn, Caleb Kelly, Sally Macarthur, Julian Murphet, David Toop, Shelley Trower and Stephen Whittington.

"Scientists have recently made some remarkable discoveries about non-human sounds. With the aid of digital bioacoustics - tiny, portable digital recorders similar to those found in your smartphone - researchers are documenting the universal importance of sound to life on Earth. By placing these digital microphones all over Earth, from the depths of the ocean to the Arctic and the Amazon, scientists are discovering the hidden sounds of nature, many of which occur at ultrasonic or infrasonic frequencies, above or below human hearing range. Non-humans are in continuous conversation, much of which the naked human ear cannot hear. But digital bioacoustics helps us hear these sounds, by functioning as a planetary-scale hearing aid and enabling humans to record nature's sounds beyond the limits of our sensory capacities. With the help of artificial intelligence (AI), researchers are now decoding complex communication in other species."

"Touch reorients us to the fundamental condition of being - to the inevitability of others, human and nonhuman. In touching, we are most vulnerable because we are always also being touched back. The analogy that Merleau-Ponty uses in his posthumously published work, The Visible and the Invisible (1964), is this: when my one hand touches the other, which one is doing the touching, and which one is being touched? We have eyelids; we can pinch our noses and shut our ears; but there are no natural skin-covers. We cannot turn off our sense of touch. To be a human in the world is to be tactile, to always be touching and touched with every single pore of our bodies. Advertisement "

"Lumière is a concert series exploring the artistic dialogue between high precision lasers and percussive sounds. It is based on a unique vector graphics software, which the artist is developing since 2010. The software allows to generate rapid successions of visual shapes and associated sonic events, and to manipulate them in real time. Lumière is permanent work in progress, with each performance being a snapshot of the current state. Since the premiere in 2013 Lumière got three fundamental revisions, and countless 'minor updates'."

"Sam Green on the friendship that inspired his films about sound."

"Our new how-to zine is ready to share! In this project you'll build a solar-powered oscillator circuit, using two NOT gates to generate a square wave. Then you'll add two push button switches and a potentiometer to adjust the pitch."

"All animals use their senses to perceive the world, humans included. But not every animal senses the same thing. In Pulitzer prize-winning science journalist Ed Yong's new book, he explores the way each species sees the world through its own sensory viewpoint and explains why that should both delight and humble us."

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.

In what ways do we listen to the soundscape? How do our concurrent activities, moods, and abilities determine the listening mode? What is it that allows us to experience arbitrary sounds in an everyday environment as elements in a musical composition?

"Ed Yong's book urges readers to break outside their "sensory bubble" to consider the unique ways that dogs, dolphins, mice and other animals experience their surroundings."

"Discrete Archive was created for music, writing and artefacts that explore quietness. This can mean many things, we like music that allows for space, presents sonority as object and is concerned with the materiality of sound, sound as thing. We occupy a world of noise, discerning meaning in this sea of noise is increasingly difficult.  We invite you to contemplate the world around you through stillness and quiet that sound can provide a focus for. "

"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. "

A piece made from the last answer phone message from his mother In law which he saved after her death.

great short about foley artists creating sounds for a fishing village

The Underground Sound Project is a collection of underground sound recordings made by artist Nikki Lindt over the course of the past year. They were made in Prospect Park, other parks in the five boroughs of NYC and in rural Cherry Valley, NY. The recordings are made by placing microphones underground, underwater and even inside trees. So put on your headphones and come explore the melodic, resonant, and otherworldly sonic ecosystem right beneath our feet!!

"Did you know deep, resonant sound can be heard inside trees, among the roots of plants, in shifting soils, in streambeds, rivers, and even in mud-and that the sounds of the subway and airplanes can be heard in the soils of our local parks? From May 14, 2022 - May 2023, experience the sounds of Prospect Park in a new immersive way with artist Nikki Lindt's the Underground Sound Project, a Soundwalk."

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

"Trained as a musical composer, Beer (who created a 'Vessel Orchestra' for his 2019 solo show at the Met Breuer) works with the acoustic fingerprints of architecture, asking vocalists to stimulate their natural harmonics. 'Since I was a kid, I could hear the notes of buildings,' he says, explaining that a room is like a seashell, constantly making its own sounds.  When he found himself on the wrong side of the Sydney Opera House, he led his four local singers to an external nook of the building, then asked them to lock lips and treat each other's bodies as architecture. 'The acoustic space that they're working with is the empty mouth of the other person that they're singing through.'"

"Classical music has been shown to reduce stress in kennelled dogs; however, rapid habituation of dogs to this form of auditory enrichment has also been demonstrated. "