"Fure, a composer and sonic artist whose works often involve the live modification of prerecorded electroacoustic tracks, unleashed an hour-long storm of sound, incorporating extremely low bass frequencies that began below the range of human hearing and slid upward to a barely perceptible 30 Hz. For a few minutes, I stood in front of a tower of speakers, having taken the precaution of inserting earplugs, and had a purely visceral encounter with sound-one that gave me the unsettling and liberating sensation of being no longer material in my own body."

"Capturing just 20 seconds of a songbird's chirrup, or an elk's bugle, or a kangaroo's chortle often requires hours of stillness and solitude. It's a craft that Birmingham-born sound recordist Martyn Stewart has perfected over the last 55 years. In that time, he's built up one of the largest private collections of natural sound in the world. Comprising 30,000 hours of material, it includes recordings of 3,500 bird species, alongside countless mammals, insects, amphibians and reptiles, as well as soundscapes of the Serengeti, the Arctic and Chernobyl, 10 years after the nuclear reactor meltdown. At least four of the species he's recorded are now extinct in the wild, including the northern white rhinoceros and the Panamanian tree frog."

In this second interpretive video for "Living with Concepts," Norway-based artist Jana Winderen discusses the four-channel audio installation "Spring Bloom in the Marginal Ice Zone: From the Barents Sea to Lake Ontario": https://vimeo.com/613751409 Composed from field recordings in the Barents Sea along the marginal ice zone (an ecologically vulnerable, dynamic border between the open sea and the sea ice), Winderen's composition documents wildlife activities that all depend on the annual spring bloom: plankton, bearded seals, humpbacks and orcas, crustaceans and spawning cod. On UTM campus, these sounds connect the vulnerable ecologies of the Barents Sea with the seasonal rhythms of local forest ecologies, and the distressed waterways of Lake Ontario and the Credit River. "Spring Bloom" plays during daylight hours only. It is periodically shut off in response to seasonal ecological activity, determined in consultation with faculty in UTMBiology. See the Blackwood website for current playback conditions: https://www.blackwoodgallery.ca/program/living-with-concepts First presented in Mississauga by the Blackwood for "The Work of Wind: Air, Land, Sea," "Spring Bloom" is currently installed at the University of Toronto Mississauga campus, 2021-2024, as part of "Living with Concepts." Artwork storage and transport sponsored by Musket Transport Ltd. Video by Vuk Dragojevic.

"Landscape with Alvin Lucier (57:40) including the performance of "Outlines of Persons and Things" (1975) The Music of Alvin Lucier (57:40) ""Bird and Person Dyning" (1975) ""Music for Solo Performer" (1965) Music with Roots in the Aether is a music-theater piece in color video. It is the final version of an idea that I had thought about and worked on for a few years: to make a very large collaborative piece with other composers whose music I like. The collaborative aspect of Music with Roots in the Aether is in the theater of the interviews, at least primarily, and I am indebted to all of the composers involved for their generosity in allowing me to portray them in this manner."

Vocalist, performer and sound artist Stine Janvin works with the extensive flexibility of her instrument of the voice, and the ways in which it can be disconnected from its natural, human connotations. Created for variable spaces from theatres, to clubs and galleries, the backbone of Janvin's projects focus on the physical aspects of sound, and potential dualities of the natural versus artificial, organic/synthetic, and minimal/dramatic.

Solo. Based on a recording of a Salvadoran boy burying his father. Bob Ostertag did not simply create a political piece but a musical reality, in which sampling technology is used in a significant way for the first time. The music encircles reality, decomposes it into music and recomposes it until reality is no longer able to escape. It is this clarity that makes Sooner or Later great music, a music that has something to do with life again. -- Die Zeit

"Years ago I unearthed a case full of cassettes in my parents closet. I'd been saving a certain one for the right time. A recorded letter, "To Ron" written on the label. It would have been sent to my father in Costa Rica from his family in Ohio. Upon pressing play I hear who I think is my grandmother as the initial hiss of the tape settles and soon the voice of my young uncle. My Mother and Father met while they were both serving as Mennonite missionaries in Costa Rica during the 1970s. He sang love songs outside her window. He rode an old Yamaha motorcycle up through Central America. He loved to tell those stories. While on my third stay in the psychiatric hospital I started sketching out a short piece. The new season of Twin Peaks was airing at the time and the adult unit I was housed in is known as "Lodge". It was during my fourth and most recent stay that my father fell ill and passed away. I experienced his last days through second-hand phone calls in my own hospital room miles apart. Such a physical disconnect and heightened reality complicates my ability to grieve. I returned home and had to finish the piece. The sample finally had a purpose."

"Sound affects every aspect of our lives - even in our communication. I want to talk in this short blog about the ways sound affects us. You can listen to the blog or read the transcript below."

"The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) lockdown meant a greatly reduced social and economic activity. Sound is of major importance to people's perception of the environment, and some remarked that the soundscape was changing for the better. But are these anecdotal reports based in truth? Has traffic noise from cars and airplanes really gone down, so that more birdsong can be heard? Have socially distanced people quietened down? This article presents a case study of the human perception of environmental sounds in an urban neighborhood in the Basque Country between 15 March and 25 May 2020."

"This article seeks to explore the manifold ways in which carceral violence and acoustics intermingle, as manifested in the case of the military prison of Saydnaya-an infamous, state-run torture jail in Syria. As revealed by survivors' ear-testimonies and by the recent digital reconstruction of the prison's interior (available on the Amnesty International website), sound seems integral to the dynamics of power at play in the Syrian prison. A great part of the violence committed there is acoustic, one that is meticulously based on defining properties of the aural experience. "

"In the arid hills outside Damascus, Syria, there is a military prison called Saydnaya, a low-slung concrete building where prisoners are forbidden to make any noise. Because of Saydnaya's eerie quiet-and because the prison is kept dark and prisoners are frequently blindfolded-inmates develop a particularly keen sense of sound."

"Sound, as a modality of emotion, is central to the everyday constitution of space. For an increasing population in Canada, however, incarceration forms the basis of everyday life. This paper explores the connections between sound and emotion as they play out in the under-researched context of prisons. I use a participant's term, "feeling the range," to identify the atmospheric, haptic, and emotive potential of sound as a vital tool of spatial knowledge. "

"During the Covid-19 pandemic, comparisons have often been drawn between lockdown measures and prison, yet people with lived experience of prison have countered that such domestic confinement bears little resemblance to the pains of imprisonment. These different viewpoints suggest that the general public has little understanding of what happens behind prison walls. This blogpost considers how prisoner writing can describe prison to the non-prisoner reader (i.e. a reader who does not have lived experience of prison), bearing witness to the carceral experience. Drawing on examples of short stories about prison, written by current or former prisoners, I examine how these writers recreate sensory aspects of prison in their writing. Carceral texts commonly recount the sights, sounds, touches, tastes and smells of prison; but, in my experience of reading and analysing prisoner writing, it is the depiction of prison sound that is most powerful and affecting. In this blogpost, I examine how prisoner-writers translate the speech and sounds of prison into written form, to convey the carceral experience to those outside prison walls."

"A modern-day zen garden opened this past Friday, October 1st, at the Fort York Historic Site in Toronto, Canada. Contemporary artist Krista Kim brings her vision of wellness to the world via CONTINUUM: a meditative 20-minute generated animation aimed at improving mental health through active self-care participation. "

"Listen to the sounds of deterioration and decay as the sound is transformed into something else for this episode. Hear Brooklyn composer William Basinski and a portion of his mammoth work, "Disintegration Loops" - a project based on very old tape loops from the 1980's. The tape itself was disintegrating, and tape gunk would come off on the playback head, but Basinski allowed the loops to play continuously while he recorded them digitally, capturing the process of the music's demise. "

Immersive digital art works offering listeners an intimate, visceral and poetic glimpse of their own mortality. Afterlife is a series of four 20-minute (approx.) immersive digital artworks that transport the listener to places which paradoxically none of us will ever know: connecting us with stories of the body's decomposition after death."

The Expressive Body: Memory, Devotion, Desire (1400-1750), an exhibition at the Norton Simon Museum Contemplates sacred and secular bodies in painting and sculpture, and how our bodies as viewers interact with them, the show is a perfectly timed refresher on the importance of physicality in art.

"Asked to curate a night of insect music for Pestival at London's Southbank Centre, wildlife sound recordist Chris Watson thinks he may just have found a 15th-century iPod"