Centuries of Sound is an attempt to produce a set of mixes for every year of recorded sound. Starting in 1860, a mix will be posted every month until we catch up with the present day. So far we are still in the very early days, where a very limited selection of recordings are available, but as we get into the 20th century I hope to include the widest possible spread, both in terms of geography and genre. This will mean that experts will be required. If you are interested in putting yourself forwards as an expert on Rembetika, early microtonal recordings, French political speeches, Tagore songs or anything else, then please do drop me a line at centuriesofsoundmail at gmail.

"Listening to the City of Light: An interview with Sound Recordist Des Coulam"

" "Devine has taken data from NASA's Kepler missions to create individual compositions that occupy each floor of the 29 metre high tower, built in 1758. Each composition can be thought of as a subset of this set of data, and a mapping of the range of frequencies and information gathered by the missions to a more manageable human scale. The compositions from each star's data are positioned according to their age, frequency range and the number of exoplanets they host, moving upwards through the tower, which could almost have been custom built for the installation. [...] As you ascend through the building, you're also moving light years through the universe, outwards towards the different solar systems with their exoplanets and changing resonances. Just as musical instruments resonate with frequencies, so can the stars and planets, and it is this resonance that Devine has scaled for the human ear.""

"For the Venice Biennial Nevin Aladağ restages Raise The Roof which was performed for the first time in Berlin in 2007 on a rooftop in the former border section between West and East Berlin.  Seven female dancers leave their traces on the copper stages with their stiletto shoes while dancing to given songs, played on their headphones. The audience can read the different titles on the shirts of the dancers. What the audience hears is a rhythmic sound produced by the stiletto steps. Each dancer produces another frequency of a drum set, from high hat to bass drum. "

"They grow in secret and yet form the largest living organisms in the world: mycelia, the subterranean filament of fungi. In this, the sound artist Antye Greie-Ripatti {AGF} sees a metaphor for political activism in the age of the Internet. Here, too, small cells are interlacing in the subsurface to effect the greater. For her radio composition "Mycelium" Greie-Ripatti therefore sonifies the vital functions of fungi and contrasts them with voices of activists from all over the world. This creates a multi-lingual sound network, which transports a quiet but sustainable utopia: Together we are strong."

"What does finance sound like? Is it the clanging of the opening and closing bells at the New York Stock Exchange? The shouting of offers to buy or sell? The beeps made by cash registers as a credit card is swiped? The whirring of fans working overtime to cool computers? What is this noise?"

" This essay is about listening to the voice as a social prism of sound that disperses and reflects power. Thus by listening to and for elsewhere at public gatherings, we hear voices at work-in formation-producing an elsewhere by refusing to comply with the sonic demands of a Canadianness based on white settler colonialism, dependent on state-sanctioned multiculturalism, and rendered as silence."

"If you were to choose to watch live video composer and performer Ana Carvalho's work silent, your brain would be easily guided into a synesthetic experience, assigning sounds to each rhythmic change in color, pace, frame. Her images oscillate…they dance, they breathe. As you experience this, there might be a sense that you have lost your ability to hear the outside world, as these images are clearly attached to, woven with, a part of sound."

"We are interested in how data might be understood differently once sonified or made musical. We want to explore what kinds of codes are embedded in the architecture of American culture."

"This is a guest contribution by Jim Griffin, Senior Sound Designer at award-winning Soho-based audio post production facility Jungle Studios. Foley is probably the most fun and creative element of sound design - here, Jim looks at some of the lengths he has gone to creating great sound and offers his tips on Foley. "

"The goal of this project is to understand the language of birds -- of course not ALL species of birds, but at least a few, starting with those that have languages that seem complex, and yet manageable.While this has long been a desire, up to now it has not been possible, but with modern advances in computing, in linguistic analysis, and a new-found appreciation of how sophisticated other creatures can be, the grammar (and perhaps meaning) of bird song seems attainable."

"When presented with visual flashes of a black disk and audible beeps, the number of beeps may dictate how many disks you see. Illusion discovered by Ladan Shams, Yukiyasu Kamitani, and Shinsuke Shimojo."

"Based merely on a technological approach, one might think that Surround sound is just the technique of reproducing audio signals in a particular array of speakers that distribute sound around space in order to give a three-dimensional illusion for the ears… Surround is not visual really, is not something we can see. Surround is not just a technique of distributing sound, but the consequences of it. It's a characteristic of sound itself, natural to the sonic phenomenon and responsible of the entire notion of the "auditory field" which is more than simply one dimension of space, but a multi-layered, multi-dimensional representation of sound."

Great article about field recording and the ways that it can go wrong (and right!)

"Neuroscientists have found that there are audiovisual mirror neurons in the monkey premotor cortex that discharge when the animal performs, sees, or hears a specific action. Scientists of human motion have shown that auditory stimuli are important in the performance of difficult tasks and can, for example, elicit anticipatory postural adjustments in athletes."

"Jennie C. Jones  practice mines the territory of Modernism-abstraction and minimalism; experimental jazz; and seminal political and social shifts-to reveal the complex and often parallel legacies of the mid-20th century's social, cultural, and political experimentations.  Jones brings to light the unlikely alliances that emerged between the visual arts and the imprint of jazz, highlighting the way they became and continue to exist as tangible markers of social evolution and political strivings. "

"Bells ring, but it's not your grandmother calling you to dinner from the backyard. Bells ring and people shout, but it's not in a train station. Bells ring, people shout and a motorcycle whizzes by. Cars honk. "Dolla dolla dolla," the hawkers call. Despite standing in an underground gallery at the Smithsonian's National Museum of African Art in Washington, D.C., visitors are instantly transported to the Balogun Market in Lagos, Nigeria, through Emeka Ogboh's sound art installation, "Market Symphony." Open through Sept. 24, this is the museum's first sound-art installation, thanks to curator Karen Milbourne, who has a special interest in sound art. Ogboh appeals directly to only one of the five senses-hearing-to re-create the atmosphere of an open-air market. Upending the traditional museum visitor experience presents several opportunities."

"As Mendi + Keith describe, "For Baldwin sound, music, and the blues in particular were sources of inspiration. The multichannel sound art work meditates on a politics of listening found at the intersection of Baldwinʼs language and the sound worlds invoked in his work. It uses the glass façade of The New School's University Center as delivery system for the sound, turning the building itself into a speaker. The 12-hour piece is created using slow moving harmonies, melodicized language from Baldwinʼs writings, ambient recordings from the streets of Harlem, and an inventory of sounds contained in Baldwin's story 'Sonnyʼs Blues.'""

"A new study shows microphones suspended from helium balloons in the stratosphere can detect low-frequency sounds from ocean waves. The new method shows promise for detecting acoustic signals from natural disasters and nuclear explosions that cannot always be reliably detected by sensors on the ground, according to the study's authors."

"SONIC ACTS Festival - The Geologic Imagination Raviv Ganchrow: In the Company of Long Waves 1 March 2015 - Paradiso, Amsterdam, the Netherlands --- The saturated spectrum of infrasound suggests that toned-down sounds don't necessarily diminish. The lowest threshold of human hearing is also the upper register of an immense sonic territory that literally interfaces landmass with oceans and skies. Raviv Ganchrow introduces the theme of extensive acoustic waves in the context of his Long-Wave Synthesis project where marine oscillations, streaking meteors, calving glaciers, gas flares and nuclear explosions coexist; where sound become so heavy it's affected by gravity; and where oscillations slow down to such an extent that they spill over into weather."