"A team of scientists announced on Thursday that they had heard and recorded the sound of two black holes colliding a billion light-years away, a fleeting chirp that fulfilled the last prediction of Einstein's general theory of relativity."

"We may complain about a defining feature of the city, but we also feed off it."

"The Robert L. Forward novel Dragon's Egg begins with an intrepid graduate student refusing to accept that a noisy satellite signal is just a malfunction. It must have some meaning, she thinks-and it does, turning out to herald the passing by of an inhabited neutron star (and making graduate school look rather easy). Even a malfunction, though, wouldn't really have been noise. We'd have to assume that some satellite engineer would be interested. In fact, it's hard to imagine any signal coming from space that would be of no interest to anyone. The noisiest signals are even sometimes the most important. Microwave and gravitational wave backgrounds, for example. Our modern definition of noise, as unwanted sound or signal, is a relatively recent one. The word used to mean strife, and nausea. Is the new meaning a useful ontology? Or does it encourage us to dismiss what we can't interpret? Welcome to "Noise.""

"I wondered why an artist like Brian would be interested in matters of spacetime and relativity. The more I got to know Brian, I knew it wasn't a time filler, or for his health. What I was about to discover during my two years in London was that Brian was something I've come to call a "sound cosmologist." He was investigating the structure of the universe, not inspired by music, but with music."

"In 2011, the Finnish Tourist Board released a series of photographs of lone figures in the wilderness, with the caption "Silence, Please." An international "country branding" consultant, Simon Anholt, proposed the playful tagline "No talking, but action." And a Finnish watch company, Rönkkö, launched its own new slogan: "Handmade in Finnish silence.""

"Without stimulation and distraction, your brain need not focus and goes into a default mode of sorts. That doesn't mean it completely turns off. Quite the opposite. Your brain at rest will sort and gather information. This is where the self-reflection comes in.   Auditory stimulation forces your brain to process sound and listen to what's going on around you. Without that external noise, your brain is forced to listen to what's going on inside of it."

"The Music Construction Machine is a large, public, generative music box, which people can operate via a big hand crank. The project is on public display in the Goethe-Institut Pop Up Pavillion in Wroclaw, Poland, as part of the cultural capital program."

browser based project: Musical Chord Progression Arpeggiator via the verge

"I brought a pound of sodium to Chestfest 5.0. It did neat things once it hit the water!"

"Born blind, Juan Pablo Culasso has never seen a bird. But through his gifted sense of hearing, he can identify more than 3,000 different bird sounds and differentiate more than 720 species. The 29-year-old said he realized he had perfect, or absolute pitch, when he was a boy. Tossing stones in a river, he was able to tell his father exactly the note each one made when it hit the water. Absolute pitch, the rare ability to hear a tone and immediately know it's a C-sharp, for example, is so unusual that only one of every 10,000 people has it, Culasso said, adding that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was among them."

"Here's a fun bit: a foley artist recreating and accentuating the sounds of everyday life, transforming a shower into hand tossing spaghetti while making coffee can be blowing bubbles in a milkshake with a swirly straw. The imagination of sounds gets more and more ridiculous which results in more and more fun. Presented by Nowness and directed by Oliver Holms, it's basically sound design for life."

"Scientists from Chalmers have demonstrated a new kind of detector for sound at the level of quietness of quantum mechanics. The result offers prospects of a new class of quantum hybrid circuits that mix acoustic elements with electrical ones, and may help illuminate new phenomena of quantum physics. The results have been published in Nature Physics. ​The "quantum microphone" is based on a single electron transistor, that is, a transistor where the current passes one electron at a time. The acoustic waves studied by the research team propagate over the surface of a crystalline microchip, and resemble the ripples formed on a pond when a pebble is thrown into it. The wavelength of the sound is a mere 3 micrometers, but the detector is even smaller, and capable of rapidly sensing the acoustic waves as they pass by."

There are two ways of seeing this act of invention. In one version, it was the realization of an old dream. answering to ancient susceptibilities. The French photographer Nadar, greeting Edison's invention, said it was as if Rabelais's tale of the sea of frozen words, which released voices into the air when it melted, had passed from the imaginary to the real. Rabelais was dead only thirty-five years when in 1589 the Italian scientist Giovanni Batista della Porta, one of the inventors of the telescope, imagined that he had 'devised a way to preserve words, that have been pronounced, inside lead pipes, in such a manner that they burst forth from them when one removes the cover'. Around the same time a Nuremberg optician suggested enclosing echoes inside bottles, where he thought they would keep for a few hours at least.

"Recording of sound is an old dream of man. Scientists began to declare the physical basics of sound in the early Middle Ages already. Bonetius, roman philosopher described the relation between fastness of vibration and the pitch of the sound at the end of the 5th century [1]. In the Middle Ages, many researchers tried to record sounds but they were not too successful, due to the insufficient knowledge. Giovanni Battista della Porta, a great natural scientist, who lived in the 16th century, wanted to "trap" the sound with metal tubes. He thought, if he speaks into the tube and covers that very fast, then the sound will be caught and he can listen that later. He was very enthusiastic, but he could not reach any result"

"Yuri Suzuki is among the 2016 Swarovski Designers of the Future Award commissions, unveiled at Design Miami/Basel 2016."

"I first encountered Guidonian hands as an extension of my interest in graphic scores from the 20th century avant-garde. Beyond their shared use of drawing, and inherent beauty, the two have few conceptual links. Guidonian hands were a medieval mnemonic device (a system of learning aiding retention) designed to assist singers sight-sing (the sung realization of prima vista, or sight-reading). Their development is generally credited to an 11th centruy Italian music theorist named Guido of Arezzo, though the graphic use of the hand as a musical guide long predates the development of his technique. Within a Guidonian hand, each section of the hand indicated a specific note within the hexachord system (six-notes), over three octaves. In the absence of a score, once the graphic hand was memorized by a singer, a conductor would need only point to a series of notes on their hand. They are a fascinating fragment from the development of Western theory, as well as being objects of sublime beauty."

"After his friend Toru Takemitsu, Toshi Ichiyanagi is one of the most famous Japanese composers of the 20th century. He was an early member of Fluxus and a student of both Aaron Copeland and John Cage, but unlike most of his contemporaries with similar pedigrees, he is largely unknown outside of the country of birth. His important contributions to Fluxus have been largely lost within the long shadow of historical revisionism. Like the efforts of many of his peers, they are somewhat obscured by the success of his first wife Yoko Ono."

symposium

"magine a wide, twisting column of bass in the center of a room with percussive moons spinning around in its orbit. A beat would smash in one corner, and then echo away in a spiral around the room before the pattern continues with the next beat in the following corner. That was a portion of Zemi 17's recent surround sound installation in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Listeners lay strewn about the carpeted, dark room taking in the aural tale through a multi-channel sound system that he built."

"Sub Pop Records has signed some of the most famous and influential indie bands of the last 30 years, including Nirvana, Sleater-Kinney, The Postal Service, and Beach House. Over time, the stars and hits have changed and the formats have evolved as well, from vinyl to CDs to MP3s. In recent years, however, the label has started releasing new albums on a medium few thought would ever see a comeback: the cassette. But there's one big user group that never entirely stopped using the old school technology. The United States prison system has the largest prison population in the world and many of its inmates listen to their music on tape. For this group, cassettes aren't necessarily the cheapest or hippest way to listen to music; in some cases, it's the only way."