"We can't see sound. We can only judge the beauty of it by listening. Sometimes it seems like people who work with sound don't really know or care about visual aesthetics. Look at a website like this, for instance. On the other hand I think the opposite is also true."

The Highline is an elevated park, extending, at the time of this recording, from 13th Street to around 30th Street on the west side of Manhattan. I had chosen the Highline for recording because of the multi-dimensional sonic perspective it provides, with sound coming at you from below, from front and back, and above. My plan was to use the sounds in a composition called 'Elevated City', set to premiere as part of a World Listening Day event at New York University, July 18th.

"Neuhaus builds what he calls "sound works," more than 30 so far, that transform physical "places," most of which exist for other reasons. The premise is that we perceive space with our ears as well as our eyes: We hear a room as well as see it. The change is basic but subtle. A total of five - including two opened this spring on a bridge and in a corridor in Bern - are still running. Having toyed with such terms as "installation" and "sound environment," and trying to determine whether he can be called a sculptor or not, he still has trouble defining what he does. Ask Neuhaus what he is, however, and he answers without delay: "I'm an artist." "

Lying minutes off the coast of the Bronx mainland is City Island. Spanning only 1.5 miles in length and occupying space off the coasts of both New York City and Nassau County, its singular location and history make the island a living laboratory for exploring New York City's history and future. The entire length of City Island can be easily traversed by foot and the surrounding water can be seen and heard from virtually all points. This proximity to the water lends City Island residents a unique perspective, as they enjoy many of the conveniences of an urban life, yet still maintain a close relationship with the water. This walk will incorporate anthropological 'field study' techniques. The participants will be engaged in exercises designed to observe the environment and decipher its visual and aural 'cues'. The group will uncover the relatively unknown wonders of this "island existence" that thrive within the confines of an urban environment.

"The design, for a house on a generic suburban lot, mixes sound on two levels. First, "sonic windows," embedded with microphones and tiny cameras, capture images and sounds from outside the house and broadcast them inside. Second, the house encourages family members to mix, layer, and juxtapose pre-recorded sounds with those collected from outside. Think bluebirds chirping along with Beyonce, or the postman slamming the mailbox shut at a climactic moment in a Beethoven symphony."

""we tend to be indifferent to acoustics" in contemporary residences, and think only of "competing with traffic outside". Normally, he continues, "architecture is about being quiet", whereas there's a rich history of sound and architecture - especially in pre-literate societies. He talks of the clarity of sound in the Greek amphitheatre, of the intentional use of sound spaces in Medieval and Gothic cathedrals, which were "designed by acoustics as much as visual principles - they were considered 'sacred resonators'"."

"This short film is actually an advertisement for Japanese mobile phone company Docomo, but it's nonetheless hard to resist: a linear musical instrument designed by Drill Inc. is played by the descent of a wooden ball as it slowly rolls down track, sending xylophonic plinks and plonks out into the forest. "

"I'm quite late hearing this for the first time, but I was thrilled to discover composer Pierre Sauvageot's Harmonic Fields project, a participatory landscape of wind-activated musical instruments temporarily installed on the beach near Birkrigg Common, Cumbria, England. The haphazard plinks, drum rolls, whistles and drones is often mesmerizingly beautiful, as the following video makes clear. It's a kind of weather plug-in, constructed as a sequence of very different movements in space."

On the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, sound artist Mark Bain has released the full audio file of the sound of the Twin Towers collapsing, a melancholic howl terrestrially amplified by the region's geology. You can listen to it here:

Sound artist Rutger Zuydervelt and designer Gerco Hiddink have teamed up to organize a new audio project called Bridges. The project asked a group of eight well-known improvisational musicians to "react" to four Dutch bridges (or, more accurately, to field recordings made on, under, and near those bridges). The project is thus as much about musical improv as it is about infrastructural acoustics-a structural ecology of sound vibrantly humming in the spaces around us. "

"20 Hz observes a geo-magnetic storm occurring in the Earth's upper atmosphere. Working with data collected from the CARISMA radio array and interpreted as audio, we hear tweeting and rumbles caused by incoming solar wind, captured at the frequency of 20 Hertz. Generated directly by the sound, tangible and sculptural forms emerge suggestive of scientific visualisations. As different frequencies interact both visually and aurally, complex patterns emerge to create interference phenomena that probe the limits of our perception"

"In the MASS MoCA portion of this multi-part project, Harmonic Bridge, low sounds roll and drone under the Route 2 overpass half a block from MASS MoCA. Entering the space under the bridge, one becomes aware of a turning eddy of sound in the midst of intersecting streams of traffic. Cars pass by heading north or south on Marshall Street and east or west on the Route 2 bridge, but this linear motion is counterpoised by a rolling, humming C as calming as the rhythm of ocean waves. Although cars stream by, pedestrians lose the impetus to move forward, derailed by this cool pool of sound with its mysterious, chant-like hum. Harmonic Bridge presents an aural cross-section of North Adams, a slice of the city in the key of C, comprised of the fundamental note and its overtone series."

"Conceptualizing sound in geologic terms is a daunting task. Both the geologic and the sonic are time-based media, defined by duration. Yet sound speaks in milliseconds, the geologic in eons. They exist in different time zones. So, given this conundrum, instead of considering how to measure sound within a geologic scale, perhaps we are better served to ask: What do geologic materials sound like or, more precisely, what do geologic materials hear? This latter question might seem ridiculously anthropomorphic, given that we are talking about material objects. So let us first consider what exactly sound and hearing are."

"For most fans attending a baseball game is a summer diversion, an addiction, an act of devotion. I'm a music critic, so for me it's something else too: an immersion in bustling, jumbled, enveloping sound. And if you think of the Yankees as an athletic orchestra, the team has a comfortable and acoustically lively new concert hall. What if I treated a game as a kind of outdoor musical piece? "

""The Music Box," the project of which this tower is a part, is one of those things that requires a hyphen or a compound word to describe; Delaney Martin, its curator, calls it "a shantytown-sound laboratory." "

"This webpage contains earthquake "sounds" created from seismic recordings around the world generated by the 2011/03/11 Mw9.0 Tohoku, Japan earthquake. They provide a unique way for us to listen to the vibration of the Earth that is otherwise inaudible to us, and to decipher the complicated earthquake physics and triggering processes. "

Bryan Pijanowski of Purdue University is hoping to start a new research discipline that he calls soundscape ecology; it will "use sound as a way to understand the ecological characteristics of a landscape," as ScienceDaily reports.

"The phonography scene is small and fragmented, yet ambitious and international - all factors which make it simultaneously hard and easy to keep up with developments. Ever since it was founded, Gruenrekorder has attempted to be more than just a label and turned into a hub for field recording-related issues and projects. They therefore seemed like an obvious choice for Angus Carlyle as curators for the audio part of his „Autumn Leaves" compendium."

"Some of the hottest tracks on digital playlists: sounds of an oscillating fan, a waterfall and crickets. White noise and other soothing sounds, once mainly played on machines to aid nighttime sleep, are increasingly helping make daytime hours more serene. When played through headphones, the sounds help people tune out chatty co-workers, pounding jackhammers and the dentist's drill. "

"I just came back from New York City, a place with an overwhelming sound, everywhere you go. And each location in a city like that has its own resonance, its own sonic identity. That's hard to hear though if there is so much noise around it becomes a cacophony. But what if we could isolate this resonance and listen to the astonishing differences in the sound of urban spaces? Davide Tidoni did just that with A Balloon for Linz. Luckily Linz is not NYC, and he was able to find spots which were quiet enough to make a clear recording (using his nice helmet mount microphone). You might recognize the concept as Davide did something similar before."