Sound Research

Black Quantum Futurism (BQF) is a new approach to living and experiencing reality by way of the manipulation of space-time in order to see into possible futures, and/or collapse space-time into a desired future in order to bring about that future's reality. This vision and practice derives its facets, tenets, and qualities from quantum physics and Black/African cultural traditions of consciousness, time, and space. Under a BQF intersectional time orientation, the past and future are not cut off from the present - both dimensions have influence over the whole of our lives, who we are and who we become at any particular point in space-time. Through various writing, music, film, visual art, and creative research projects, BQF Collective also explores personal, cultural, familial, and communal cycles of experience, and solutions for transforming negative cycles into positive ones using artistic and wholistic methods of healing. Our work focuses on recovery, collection, and preservation of communal memories, histories, and stories.

"It is of vital importance to attend to the Covid soundscape while we are still in it because the Covid soundscape is bound by time and place and is ever-changing. Once Covid is eradicated, our access to the sounds surrounding it disappear as well."

"In 1939, an astonishing new machine debuted at the New York World's Fair. It was called the "Voder," short for "Voice Operating Demonstrator."  It looked sort of like a futuristic church organ"

A written history of the legendary and groundbreaking BBC Radiophonic Workshop

"Ryuichi Sakamoto, Daito Manabe"

"Provoking more noisy t(h)inkering in sound studies, digital humanities, and the audio arts."

"Soundcities is an online database of the thousands of sounds from around the world and you can visit the various cities and create soundmaps. "

"Locus Sonus is a research group whose main aim is to explore the ever evolving relationship between sound, place and usage. Our methodology places artistic experimentation at the center of our research. Multidisciplinary theoretical approaches dialogue with, nourish and nurture this experimentation and the research sometimes (but not systematically) leads to artistic productions in the form of installations, performances, concerts and web-based projects. Beyond this, Locus Sonus regularly publishes research in recognized journals and takes on an editorial role for special issues. "

"The UCSB Library invites you to discover and listen to its online archive of cylinder recordings; donate to help the collection grow; and learn about how these sounds and songs create an audio history of American culture."

"Conversations of Great Whales in the oceans… Low throb of ship engines… Continuous rumble of the ground beneath our feet and of the seafloor below the water… Bursts of vibrations excited by earthquakes… We cannot normally hear these vibrations as sounds-the human ear is not designed to. But what if we could? What if we could make the sounds of the Earth audible?"

" Sonic Cyberfeminisms is an ongoing project by a collective of artists, musicians and writers, which draws upon intersectional feminist praxis and the legacies of cyberfeminism. The project aims to foreground agendas of social justice in the domains of sound, gender and technology and, in doing so, develop critical cultural work. The project was initiated by Annie Goh and Marie Thompson. Current Sonic Cyberfeminisms participants include Robin Buckley, Marlo De Lara, Jane Frances Dunlop, Natalie Hyacinth, Miranda Iossifidis, Louise Lawlor, Frances Morgan and Shanti Suki Osman. "

"Does the internet have a sound? Is it the whirring fan that keeps your computer from overheating? Is it a flurry of incessant notification pings? Is it the cackling laugh of Chewbacca Mom? Or is a monotonous drone, humming from an anonymous building where servers spin their disks and spit out information to millions of devices across a global network?"

"Despondent folk music has been written about the sound of silence, but the sound of spiders turns out to be much, much heavier. Scientists at MIT have collaborated with Berlin-based sound artist Tomás Saraceno to create a virtual experience that literally instrumentalizes spider webs. This project aligns with more than two decades on the artist's part to deepen our understanding of environmental justice and interspecies cohabitation. Saraceno, Roland Muehlethaler, and Ally Bisshop at Studio Saraceno all participate in the research and development carried out through projects, including "Arachnophilia." "

"Magneto Mori is an exploration of tape recording as a form of memory storage. In this iteration the location is the Irish mountain town of Kilfinane."

In Resonance: The Journal of Sound and culture "This paper explores the cultural ramifications of music generated by artificial intelligence (AI). Deploying complex algorithms to create original music productions, AI's automation of human authorship may suggest a radically new sonic form. However, its creators have preferred to use its tools to mimic established musical genres from the past. "

"Over the past 40 years "sound art" has been hailed as a new artistic category in numerous writings, yet one of its first significant exhibitions is mentioned only in passing, if at all. The first instance of the hybrid term sound art used as the title of an exhibition at a major museum was Sound Art at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA), shown from 25 June to 5 August 1979. Although this was not marketed as a feminist exhibition, curator Barbara London selected three women to exemplify the new form. Maggi Payne created multi-speaker works that utilized space in a sculptural fashion; Connie Beckley combined language and sounding sculptural objects, showing sound in both a conceptual and physical manifestation; and Julia Heyward's work used aspects of feminist performance art including music, narrative, and the voice in order to buck abstract aesthetics of the time. This paper uses archival research, interviews, and analysis of work presented to reconstruct the exhibition and describe the obstacles both the artists and the curator encountered. The paper further provides context in the lives of the artists and the curator as well as the surrounding artistic scene, and ultimately exposes the discriminatory reasons this important exhibition has been marginalized in the current discourse."

"What is sound art? And what do we know about its origin story? We explore this question and more with our guest this week, artist and educator Judy Dunaway. An adjunct professor in the History of Art Department at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Dunaway's recent article, "The Forgotten 1979 MoMA Sound Art Exhibition," is a fascinating look at the history of sound art and highlights important contributions by female artists. In our wide-ranging discussion, we also hear about Dunaway's own artistic practice, from her work with latex balloons to transmission art to a "phone improv" show over BlogTalkRadio a decade ago."

"I can hear how the bees are behaving - if they're agitated, if there are other bees trying to get in the hive, or if it's too crowded or too hot or too cold," said Aerial Gilbert, an avid beekeeper in Petaluma."