Sound Research

"SPECIAL ISSUE "SOUND AND THE HEALTHY CITY": ARTICLES PUBLISHED AS OF DECEMBER 2019"

"Lawrence Abu Hamdan is an internationally celebrated artist who works with sound and an internationally recognized expert forensic listener. He likes to call himself a Private Ear. Your host visits Lawrence in Beirut to hear more."

"Experiences of listening may be understood to weaken us, making us vulnerable to the intensities of worldly contact and each other. Reflecting upon particular modes of listening, from the empathic to the migratory, understandings of sharing and togetherness will be drawn out, leading to a consideration of what we might call an acoustics of interruption. Accordingly, listening is posed as a framework through which formations of social solidarity and self-organization may be generated, where material and immaterial, real and imaginary forces are equally demanded."

" I'm curating a collection of auditory illusions found in indigenous folk practices, popular music, and scientific research.  The focus is on finding examples from each sphere that are as beautiful and engaging as they are educational. As the collection takes shape this blog will be structured as an archive of illusions and phenomena, searchable by terms from both science and culture."

"The Vienna-based group Iraqi Autumn draws attention to the international community's silence regarding the outbreak of violence in Iraq over the past two months."

"Keeners were the women of rural Ireland who were traditionally paid to cry, wail and sing over the bodies of the dead at funerals and wakes. Their role was to help channel the grief of the bereaved and they had an elevated, almost mythical status among their communities. The custom of keening had all but vanished by the 1950's as people began to view it as primitive, old-fashioned and uncivilised."

ELECTRONICOS FANTASTICOS! is a project where retired consumer electronics are resuscitated as instruments, new ways to play music are invented, and all kinds of people are invited to be orchestrated with the artist and musician Ei Wada. Once we dismantle old consumer electronics, we realize the condensed wisdom of pioneers and the interesting and mysterious scientific/physics phenomenon hidden inside these objects. By transferring these into electronic musical instruments, a sound like a groan of electronics begins to echo. Old consumer electronics come to life as yokai-supernatural creatures from Japanese folklore, sometimes they appear as spirits of abandoned tools.

"THE NEUROLOGICAL LINK BETWEEN TASTE AND HEARING, OR WHY AIRPLANE PASSENGERS LIKE TO DRINK TOMATO JUICE"

"Sixteen bottles, each with its own air blower, stand arranged in a circle playing music. For his piece, and the wind was like the regret for what is no more, artist João Costa brings the wind indoors, translating its wild energy into simple sounds. "

"As he prepares for a performance, B&O PLAY visits London's Kew Gardens and meets the artist Wolfgang Buttress who tells us about his soon to be sonified sculptural installation, The Hive."

This is a pretty good layman's description of the relationship between sound wavelengths (their pitch in Hz) and the size of the room they are played back in.

"Researchers from Nottingham Trent University, in the United Kingdom, have now developed and tested a new prototype device that can remotely monitor hive activity without disturbing the bees. The device picks up and analyzes vibrations from special types of bee vocalizations, such as the common one called a "begging signal." It has successfully tracked changes in bee activity from day to night, and seasonally, by monitoring the occurrences of this specific signal."

"We had a joke in the studio that they were the best band members we've ever had," laughs Kev Bales when describing the recording of Be's One album. Bales may have spent the last 30 years drumming with the likes of Spiritualized, Soulsavers and Julian Cope, but the musicians he's referring to here are a different kind of buzz band altogether: to be precise, they're 40,000 bees, and their activity forms the basis of One, a transcendental drone symphony between man and bee that is surely one of the year's most beguiling offerings."

"The tradition of "environmental music" that began in 1980s Japan has passed to a new wave of audio adventurers. We join them in Tokyo in search of found sounds"

Make your own hydrophone