Sound Research

"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."

THE SCHOOL OF SOUND began in 1998 as a single, four-day event aimed at exploring the creative use of sound in the arts and media, with a special emphasis on film and screen productions. It was responding to the limited opportunities to study sound, particularly for film. Our first event attracted over 200 people from 25 countries. The programme featured Walter Murch, Michel Chion, Piers Plowright, Mike Figgis, Laura Mulvey, Peter Kubelka and the Quay Brothers. Since then, the SOS has expanded its programme to include weekend seminars, intensive practical workshops, lectures, 'listening' events, consultancies for professional practitioners and, of course, the international symposium held every two years.

"Sculpture-situated within the sensibilities of space, embodiment, and the physical world-offers a richly speculative arena for experimentation with materials and technology. The continuing expansion of practices reminds us that sculpture no longer resides in a world of "things": contemporary physics now reformulates "solid" matter as process and flow, foundational concepts for art are now redefined or dismantled, and virtuality often stands in for the "real." The implementation of sound created by artists as sculpture has contributed robust tools and a new sense of identity for these changing boundaries. Yet while sound has become almost ubiquitous in contemporary art, it has garnered scant scholarship, and its artists are often neglected. "

"This sculptural installation invites people to use acoustic glasses to discover musical tones in the sound of their environment. Listening Glasses are hollow spheres with a funnel on one side (inserted into the ear) and an opening on the other. Each glass is calibrated to a particular musical tone. If this tone sounds in the surrounding air, the glass resonates and amplifies it."

Another good inquiry into what :sound art" means

"an exploration of the sonic landscape of civil defense featuring the sounds of the rsh-10, asc t-135, thunderbolt t-1000, aca allertor 125 and more…"

"Installation by Brian House creates audio from feedback of four different sheets of metal affected by a realtime feed from water quality sensors examining a polluted river:"

"Capilano Breakhead Tank Music Performance, Immersion"

"Italian cave with exceptional acoustics and an unsavory history.  "

"The Talking Statues project gives 35 public monuments in New York City a voice, from Balto the dog to George Washington in Union Square."

"Almost 200 recordings of international protests are now archived in an online sound map that spans over two decades."

"In a project by Gideon Jacobs and Gregor Hochmuth, visitors to Deli Gallery can pick up a phone and hear the confessions of strangers."

"Imagine for a moment the year 1800. A doctor is meeting with a patient - most likely in the patient's home. The patient is complaining about shortness of breath. A cough, a fever. The doctor might check the patient's pulse or feel their belly, but unlike today, what's happening inside of the patient's body is basically unknowable. There's no MRI. No X-rays. The living body is like a black box that can't be opened. The only way for a doctor to figure out what was wrong with a patient was to ask them, and as a result patients' accounts of their symptoms were seen as diseases in themselves. While today a fever is seen as a symptom of some underlying disease like the flu, back then the fever was essentially regarded as the disease itself."

"This acoustic world is open to everyone, but most of us never enter it. It just seems so counter-intuitive-not to mention a little hokey-to listen to trees. But Haskell does listen, and he describes his experiences with sensuous prose in his enchanting new book The Songs of Trees. A kind of naturalist-poet, Haskell makes a habit of returning to the same places and paying "repeated sensory attention" to them. "I like to sit down and listen, and turn off the apps that come pre-installed in my body," he says. Humans may be a visual species, but "sounds reveals things that are hidden from our eyes because the vibratory energy of the world comes around barriers and through the ground. Through sound, we come to know the place.""

"This month's series will have readers thinking about the sounds in classrooms in different ways. They will consider race, class, and gender, and how those aspects intersect how we listen to the classrooms of our past and our present. More importantly, the posts will all include assignments that educators at all stages can use in their classrooms."