Sound Research

"No field of study based on sensory experience seems to be overburdened by terminology to the same extent as that dealing with sound and hearing. The visual sense, of course, has received as much attention as the auditory from physics, psychology, neurophysiology, and the visual arts, which have all contributed terminology and jargon alike, but a great deal of it seems to have entered the common vocabulary already, and at least the general notions involved are seldom foreign to the average citizen or student. Terms such as perspective, foreground, background, colour, spectrum, shadow, focus, image, reflection, transparent, translucent and the wealth of descriptive visual terms, not to mention common visual impairments and the complexity of visual language found in contemporary cinema and photography - all of these have found public familiarity in a way that it is hard to imagine their sonic counterparts ever matching. Almost every school child knows what white light is, and how it is composed, but would he know what white noise is, even though the likelihood of it having an adverse effect on him is far greater? The ability to perceive three-dimensional visual perspective when projected onto a two-dimensional surface, by no means a simple achievement given the lateness of its appearance in our civilization, is irrevocably ingrained in the child's perceptual habits at an early age, and yet the ability to distinguish acoustic parameters, or experience subtle nuances of timbre (supposing he knows what timbre, the sonic equivalent of colour, is) may never be among his perceptual skills."

"Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez's (literally) transporting film-shot inside a cable car that carries pilgrims and tourists to and from a mountaintop temple in Nepal-is radically simple in conception. Each of its 11 shots lasts as long as a one-way ride, which corresponds to the duration of a roll of 16mm film. A kind of head movie that viewers are invited to complete as they watch, Manakamana is thrillingly mysterious in its effects: a staged documentary, a cross between science fiction and ethnography, an airborne version of an Andy Warhol screen test. Working within a 5-by-5-foot glass and metal box, Spray and Velez have made an endlessly suggestive film that both describes and transcends the bounds of time and space."

"Henrik Håkansson (b. 1968 Sweden) devotes his work to studying the complex connections between humans and nature. He carefully constructs environmental experiments that ask participants to explore their impact on the environment that surrounds them, such as in the installation Frog For e.s.t. (eternal sonic trance) (1995). This piece consisted of a room filled with inflatable pools, humidifiers, insects, frogs, strobe lights, and a DJ mixing techno music on site. Projects like Frog For e.s.t. examine the intrusion of human artifice on the environment: what happens when we attempt to recreate delicate ecological systems? What are the effects of human-made sounds replacing the natural soundscape?"

"That's the idea, at least. I'm walking westward from New York City for nine months or so. If everything goes according to plan, I'll be in Oregon when the clock runs out. If nothing goes according to plan, maybe I'll end up in Peru or Mongolia or Pennsylvania. "

This is just one video, poke around on the site to find more. "Anechoic is a 'collections story' that uses sound instead of visuals to interpret the essence of key garments from the Autumn/Winter 2006 collections by leading fashion brands. Part of a series of projects devoted to exploring 'The Sound of Clothes', these interactives and fashion films explore sound 'generated' by the garments themselves."

"Hearing is a vastly underrated sense. We tend to think of the world as a place that we see, interacting with things and people based on how they look. Studies have shown that conscious thought takes place at about the same rate as visual recognition, requiring a significant fraction of a second per event. But hearing is a quantitatively faster sense. While it might take you a full second to notice something out of the corner of your eye, turn your head toward it, recognize it and respond to it, the same reaction to a new or sudden sound happens at least 10 times as fast. "

Artist reference In this interview artist Jem Finer discusses his recent body of work with David Rooney, Curator of Timekeeping at the National Maritime Museum. In his Longplayer project Finer set himself the challenge to develop a 1000 year long musical score, working within the confines of today's technology and considering how sustainable the possibilities may be over time.

"An aural history of the Cold War technologies that underpinned the space race and the arms race. "

soundartist (1999, Spain) Currently based in Utrecht For me, creating a work always begins with sound research. In my concerts and installations, I explore the boundaries of the concept music using my own made instruments and extended techniques. To perceive sound, you need a source that vibrates (moves) the air and someone who can perceive those vibrations: "Sound is movement". As an artist I communicate with sound waves, with movement. Everything that sounds in my work is "aLive": lively, playful and produced in the moment.

""Sound travels as compression waves through gases and liquids. Stable in its immateriality it remains true to its original data. Here sound input has a stronger power over a flow field. It creates waves that propagate through the fluid. When two sound waves run towards each other, they collide and interfere with each other's patterns. A snapshot of this collision is translated into a 3D model and produced with a milling machine." -Eva Schindling"

"This paper traces the relationship between art and atrocity, materiality and decay, and the aural possibilities of hospitality in a time of terror. There is one site in particular that seems to speak so poignantly to the complex workings of trauma, ruin, and memory, and it is the use of sound in this place that I wish to draw attention to here. The September 11 Memorial and Museum may not appear, at first, to signal the ways in which sound might usher in a new way of thinking about the philosophically complex concept of hospitality nor the promises of decay. Yet, one installation in particular manages to do just that. Located in the Museum's Historical Exhibition, and evocative of death, mourning, and haunting, William Basinski's sound and video installation, The Disintegration Loops, offers a fitting yet unique elegy to the loss of the towers and nearly 3,000 innocent people."

"Encountering a boxing match projected on the wall of a darkened room is pretty unlikely while roaming around Chelsea galleries - unless you're at a Paul Pfeiffer show."

"This study examines evidence of the health benefits of natural soundscapes and quantifies the prevalence of restorative acoustic environments in national parks across the United States. The results affirm that natural sounds improve health, increase positive affect, and lower stress and annoyance. Also, analyses reveal many national park sites with a high abundance of natural sound and low anthropogenic sound"

Kathy Hinde is an audiovisual artist inspired by behaviours and phenomena found in nature and the everyday expressed through audiovisual installations and performances that combine sound, sculpture, image and light. Composed of hand-made objects, electronics and a blend of digital and analogue systems, her work represents a cross between kinetic sound sculptures and newly invented instruments. She frequently works in collaboration with other practitioners and scientists and often actively involves the audience in the creative process.

"In May 2019, Kathy Hinde invited people to join her on a 'Deep Listening Walk' to focus on the hidden sounds of Europe's largest blanket bog in The Flow Country in the far north of Scotland. Using specialist listening devices such as hydrophones, she made audible the sonic qualities of peat gently moving, and tuned in to the minuscule sounds emitted by small organisms living within this rich and biodiverse ecosystem. Blanket bog is a very special ecosystem, and the idea of 'Deep Listening' in this context was to listen into the peat at different depths, and to think about listening 'back in time' as these deep layers of peat have taken centuries to form, preserving organisms within its layers. What is it like to listen to these layers and different depths that hold deep time?"

"Fabric/Fragment of An Urban Wilderness is a sound work and an investigation of the built environment, produced by giving voice to the city's thickly layered range of electromagnetic fields (EMFs) projected by cell phone base stations."

"Researchers in Indonesia have developed an innovative way to remove microplastics from water without the need for expensive filters. It works, says Dhany Arifianto, an engineer at the Institut Teknologi Sepuluh Nopember in Surabaya, Indonesia, by passing contaminated water through a pipe, while underwater speakers make the pipe vibrate like the sound board of a guitar."

"Image to Audio, Spectrogram Player This app allows you to convert an image to audio file, and Decode, Play a audio file via spectrogram. You can make a sound image that is viewable on a spectrogram. With this app you can convert your images to audio and secretly send them to others. In order to convert an image, you just need to select an image from your computer, Google Drive, Webcam, and Clipboard. This app provides a standard spectrogram audio player. You can also play multiple audio/video file (mp3, m4a, mp4...) with a spectrogram. Supported formats: jpg, jpeg, png, gif, bmp, webp, mp3, m4a, ogg, mp4, webm... A spectrogram is a visual representation of the spectrum of frequencies of sound or other signal as they vary with time. Spectrograms are sometimes called sonographs, voiceprints, or voicegrams."

"Honey bees are one of the treasures in the world. An increase of waveform communication leads to good information exchange of mankind. In the biological view, it causes a lot of side effects and lifestyle changes in other living organisms. The drastic changes are causing the natural imbalance in the ecosystem and become a global issue. There are significant reasons for bee colony collapse disorder (CCD) like pesticides, disease and climate change. Recent studies reveal that a cell phone tower and mobile phone handset are also causing side effects to honey bees due to radiation emission. Most of the researchers concentrated on biological and behavioral changes in a honey bee due to radiation effects. For that, the real-time radiation levels have experimented but the different technical perspectives such as radiation emission levels, handset radiation emission measures and multi-sources of radiation are needed to be considered during research. This study aimed to provide possible research extensions of colony collapse disordercaused by cell tower and mobile handsets."