Sound Research

"BIG revealed the design for a treetop hotel room wrapped in 350 bird houses created for the Treehotel in Lapland, Sweden. Designed in collaboration with ornithologist Ulf Ohman, the 34 square-metre Biosphere room seeks to enhance the surrounding biosphere by providing a habitat for local birds while allowing guests to be immersed in the surrounding forest. The project is the latest addition to the hotel's series of individually designed rooms created by some of Scandinavia's most renowned architects, such as Snøhetta, Rintala Eggerstsson, and Tham & Videgard."

Gilberto Esparza investigates technology as a possibility to pose questions and solutions to the impacts of the human footprint on life on earth, based on a vindication of the intelligence inherent in life and rethinking the relationship of human societies with the natural environment. His practice employs recycling consumer technology and experiments with biotechnology.

"Nick Luscombe concludes his personal journey through music and architecture, with a look at past and present visions of the future, including tracks from Yuri Suzuki, Alexandre Desplat and Abdullah Ibrahim. We hear the music choice of architect Kengo Kuma and a brand new work from Scanner, inspired by Kuma's Yudo Pavilion."

"Three inverted metal trashcans, with microphones hidden inside. Strategically placed beneath a steady stream of rain drops, from a cracked porch roof. Who composed this? Ask the rain."

"In order to design a computer game soundscape that allows a game player to feel immersed in theirvirtual world, we must understand how we navigate and understand the real world soundscape. In thischapter I will explore how sound, particularly in urban spaces, is increasingly categorised as noise,ignoring both the social signicance of any soundscape and how we use sound to interpret and negotiate space. I will explore innovative methodologies for identifying an individual's perception of soundscapes. Designing virtual soundscapes without prior investigation into their cultural and social meaning could prove problematic."

With the advent of Digital Humanities methodologies the visualization of Humanities data has become more and more prominent. However, once the "wow-effect" of a "cool" visualization - such as a pie-chart, a word cloud, a diagram etc. - has worn off many Humanists begin to react with scepticism: is it worth the trouble? Doesn"t a "word say more than thousand pictures"? Their scepticism seems justified: Most of the current visualization paradigms are derived from engineering and mathematics oriented applications. Most of them are context blind, a-historical and driven by an epistemology that reduces complex phenomena to a series of "data points" - which is exactly the opposite of how Humanists tend to look at their field of interest. - In this lecture series international visualization experts will explore new, philosophically and cultural history informed approaches to Humanities data visualization that respond to the Humanities" needs.

"Today a growing group of sonic artists engage with plants as collaborators in their processes and creations. The duo Feral Practice invites audience members to sound walks in forests to reflect on ecological and social issues in the vicinity of trees. Sound artist Mileece senses signals from plants to develop sound-generating algorithms that she combines with field recordings to design immersive sound installations, a technology akin to the one used by Tosca Terán to detect activity in mycorrhizal systems which she converts into musical notes. Cristina Ochoa and Eduardo Vindiola read signalling activity in beets and modulate their rhythmic patterns to perform with them. Leslie Garcia studies plant communication to design prosthetic devices that simulate an abstract voice for plants through a process of biofeedback."

Article about the sound design of Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Memoria) and also the sound of the body and mind.

"In the late 1970s, a harbor seal named Hoover began catcalling passersby at the New England Aquarium in a thick Maine accent. A new study confirms seals' uncanny ability to copy human speech."

"Daniel Challis, who has cerebral palsy and is unable to speak, is auditioning people to provide his new voice"

"Have you ever wondered if bacteria make distinctive sounds? If we could listen to bacteria, we would be able to know whether they are alive or not. When bacteria are killed using an antibiotic, those sounds would stop - unless of course, the bacteria are resistant to the antibiotic. This is exactly what a team of researchers from TU Delft, led by dr. Farbod Alijani, has now managed to do: they captured low-level noise of a single bacterium using graphene. Now, their research is published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology."

a nomadic space designed to host invisible works. It produces, presents and collects recent or unpublished sound works by contemporary artists from different backgrounds, geographies and generations.

in 1722 Buonanni published his Gabinetto Armonico pieno d'istromenti sonori (or Harmonic cabinet full of sonorous instruments), an attempt to catalogue, for the first time, the musical instruments of the world.

"The German polymath and Jesuit priest Athanasius Kircher had a lifelong fascination with sound and devoted two books to the subject: Musurgia Universalis (1650), on the theoretical (and theological) aspects, and Phonurgia Nova (1673), on the science of acoustics and its practical applications. It's no surprise then to learn that his famed museum at Rome's Collegio Romano boasted- in addition to "vomiting statues", ghost-conjuring mirrors, and other curious wonders - a vast and diverse collection of musical instruments. "

"Nature has published a new article about the acoustic environment of Mars, called "In situ recording of Mars soundscape", from a long term research done by a vast group of astrophysicists and space explorers, primarily based on recordings taken by NASA's Perseverance rover, which has been on the planet since February 2021 and has discovered that the "red planet" has two different speeds of sound, as well as some special acoustic proprieties. "

"Eirik Brandal is and artist and engineer working between circuits and sound, primarily on the development of intricate sonic sculptures in which the electronic components play an important aesthetic role, also integrating light in some of them, resulting in amazing experiences around objects and space, inspired by the sculptural work of people such as Walter Giers, Alain le Boucher, Peter Vogel, Leonardo Ulian and Gislain Benoit. "