Sound Research

"Bernie Krause is an American musician and soundscape ecologist. He has been recording, researching and archiving soundscapes for over 40 years. ....It celebrates the work of Krause's work, adding a simple but fitting and room-filling spectrogram to the recorded soundscapes, emerging the listener in sound, and being able to recognise the animals with visual cues. Here's a 360-degrees video, if your browser can play that: The idea is quite simple, but the soundscapes are compelling and diverse. While it can sometimes be hard to get an audience interested in sound-based works in a museum, United Visual Artists did a great job of adding a simple visual counterpart to keep those who aren't used to only listen to sound, interested. If you want to know more about the work of Bernie Krause, I suggest watching this TED Talk about "The voice of the natural world"."

"A dedicated algorithm was created to turn one second of browsing on the 4G network into one second of music. The number of connections to the network in different regions of Lithuania controls the volume of the notes being played and their rhythmic distribution, while the amount of data transferred during those sessions determines the notes' pitches."

Swartz also invites gallery visitors to handle, listen and look - often in unconventional museum spaces. More subtly, her work employs them as spectators of interactivity, a less considered version of participation, yet one often crucial to the complete experience of some of her sculptures. These modes of interactivity combine with Swartz's skillful transformation of simple, industrial materials to engage viewers with their own emotional history as well as the formal traditions of participatory art... - Rachel Arauz

"Sonic Acts Festival has been uploading some new videos to their YoutTube channel featuring amazing content from their edition on Geological Imagination, including talks, performances, interviews, etc."

"A Thing Heard: Four Ways of Listening is a collaborative tour showcasing the work of four contemporary British artists working in the field of sound art. The artists have curated a collection of sculptural artworks that use sound as the primary medium, exploring the inherent materiality and physicality of sound through a range of media, working methods, and outcomes."

"Composer, performer and band leader Anton Lukoszevieze shares a series of graphic scores, each of which takes its title from a Lithuanian place name"

"It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing, goes the Duke Ellington song. By that logic, some bird songs really do mean something: at least a few bird species can swing in the same way that human musicians do, New Scientist can reveal. This claim has been made based on a mathematical analysis of the songs of one species, the thrush nightingale. Not all of the musicians New Scientist spoke to agree that what the thrush nightingale is doing can be called swing - but several said they have heard other species of birds singing that definitely do swing. "

"For centuries, skywatchers have reported seeing and simultaneously hearing meteors whizzing overhead, which doesn't make sense given that light travels roughly 800,000 times as fast as sound. Now scientists say they have a potential explanation for the paradox."

"Developed by Pauline Oliveros in collaboration with Leaf Miller and released in 2007, the AUMI is a camera-based software that enables various forms of instrumentation. It was first created in work with (and through the labor of) children with physical disabilities in the Abilities First School (Poughkeepsie, New York) and designed with the intention of researching its potential as a model for social change."

"This site documents examples discussed in my book Between air and electricity - Microphones and loudspeakers as musical instruments. Although most of these pieces and performances are best experienced live, these audio and video documentations might be helpful to get a better understanding of the music."

"On 27 August 1883, the Earth let out a noise louder than any it has made since. It was 10:02 AM local time when the sound emerged from the island of Krakatoa, which sits between Java and Sumatra in Indonesia"

"An immersive audio experience transports listeners four centuries into the past, when New York was undeveloped and ecologically diverse. "

In February 2016, U.S.-based astronomers announced that they had detected gravitational waves, vibrations in the substance of space-time. When they made the detection public, they translated the signal into sound, a "chirp," a sound wave swooping up in frequency, indexing, scientists said, the collision of two black holes 1.3 billion years ago. Drawing on interviews with gravitational-wave scientists at MIT and interpreting popular representations of this cosmic audio, I ask after these scientists' acoustemology-that is, what the anthropologist of sound Steven Feld would call their "sonic way of knowing and being." Some scientists suggest that interpreting gravitational-wave sounds requires them to develop a "vocabulary," a trained judgment about how to listen to the impress of interstellar vibration on the medium of the detector. Gravitational-wave detection sounds, I argue, are thus articulations of theories with models and of models with instrumental captures of the cosmically nonhuman. Such articulations, based on mathematical and technological formalisms-Einstein's equations, interferometric observatories, and sound files-operate alongside less fully disciplined collections of acoustic, auditory, and even musical metaphors, which I call informalisms. Those informalisms then bounce back on the original articulations, leading to rhetorical reverb, in which articulations-amplified through analogies, similes, and metaphors-become difficult to fully isolate from the rhetorical reflections they generate. Filtering analysis through a number of accompanying sound files, this article contributes to the anthropology of listening, positing that scientific audition often operates by listening through technologies that have been tuned to render theories and their accompanying formalisms both materially explicit and interpretively resonant.

"The recording starts with the patter of a summer squall. Later, a drifting tone like that of a not-quite-tuned-in radio station rises and for a while drowns out the patter. "

"Jonas Hollerup Helle  did an in-depth feature interview of Martin Stig Andersen, Sound Designer & Composer behind Playdead's LIMBO & INSIDE."

"In an excerpt from his book The New Analog, Damon Krukowski looks at the aesthetics of noise in analog music-and what we've lost in the transition to digital recordings."

""the role of smells in our perception of and engagement with the past has not been systematically explored." Their findings, presented under the title "Smell of heritage: a framework for the identification, analysis and archival of historic odours," are based on sampling volatile organic compounds (VOCs), which compose most odors, at sites including the library of St. Paul's Cathedral in London. They additionally surveyed people about their olfactory perceptions of historical books."

"Most non artists think that a work of art begins with an imaginary grand design, which is then made real by using the techniques the artist has developed.   That's not the way it usually happens.   It's certainly not the way interesting art usually happens.  In the beginning there is most often nothing, and nothing, and nothing for hours and days, and sometimes weeks and months.  There are scores or hundreds of false starts.  Then, when something does pop into the artist's head it isn't anything close to a grand design.   It's usually an inkling, a notion, a fleeting feeling.  It's an unintentional smear in one corner of the same canvas the painter has been fruitlessly fiddling with all along.  But it suggests something.  It's a start, only an idea, a hunch, but nevertheless something concrete to work with."