Sound Research

"If you flip on a waterfall to fall asleep, if you keep rainymood.com in your bookmarks, if you associate well-being with the sound of streams and crickets or wonder why the beach never quite sounds as tranquil as you imagine, it's because of Teibel. New York's least likely media mogul was the mastermind behind Environments, a series of records he swore were "The Future of Music." From 1969 to 1979, he took the best parts of nature, turned them up to 11, engraved them on 12-inch records, and sold them back to us by the millions. He had a musician's ear, an artist's heart, and a salesman's tongue, and his work lives on in yoga studios, Skymall catalogs, and the sea-blue eyes of Brian Eno. If you haven't heard of him, it's only because he designed his own legacy to be invisible. "

"What might a Raphael sound like, based on the particular colors of its paint? According to artist and musician Yiannis Kranidiotis, similar to the sound one makes from blowing on a bottle or rubbing the rim of a water glass. Examining the relationship between color and sound frequencies, Kranidiotis has recently composed a soundscape for Raphael's "Madonna del Prato" (1505), or "Madonna of the Meadow." His resulting video work, "Ichographs MdelP," visualizes the breaking up of the painting into 10,000 cubic particles that correspond to various sounds, honing in on specific parts of the canvas to explore the different tones of different colors."

Sea Organ in Zadar, Croatia

"Installation / Audio walk for the Mobile Audio Fest organized by Locus Sonus in Aix-en-Provence (France), november 2015. Mots croisés is a weaving of words of the city's inhabitants and visitors to be discovered by scanning a series of QR Codes posted on the nine city centre's advertising columns."

"Time and Tide Bell" is a permanent installation, existing of 12 bells around the U.K. in several very different locations, rung by the sea at high tide. The rise of the water at high tide moves the clapper to strike the bell. Played by the movement of the waves, the bell creates a varying, gentle musical pattern. As the effect of global warming increases, the periods of bell strikes will become more and more frequent, and as the bell becomes submerged in the rising water the pitch will vary."

"For Hong Kong artist Samson Young, however, war sounds less obviously martial; indeed, it's pretty random. It's calm, somewhat foreboding - human, organic, often silent but with bursts of technological noise. And most importantly for Young, war sounds musical. Visitors to the artist's current exhibition at Team Gallery, Pastoral Music, see him sitting in the center of the room wearing fatigues, staring into an obsolete television monitor, surrounded by a surfeit of sound-making devices, some traditionally musical, like a contact mic hooked to a bass drum, and some definitely not, like soil, a room fan, Corn Flakes. What's going on exactly? The unconventional musical scores hanging - or, in some cases, drawn directly - on the walls suggest that Young's restrained movement amid the mess of sound-producing gadgets must constitute a musical performance."

"This is the most awesomely surreal architectural proposal of 2015: an extremely remote Cold War-era submarine surveillance station on the Isle of Lewis in the Scottish Outer Hebrides might soon be transformed into a kind of benthic concert hall for listening to whale song."

"Build a classic batteryless AM radio receiver and learn some modifications that let you eliminate the need for the long antenna usually required."

"The oceans are full of noise - both natural and man-made. In this video, researcher Michel Andre explains how he is trying to make sense of how our sounds have such far-reaching effects on the whales sharing our seas."

"The noise of city life is dulling down the song of our famously musical tui. The colourful, scrappy birds are among the few native species to have adapted to humans disrupting their environment, and one researcher is now trying to understand what changes they've made to survive."

"Christine Sun Kim on Sound, Listening and the Importance of Sign Language"

TELEPRESENCE WIND by David Bowen - This installation consists of a series of 42 x/y tilting devices connected to thin dried plant stalks installed in the gallery and a dried plant stalk connected to an accelerometer installed outdoors. When the wind blows, it causes the stalk outside to sway. The accelerometer detects this movement transmitting it in real-time to the grouping of devices in the gallery. Therefore the stalks in the gallery space move in real-time and in unison based on the movement of the wind outside.

"SOUNDIAL is the latest brainchild of sound installation team Jonathon Kirk and Lee Weisert (aka PAML; the Portable Acoustic Modification Laboratory). The installation aims to engage the public community with an arresting new manifestation of a public timepiece. Using ultrasonic, hyper-directional speakers, three rotating "beams" of newly-composed electronic music are transmitted in an outdoor public space. Due to the unique sound-transmitting mechanism of the ultrasonic speakers, these narrowly focused sound-beams are only audible to people directly in the path of the speaker."

It is all too easy for architecture to be seen and not heard. Instragrammable visuals may be at our fingertips, but it is impossible to photograph an echo. Sad news, considering the most memorable of spaces are those that heighten more than just our optical sense. What's more, much of new architecture is focused on controlling sound, rather than celebrating it. We want to block out our neighbours, escape the city noise, or buffer any possibility of sonic surprise. Here are 10 spaces to remind us of architecture's acoustic abilities - from the unexpected quarry opera venue to the deliberate forest megaphone. If you're a musician, imagine playing in these…

"Using examples from birdsong, the natural lilt of emphatic language and even a cooking pan lid, singer-songwriter and TED Fellow Meklit Hadero shows how the everyday soundscape, even silence, makes music. "The world is alive with musical expression," she says. "We are already immersed." "

"In their many (justified) laments about the trajectory of their profession in the digital age, songwriters and musicians regularly assert that music has been "devalued." Over the years they've pointed at two outstanding culprits. First, it was music piracy and the futility of "competing with free." More recently the focus has been on the seemingly miniscule payments songs generate when they're streamed on services such as Spotify or Apple Music."

"The year that Skype launched its calling service, the world was in the midst of a sonic crisis: the ringtone. Mobile phones - to which Skype was an indirect competitor - were becoming ubiquitous, and so were the personalized sounds that went with them. Shortly before the company put out the first of several betas in August of 2003, an analyst report predicted that ringtone sales would soon bring in more money than CD singles."

"Tsabar creates sensually driven installations, performances, and sculptures that examine the charged spaces and multi sensory zones of nightlife and their associations with notions such as freedom, excess, and escape. Her work treats the venues themselves as structures of power, enabling a display of fantasy, sexuality, and bravado, as well as providing a shelter from the realities of the outside world."

"The SoundObject series captures the auditory component of making the ceramic objects. The work pairs sound and image as the final product. Each element of the project is documented and recorded with an iPhone. The intent is to view it on that scale. "

"Someone just uploaded their complete collection of Kmart in-store background music"