Sound Research

"Sounds carry intelligence. If you are too narrow in your awareness of sounds, you are likely to be disconnected from your environment. Ears do not listen to sounds; the brain does. Listening is a lifetime practice that depends on accumulated experiences with sound; it can be focused to detail or open to the entire field of sound. Octogenarian composer and sound art pioneer Pauline Oliveros describes the sound experiment that led her to found an institute related to Deep Listening, and develop it as a theory relevant to music, psychology, and our collective quality of life. Pauline is a composer and accordionist who significantly contributed to the development of electronic music. The culmination of her life-long fascination with music and sound is what inspired the practice of Deep Listening, the art of listening and responding to environmental conditions. As a Professor of Practice in the Arts Department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, she produced highly regarded work as a composer and improviser. Pauline's 1989 recording, Deep Listening, is considered a classic in her field."

"When one thinks of his work, what comes to mind are not so much objects, stable and defined. Rather, these are "moods" or "atmospheres" or "situations." "Ecosystems," in which things and places are enveloped in sounds."

The Song Books by the sound artist Rolf Julius (born in 1939) consist of several bound sheets of Japanese paper, of which each sheet is marked by a different kind of spot.[1] These red or black spots are prints of the processed photographs of color pigment clusters. Julius had already used these types of pigment clusters in earlier sound art installations, combining them with different sounds. There were similar sheets in his Piano Piece No. 1 (1998), whose title indicates that they can be performed musically.[2] It would hardly be possible to detect this solely on the basis of their visual form. According to Erhard Karkoschka, Julius's musical graphics can therefore be classified as pure musical graphics, that is, as musical graphics without a staff.[3] It must above all be stressed that musical graphics constitute individual solutions to problems with notation as perceived by an artist, and therefore stand out due to their different relationship to conventional notation. When interpreting musical graphics with so few parameters, which is the case for the Song Books, the performers have to develop a convincing translation for the ambiguous parameters. In the Song Books, the repetition of a similar form-in this case, the various spots-directs the performer's gaze toward minimal differences, such as the different sizes or fraying of the spots,[4] which are then translated into sound.

"Ionized air and wires may take headphones to the next level."

A personal essay about hearing loss, disability, the amplification of the sound of one's body, the way that hearing and mishearing leads to metaphor, and the losses and gains of disability as well as normative sensing.

"RADIOPHRENIA is a temporary art radio station broadcasting intermittently from the Centre for Contemporary Arts in Glasgow. The broadcast schedule includes a series of 14 newly commissioned radio works, 13 Live-to-Air performances as well as live studio shows, screenings, shorts and pre-recorded features. As in previous years the majority of the programme will be made up from selections submitted to an international open call for sound art and radio works."

"Call Back Carousel is an audio time-travelogue, a slideshow of the mind's eye - projecting Kodachrome memories directly into the listeners' mind by means of sound alone. It is a way of travelling without ever having to leave the home. A vicarious vacation for the imagination. Pure audio escapism. Each episode is based on a found tape of a pre-recorded slideshow commentary. Most of these tapes were made by amateur tape recording enthusiasts and hobbyist photographers of the 60s and 70s. Their recorded commentaries would at one time have been used in conjunction with a sequence of 35mm slides but only the taped voices now remain. The recordings themselves come from my own archive of found reel-to-reel tapes that I have collected over the past twenty years."

"Design and music intersect in many areas; fashion, art, filmmaking and set design, yet one relatively obscure but staggeringly creative area, is in the design of graphic notation used by composers"

"I'm a huge fan of Joan La Barbara. Her LP The Voice Is The Original Instrument is one of my favorite documents of the 1970's NY avant-garde. La Barbara is a master of advanced vocal technique. In addition to her own remarkable creative output, she's had a long career working with many of the greatest names in avant-garde composition - John Cage, Robert Ashley, Morton Feldman, Philip Glass, Alvin Lucier, Gordon Mumma, David Behrman, David Tudor, and her husband Morton Subotnick. In my wanderings around the internet I've come across some of her wonderful scores and images of performances etc. I thought I'd pass them along. To see and learn more visit her website.   Voice Piece: One-Note Internal Resonance Investigation (1975)   Persistence of Memory (2009)   Circular Song (1975)   In the Shadow and Act of the Haunting Place (1995)   Performing in Berlin 1981   With Gordon Mumma and David Behrman in 1974   Working on Philip Glass' Einstein on the Beach in 1976   In 1974 with Philip Glass Ensemble with Dickie Landry, Richard Peck and Jon Gibson   With David Tudor, Paris 1974   With Dana Reitz and Phill Niblock (1975)   Playing chess with John Cage   Performing in 1976   Performing in 1976   In the studio with Morton Subotnick in 1984 Share this: TwitterFacebook Related at home with morton subotnick and joan la barbara January 29, 2016 Liked by 1 person joan la barbara's voice is the original instrument reissued by arc light editions May 4, 2016 Liked by 2 people on the early immersive music of joan la barbara, via mode records April 2, 2018 Liked by 2 people Post navigation Rising Tones Cross (Full Film)at home with morton subotnick and joan la barbara 2 thoughts on "the beauty of joan la barbara (scores and photographs)" Feminatronic February 9, 2016 at 8:46 pm Reblogged this on Feminatronic and commented: Something a little different as my Todays Discovery is this webs

Great example of a technology (or tech failure) leading to new art forms: "The rebajada was created at a party when the Radson [a brand of amplifier] began to sound slow because the turntable's motor ground down. We were scared cause of what happened, but then after this accident people began to ask for the rebajado version [rebajado means lowered or cut down in some way, i.e. slowed down], so we recorded Volume One, Two, Three and one hundred more. Thank god we have the original cassettes. The first cassette was released in 1992 and we sold it at the Puente del Papa market by the Santa Catarina river. My wife began to sell three or four cassettes with a little table and sound system, and thank god we made a lot."

"This is my step-by-step guide to DIY contact microphones (with some commercial options thrown in at the end). There are many other ways to do it, but my goals with this method are simplicity and durability."

"When did you last use radio technology? If you're straining to remember when you last turned on the AM/FM radio broadcast receiver in your car, you've probably gone too far back. Although it might not come to mind when we think about radio in the digital media era, things like GPS, wireless computer networks, and even our mobile phones use radio waves.  Far from being outdated, this century-old technology is still integral to much of what we do. "On the one hand, it's very ambient. We don't notice it," says Rick Prelinger, an archivist and professor emerit of film and digital media at the University of California, Santa Cruz. "But radio is also deeply engaged with the world." "

"Spring with Machine Age Noise No 1 was painted by Graves in 1957. It is among the first in a series of similar works all made that same year by Graves (see also Spring with Machine Age Noise No 3 1957, collection of Nancy Lassalle, New York; reproduced in Kass 1983, p.132). The artist had returned to his home in Woodway, Seattle, late in 1956 following a two-year period in the remote Irish countryside. He was upset to discover that the previously peaceful landscape was now regularly disrupted by the noise of construction work and of jet planes flying overhead. This was his motivation to paint a series of pictures in which the natural landscape was set in contrast to the disturbing vibrations of mechanical noise that now shattered the peacefulness of the scene. "

"KIMA: Noise by Analema Group explores how urban noises affect our physical, mental and emotional wellbeing.  Following an activity at Tate Exchange with noise expert Prof. Stephen Stansfeld, community groups such as Better Bankside, residents, and researchers in the field of urban noise, we invite you to the premiere of the art film KIMA: Noise. Participants will explore the topic of noise pollution, the effects of noise on human health and wellbeing, through the film and in an online workshop with the artists and experts. KIMA: Noise raises awareness about noise and asks important questions on what we can do to mitigate its effects on health www.analemagroup.com ​"

"In November 2019, visitors to the Tate Exchange were invited to experience urban noise as a multi-sensory art installation. The artwork KIMA Noise was developed by the Analema Group over the last two years in collaboration with Dr Stephen Stansfeld (Queen Mary). Audiences were drawing their graphic impressions of urban noise as a real-time sound sculpture. Audiences could experience urban sound from around the Tate as trajectories of sound, travelling through the space of Tate Exchange at Tate Modern. Four real-time streams, from construction noise, to railroad tracks were visualised on the panoramic windows of the Tate's monumental architecture. Through direct experience, the audience learned about the effects of noise, while shaping and designing their own soundscape."

Blog post focusing on artists exploring the amplification of long wires (like electrical lines, wire fences, etc) it includes Alan Lamb, Alastair Galbraith, and Alvin Lucier.

"David Hendy has a good idea. He is a professor of media and communication at the University of Sussex, and he's in love with noise-but not in the way you might think. Hendy is not interested in noise as mere meaningless din, but noise as a form of media conveying the meaning of a time, like when the world entered the industrial age. When listening farther back in time, one can see that the sound of bells ringing was a tool for the church of the Middle Ages to exert its power over daily life."

"Of the various forms the nascent art of sound recording took in the late nineteenth century perhaps none was so aesthetically alluring as that invented by Margaret Watts Hughes. Rob Mullender-Ross explores the significance of the Welsh singer's ingenious set of images, which until recently were thought to be lost. "

"Music sketch diary. Prototyping. Generate music and synthesizers by sketching wavetables and scores."

"The act of listening and recording sound effects or capturing potential material for working on sound design is actually a process where the artist finds its activity as that one of the illusionist of sound, a harlequin of time, storyteller of the unknown. There are tons and tons of examples of that, and the creativity of a sound designer is actually found in that way of giving new contexts, meanings and aspects to any sound present in the world. But, as always, the best examples are those that you can identify, so all this comes to the point of inviting you to the process."