Sound Research

" the burden of comprehending the physical space shifts slowly from the eye to the ear as the sounds are traced to their sources."

"The acoustics of a building are a big concern for architects. But for designers at Gallaudet University in Washington, DC, it's the absence of sound that defines the approach to architecture. Gallaudet is a university dedicated to educating the deaf and hard of hearing, and for the last 3 years, they've re-thought principles of architecture with one question at the forefront: how do deaf people communicate in space? "

"Stars oscillate on a - very - low frequency, which has to be pitched up many times to be heard by us humans. Scientists use the Kepler Space Telescope to measure these oscillations, and by the frequency they can tell the size of the stars. They combine this with the study of planets in the zone around the star where the temperature allows water to be liquid. Will this eventually lead us to the discovery of extraterrestrial life? "

"Krause spends many pages challenging the human monopoly on musicianship. He asserts that in the wild, animals vocalize with a musicianly ear to the full score of the ecosystem - a mix of competition and cooperation. Since animals depend on being heard for various reasons (mating, predation, warning, play), they are forced to seek distinct niches: "Each resident species acquires its own preferred sonic bandwidth - to blend or contrast - much in the way that violins, woodwinds, trumpets and percussion instruments stake out acoustic territory in an orchestral arrangement." "

"Some questions we aim to address are; How can we analyze and address the increasingly homogenized sounds of urban environments from traffic and other forms of urban "noise"? How can we creatively respond to the effect of urban noise on the loss of character or identity of a place? What are desirable sound environments? How can we establish new codes or behaviors that help shape our sound environments? How can we adapt or modify existing the architectural to develop new acoustic spaces? How can we identify unique or characteristic social patterns that help shape the sonic identity of a place? What role does technology play in this process, specifically newly available and more affordable digital recording technologies? "

Fantastic Futures is a collaborative group of individuals from Iraq and the United States. Together, we've created this online platform for mixing and sharing of recorded sounds and stories across cultures. Our goal is to connect citizens from nations in conflict in an open dialogue based around the sharing of field recordings, songs, and interviews. Hopefully, this might help to collapse the barriers of physical space that contribute to the misunderstandings between cultures and to emphasize the subversive value of sharing experiences across political borders.

"In Krause's world, everything is seen through the lens of sound. He even maps by ear. In one fascinating passage, he surveys a Costa Rican jungle, dispensing with the "100-meter square grids," which anyway "nonhuman animals don't understand." He ends up with "amoebalike shapes, each an acoustic region that, while mutable, would tend to remain stable within a limited area over time.""

"When applied to leafy greens, high-power ultrasound creates millions of tiny bubbles along a leaf's surface. As they burst at a rate of a thousand times a second, they provide high-energy shock waves that can get into the leaf's nooks and crannies to dislodge pathogens, which are then whisked away in the sanitized wash."

Love and Radio is an American audio podcast directed by radio producer Nick van der Kolk in Chicago, Illinois, USA. Each episode of Love and Radio consists of a mixture of fact and fiction, presented in a series of interviews and stories related to a theme.[1]

"since 2006, when scientists at Denali began a decade-long effort to collect a month's worth of acoustic data from more than 60 sites across the park - including a 14,000-foot-high spot on Mount McKinley - Betchkal and his colleagues have recorded only 36 complete days in which the sounds of an internal combustion engine of some sort were absent. Planes are the most common source. Once, in the course of 24 hours, a single recording station captured the buzzing of 78 low-altitude props - the kind used for sightseeing tours; other areas have logged daily averages as high as one sky- or street-traffic sound every 17 minutes."

"Jesper Norda created the sound installation The Centre of Silence for the Kalmar Konstmuseum. The installation consists of an empty room and sound, nothing else. A voice describes the space and the movement of air molecules in the room. In between the pieces of text the listener is treated to silence, a sine wave and white noise. "

Echolocation "Experimenting with human boids during the previous sessions sparked the idea to use sound to determine the movement of our human agents. As we were looking at boids as a mean to simulate flocking behaviour of birds, it was proposed to explore also the behaviour of animals that employ echolocation to navigate in their environment, like Bats."

Another nice looking physical representation of a sound wave is created by Andrew Spitz from { sound + design } in collaboration with interaction designer Andrew Nip. Paper Note is made using a laser cutter to create discs of paper who form the waveform when joined on a piece of string.

"Sound is ubiquitous and permanent, and embraces us as an envelope. Therefore, the experience of the auditory can be considered an environmental experience par excellence. The term and concept of soundscape reflects this idea. It implies, that sounds do not exist in isolation, and have to be understood as being embedded in and interacting with other sounds and perceptions coining the perceptional abilities of individuals and societies and their social relations: soundscape is a system in which all elements are interdependent."

Oorwonde is an interactive aural installation in which the visitor becomes a willing 'patient' to hear, feel, influence and manipulate the soundtrack of a fictitious operation. Speakers, electro-magnets, vibrator motors and piezoelectric disks entwine with the human body, creating a unique composition and performance. Based on Bernhard Leitner's philosophy that "listening is understood to extend to all parts of the body and sound to touch a deep nerve", Oorwonde explores the concept of bodily hearing as multiple elements target different body parts. Hearing is no longer restricted to the ears.

"Center for Visual Music is a nonprofit film archive dedicated to visual music, experimental animation and avant-garde media. CVM is commited to preservation, curation, education, scholarship, and dissemination of the film, performances and other media of this tradition, together with related historical documentation and artwork."

video documentation of past events. Since its inception in 1994, the bi-annual Sonic Acts festival has questioned, examined, assembled and exhibited contemporary and historical developments at the cutting edge of art, technology, music and science. for the 2012 festival go to http://2012.sonicacts.com

Not sure if anything ever became of this NYC pirate radio project: "THE THING in collaboration with r a d i o q u a l i a, and Jan Gerber started on May 5 2002 to build a radio network in NYC using internet audio (via wireless and wired connections) and miniFM. Initially the network will consist of 2-5 transmitters based around New York."

"framework began broadcasting in june, 2002 on the newly reformed resonance 104.4fm in london. the show now airs on 5 radio stations around the world, with more to follow soon, and streams and podcasts here on it's own website. framework is consecrated to field-recording and it's use in composition, and began broadcasting at a time when a new community of sound artists with a special interest in found sound was developing, a community spread across the world that, thanks to the internet, was no longer limited to a specific geography. framework sees itself as an outlet for this ever-growing and developing community, a folk-tool in a new folk movement, a community driven exchange point for creators and listeners alike. framework's goal is to present not only the extremely diverse sound environments of our world, but also the extremely diverse work that is being produced by the artists who choose to use these environments as their sonic sources. we hope to ask this question: is 'field-recording' a style, or a genre, or is it in fact as uncontrollable and undefinable an instrument or tool as any, that may be interpreted, manipulated, and appropriated by anyone with a microphone and an idea? these works are its definition, and not vice versa."

Radia is a network of independent radio stations who have a common interest in promoting and producing artworks for the radio, and in forming projects based on broadcasting and cultural exchange. We produce a weekly radio show that is broadcast by each of the member radio stations. Our shows represent the local artistic community of each station, whilst at the same time these new works point to an emergent collective notion of self-determined art for radio. radia.fm"