Sound Research

"As I started exploring, I began noticing the sounds around me. I began to think that maybe instead of focusing my attention only on the "Kodak moments" - and don't get me wrong, I take a lot of photos - perhaps using the SoundCloud mobile app to isolate and feature my "sonic experiences" would be another really cool way to map and document my Toronto travels. And thus, the Sounds of My City project was born!"

The book The Hidden City, People and Places in Gothenburg is an exploration of the open and hidden perspectives of this north European harbour town by journalist and writer Magnus Haglund and photographer Stefan Schneider. The cd "The Hidden City" consists of some 15 sound portraits from the city, by artists that are featured in the book or have an interesting relationship with certain places or addresses in Gothenburg.

"Take a Closer Listen is a project by the talented Dutch graphic designer Rutger Zuydervelt in which a variety of people have been asked to describe their favorite sound. The results-which range from quick, five-word responses to entire short narratives about found sounds-were collected into an eponymous booklet, Take a Closer Listen, this past winter. "

RICHARD LERMAN, works in Music, Film, Installations, Performance, and Video. He often constructs functional microphones from diverse materials, and then composes using these transducers to amplify and pick-up sounds of the environment, and allow the sonic flavor of each material to be heard. Recent works combine sounds from his self-built microphones with computer and MIDI techniques. bio from http://www.artifact.com/bio.php?name=Lerman

Electronic Musical Resources: Articles

Blog accompaniment (with media) to "Searching for Silence John Cage's art of noise." by Alex Ross from the New Yorker. http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/10/04/101004fa_fact_ross

"Artificial synesthesia (syn = together, and aisthesis = perception in Greek) is a deliberately evoked or induced sensory joining in which the real information of one sense is accompanied by a perception in another sense through the use of a cross-modal mapping device. It is also known as virtual synesthesia or synthetic synesthesia. The additional perception is regarded by the trained synesthete as real, often outside the body, instead of imagined in the mind's eye. Its reality and vividness are what makes artificial synesthesia so interesting in its violation of conventional perception. Synesthesia in general is also fascinating because logically it should have been a product of the human brain, where the evolutionary trend has been for increasing coordination, mutual consistency and perceptual robustness in the processing of different sensory inputs."

"A red-white-and-blue sign at the corner of West Broadway and Watts Street in SoHo reads, "Don't Honk - $350 Penalty." It is, shall we say, not always heeded. This corner is a five-way crossing, where Broome Street forks into Watts, which leads to the Holland Tunnel, and crosses West Broadway, which has two-way traffic. The tunnel entrances themselves run smoothly, if slowly; traffic police officers are there. But the New Jersey exodus has to back up somewhere, and this corner is one of those places. Amid this gridlock is a whole lot of self-expression via car horns and the occasional, ah, verbal admonition. "

""stadt:klang - urban:sound" is an interdisciplinary art project at the threshold of architecture, music, video and performance art. It focuses on our existing interactions with various public spaces, and provokes a temporary shift in the perception of how we utilise them, particularly with relation to music creation, film production and peripheral related arts. "

An extension of Peter Cusack's Favourite Sounds project.

Like the landscape, each city has a unique soundscape. In addition to the typical sounds of traffic and people, San Francisco has some identifiably unique sounds like cable cars, fog horns, trolleys and on occasion, the Blue Angels performing overhead. Almost all of us delight in these sounds because they help define the sense of place. They heighten our everyday experience. Sounds are an integral part of our experience, as you know if you've ever been to a carnival, sporting event or marketplace. And recalling sounds often brings back vivid visual memories of a place or time.

"WV is an ongoing investigation into the politics of human sensuality, by way of commentary, reviews, field recordings, and artwork. Most posts include both text and media. Our emphasis is sonic, but we're not deaf to pictures, tastes, or feelings. The site was created out of a belief that how we sense the world is a crucial political problem. Sense is at the heart of consumption - of media, food, art, material objects - as well as engagements between individuals. Influencing sensual preferences en masse is a key to political and economic power. Consider flavor, cadence, leather interiors. "

"There is a lot of noise in this city of ours, what with sirens screaming, buses screeching and LOUD music blaring out of headphones on already rackety subway cars. No escaping it. Not in libraries, not in the sanctity of your apartment, not even in yoga class. (What exactly is the point of Savasana? After you quiet the voices screaming in your head, all you can hear is bleeping cars and police sirens.) "

"As the plaintive wail of an ambulance drifted up 2nd Avenue last Friday night, a group of about 30 people at the corner of East 10th Street paused to listen to the siren as it passed by. I had joined a nocturnal urban hunt, an aural field trip through New York City, listening for the sounds of sirens and what they signify. The event was one of a three part series called Sirens Taken for Wonders, a joint program of Performa 09 and the Van Alen Institute. "

This project explores how innovative art projects on public urban screens can combine with electronic social network systems on smaller screens to initiate an international dialogue on the problem of adaptation to climate change. The main theme of this trans-disciplinary research is on the environmental and cultural significance of water in three cities in the Asia- Pacific region: Melbourne, Shanghai and Tokyo

Dr. Bernie Krause, creator of Wild Sanctuary, demonstrates that every living organism produces sound. This presentation focuses on the symbiotic ways in which the sounds of one organism affect and interrelate with other organisms, local and regional, within a given habitat. Learn about unusual soundscapes and their relevance to preserving natural sounds worldwide. Biophony--the notion that all sounds in undisturbed natural habitats fit into unique niches--will be used to illustrate the ways in which animals taught humans to dance and sing.

This 'boat-movie' follows Stephen Vitiello, internationally celebrated 'sound artist' from the US, as he embarks on a 300km odyssey around the rugged Kimberley coast capturing unique sounds. Vitiello's latest challenge, to capture the sound of Australia, is at the behest of art patron John Kaldor and is to create an 'installation' to be exhibited in the old kilns at Sydney Park's brickworks buildings.

The World Forum for Acoustic Ecology (WFAE), founded in 1993, is an international association of affiliated organizations that share a common concern with the state of the world's soundscapes. Our members represent a multi-disciplinary spectrum of individuals engaged in the study of the social, cultural and ecological aspects of the sonic environment. Within this framework of care for the sonic environment WFAE works in collaboration with it's Affiliated and Associated Organizations to promote:

"You can look across a vast expanse of ice, all white and blue and cold, and see nothing. The lead is choked with pack ice or sealed over with newly formed ice, and there is no movement or sound. With few birds, no whales and no bears, one might mistake the Arctic for a desert. But if you go down to the ice edge, pick a hole in the new ice deep enough to reach water and drop in a hydrophone (an underwater microphone), the cacophony is astonishing. "

"This paper will explore how the practice of soundwalking can be a tool for memory retrieval. I ask: How are memories created and remembered in the mind and felt within the body? What happens to our perception of self, home, and knowing as we move through spaces and places of significance?"