Sound Research

great short about foley artists creating sounds for a fishing village

The Underground Sound Project is a collection of underground sound recordings made by artist Nikki Lindt over the course of the past year. They were made in Prospect Park, other parks in the five boroughs of NYC and in rural Cherry Valley, NY. The recordings are made by placing microphones underground, underwater and even inside trees. So put on your headphones and come explore the melodic, resonant, and otherworldly sonic ecosystem right beneath our feet!!

"Did you know deep, resonant sound can be heard inside trees, among the roots of plants, in shifting soils, in streambeds, rivers, and even in mud-and that the sounds of the subway and airplanes can be heard in the soils of our local parks? From May 14, 2022 - May 2023, experience the sounds of Prospect Park in a new immersive way with artist Nikki Lindt's the Underground Sound Project, a Soundwalk."

"Composition for Mouths (Songs My Mother Taught Me)"

"Trained as a musical composer, Beer (who created a 'Vessel Orchestra' for his 2019 solo show at the Met Breuer) works with the acoustic fingerprints of architecture, asking vocalists to stimulate their natural harmonics. 'Since I was a kid, I could hear the notes of buildings,' he says, explaining that a room is like a seashell, constantly making its own sounds.  When he found himself on the wrong side of the Sydney Opera House, he led his four local singers to an external nook of the building, then asked them to lock lips and treat each other's bodies as architecture. 'The acoustic space that they're working with is the empty mouth of the other person that they're singing through.'"

"Classical music has been shown to reduce stress in kennelled dogs; however, rapid habituation of dogs to this form of auditory enrichment has also been demonstrated. "

"If soundscape ecologist Bernie Krause's theories are true, then animal song is part of a far more complex and all-encompassing sound world."

"A simple tutorial to do an hydrophone (aquatic microphone), step by step. Do It Yourself following each step below"

"While the acoustic environment and urban soundscapes shape our everyday life, architecture practice usually neglects the experience of acoustic space in its design process. My research addressed the challenge of integrating spatial acoustics and the experience of environmental sound in architecture practice. Drawing from acoustic ecology, creative approaches embody the aural experience of the environment into the design process of architecture. "

"The inner sounds of objects and substances picked up with contact mics or hydrophones never cease to amaze. For Inner Out, Italian sound designer and artist Nicola Giannini uses contact mics frozen in ice, and performs a concert on them by playing the ice. Using different objects and techniques, such as grinding, tapping, hitting the ice, or pouring hot water, he creates the source material which he processes with live electronics to create a surround concert."

"Thought to be lost for years, this playful film combines abstract geometry and textures to create a visible soundtrack, and even features the fingerprints of the director himself."

"Our brains "time-stamp" the order of incoming sounds, allowing us to correctly process the words that we hear, shows a new study by a team of psychology and linguistics researchers. Its findings, which appear in the journal Nature Communications, offer new insights into the intricacies of neurological function. "

"The format of 'Path of Awareness_Elephant and Castle' explores an individual's personal experience of space through walking, particularly the interplay between sound event (footsteps) and surrounding architecture, influenced by the constantly changing interactions in the environment. A route created around the college of communication offers numerous opportunities to engage with the city's dynamics. Walking itself, the sonic character of footwear, the walkability of this urban habitat, as well as its architectural and atmospheric qualities are all major features of this soundwalk. My soundful shoes become instruments, soloists in the space, creating a dialogue with the surroundings and situating us sonically in the places we walk."

"Interview with Paulus Van Horne, a radio producer, audio engineer and noise researcher based in Boulder, CO. Paulus discusses their work researching noise, particularly in relationship to gender, sexuality, and mobilizing a queer approach to sound."

How can sound help us better understand our environment and engage in today's critical ecological issues? The Ear to the Earth festival kicks up the volume of the earth's sonic life with concerts, installations, public art, and panel discussions that explore our interaction with natural and man-made worlds through sound. We speak with sound artists Laurie Spiegel and David Dunn.

"Participate in a listening experience with a stranger, from home: we are now walking next to each other, each of us recording this journey for two of you."

"Talking Popcorn is a sound sculpture that evolved out of my interest in language, translation, and Morse Code. A microphone in the cabinet of the popcorn machine picks up sound of popping corn, and a computer hidden in the pedestal runs a custom-written program that translates the popping sounds according to the patterns and dictates of Morse Code. A computer-generated voice provides a simultaneous spoken translation."

"My foreign-born parents who have lived in the United States for over 40 years both have distinctive but hard-to-place accents that I have never been able to imitate correctly (and have not inherited). Inspired by posters advertising courses in "accent elimination," I worked with my parents and professional speech improvement coach Sam Chwat intensively for several weeks in order to "neutralize" my parents' accents and then teach each of them to me. The very existence of these courses points to the complexities of assimilation and self-image, and the tricky maneuvering between the desire to preserve the distinctive marks of one's culture, on one hand, and to decrease them in order to seem less foreign, on the other. In the video, my parents and I struggle to hear and imitate what is so close at hand and yet so difficult to access. The accent is treated very literally, like an heirloom, and the project illustrates the very awkward attempt to concretely transfer this elusive, and ultimately culturally determined, attribute."

"Audio description allows you to enjoy a movie or TV show without the need for any visuals. But how do these narrators strike the right tone for a scene? How do the writers decide what needs to be described? And what's in store for the future of described audio? In honor of Blindness Awareness Month, this is a brand new story about the world of Audio Description. Featuring AD Narrator Roy Samuleson and AD experts Thomas Reid and Melody Goodspeed."

"Shortwave Collective is an international, feminist artist group established in May 2020, interested in the creative use of radio. We meet regularly to discuss feminist approaches to amatuer radio and the radio spectrum as artistic material, sharing resources, considering DIY approaches and inclusive structures. ​"