Sound Research

"My listening protocol is not a set of fixed instructions on how to listen. This protocol is a set of notes for listening, which I use as part of my practice-based research on sound, art, public space and postcolonial entangled histories. It both reflects past listening experiences and anticipates future listening experiences."

Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening

"The exercises presented in this book have been developed by the author as part of his listening workshops and artistic research on acoustics and the body. Exploring issues concerning: contact, filter, and distance, each of the exercises evokes a situation where the body is used wholly as a medium for experiencing sounds in relation to one's present self. The exercises guide listeners to encounter sounds distributed in space in relation to their sources considering shifts in frequency, amplitude, and rhythm."

"On Practice: Listening asks: How can listening form a space of political encounter? What is the difference between listening and hearing? How do other people hear? This episode features artist Ain Bailey's collaboration with Micro Rainbow alongside recordings from Pauline Oliveros' tuning meditations, a sound piece from artist collective Ultra-red and a contribution from academic and sound practitioner Ximena Alarcón."

This article explores the gendered sound world of anti-abortion protests outside U.S. abortion clinics. These clinics are spaces of dissent where, on a daily basis, protesters congregate to vocalize their opposition to abortion. We employ the concept of sonic patriarchy, the sonic counterpart to the male gaze, to explore how anti-abortion protesting dominates the aural space surrounding abortion clinics and is used as a vehicle for controlling gendered bodies. P

"Can you imagine sound travels in the same way as light does? A research team at City University of Hong Kong (CityU) discovered a new type of sound wave: the airborne sound wave vibrates transversely and carries both spin and orbital angular momentum like light does. The findings shattered scientists' previous beliefs about the sound wave, opening an avenue to the development of novel applications in acoustic communications, acoustic sensing, and imaging."

What is phonography? In this essay, Christopher DeLaurenti, a phonographer with three decades of experience, maps an axiomatic 13-lesson pedagogy through an abbreviated history of field recording, from Jesse Walter Fewkes in 1890 to Tony Schwartz in the early 1960s. This paper surveys various meanings and uses of the term phonography from a text published in 1701 to the formation in 2000 of the phonography listserv, an online community of makers of field recordings.

"Fure, a composer and sonic artist whose works often involve the live modification of prerecorded electroacoustic tracks, unleashed an hour-long storm of sound, incorporating extremely low bass frequencies that began below the range of human hearing and slid upward to a barely perceptible 30 Hz. For a few minutes, I stood in front of a tower of speakers, having taken the precaution of inserting earplugs, and had a purely visceral encounter with sound-one that gave me the unsettling and liberating sensation of being no longer material in my own body."

"Capturing just 20 seconds of a songbird's chirrup, or an elk's bugle, or a kangaroo's chortle often requires hours of stillness and solitude. It's a craft that Birmingham-born sound recordist Martyn Stewart has perfected over the last 55 years. In that time, he's built up one of the largest private collections of natural sound in the world. Comprising 30,000 hours of material, it includes recordings of 3,500 bird species, alongside countless mammals, insects, amphibians and reptiles, as well as soundscapes of the Serengeti, the Arctic and Chernobyl, 10 years after the nuclear reactor meltdown. At least four of the species he's recorded are now extinct in the wild, including the northern white rhinoceros and the Panamanian tree frog."

In this second interpretive video for "Living with Concepts," Norway-based artist Jana Winderen discusses the four-channel audio installation "Spring Bloom in the Marginal Ice Zone: From the Barents Sea to Lake Ontario": https://vimeo.com/613751409 Composed from field recordings in the Barents Sea along the marginal ice zone (an ecologically vulnerable, dynamic border between the open sea and the sea ice), Winderen's composition documents wildlife activities that all depend on the annual spring bloom: plankton, bearded seals, humpbacks and orcas, crustaceans and spawning cod. On UTM campus, these sounds connect the vulnerable ecologies of the Barents Sea with the seasonal rhythms of local forest ecologies, and the distressed waterways of Lake Ontario and the Credit River. "Spring Bloom" plays during daylight hours only. It is periodically shut off in response to seasonal ecological activity, determined in consultation with faculty in UTMBiology. See the Blackwood website for current playback conditions: https://www.blackwoodgallery.ca/program/living-with-concepts First presented in Mississauga by the Blackwood for "The Work of Wind: Air, Land, Sea," "Spring Bloom" is currently installed at the University of Toronto Mississauga campus, 2021-2024, as part of "Living with Concepts." Artwork storage and transport sponsored by Musket Transport Ltd. Video by Vuk Dragojevic.

"Landscape with Alvin Lucier (57:40) including the performance of "Outlines of Persons and Things" (1975) The Music of Alvin Lucier (57:40) ""Bird and Person Dyning" (1975) ""Music for Solo Performer" (1965) Music with Roots in the Aether is a music-theater piece in color video. It is the final version of an idea that I had thought about and worked on for a few years: to make a very large collaborative piece with other composers whose music I like. The collaborative aspect of Music with Roots in the Aether is in the theater of the interviews, at least primarily, and I am indebted to all of the composers involved for their generosity in allowing me to portray them in this manner."

Vocalist, performer and sound artist Stine Janvin works with the extensive flexibility of her instrument of the voice, and the ways in which it can be disconnected from its natural, human connotations. Created for variable spaces from theatres, to clubs and galleries, the backbone of Janvin's projects focus on the physical aspects of sound, and potential dualities of the natural versus artificial, organic/synthetic, and minimal/dramatic.

Solo. Based on a recording of a Salvadoran boy burying his father. Bob Ostertag did not simply create a political piece but a musical reality, in which sampling technology is used in a significant way for the first time. The music encircles reality, decomposes it into music and recomposes it until reality is no longer able to escape. It is this clarity that makes Sooner or Later great music, a music that has something to do with life again. -- Die Zeit

"Years ago I unearthed a case full of cassettes in my parents closet. I'd been saving a certain one for the right time. A recorded letter, "To Ron" written on the label. It would have been sent to my father in Costa Rica from his family in Ohio. Upon pressing play I hear who I think is my grandmother as the initial hiss of the tape settles and soon the voice of my young uncle. My Mother and Father met while they were both serving as Mennonite missionaries in Costa Rica during the 1970s. He sang love songs outside her window. He rode an old Yamaha motorcycle up through Central America. He loved to tell those stories. While on my third stay in the psychiatric hospital I started sketching out a short piece. The new season of Twin Peaks was airing at the time and the adult unit I was housed in is known as "Lodge". It was during my fourth and most recent stay that my father fell ill and passed away. I experienced his last days through second-hand phone calls in my own hospital room miles apart. Such a physical disconnect and heightened reality complicates my ability to grieve. I returned home and had to finish the piece. The sample finally had a purpose."

"Sound affects every aspect of our lives - even in our communication. I want to talk in this short blog about the ways sound affects us. You can listen to the blog or read the transcript below."

"The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) lockdown meant a greatly reduced social and economic activity. Sound is of major importance to people's perception of the environment, and some remarked that the soundscape was changing for the better. But are these anecdotal reports based in truth? Has traffic noise from cars and airplanes really gone down, so that more birdsong can be heard? Have socially distanced people quietened down? This article presents a case study of the human perception of environmental sounds in an urban neighborhood in the Basque Country between 15 March and 25 May 2020."