Sound Research

"Invisible Places has published a PDF with the proceedings from 2017 edition of their conference. 678 pages of vast sonic explorations, edited by two experts in such deepness of the unseen: Raquel Castro & Miguel Carvalhais."

"Early spring resounds with the percussive hammering of woodpeckers. Their rhythmic drumming works like many birds' songs: it broadcasts to other woodpeckers over a long distance a clear assertion of territorial and mating rights. "

"WaveCloud-M is Matlab-oriented simulator which uses the Finite Difference Time Domain (FDTD) method to solve the linear acoustic wave-equation numerically. It originates from a simulation tool which I designed in 2010 to model rooms for my PhD thesis, which is called WaveCloud (without the M). The original WaveCloud project relies heavily on parallisation on a GPU and facilitates a means for large-scale modelling. Even though it is a powerful tool, it relies on specialised hardware and can be somewhat cumbersome as it requires some machine-specific tweaking. I have listened to feedback from many users, and accordingly, I decided to create a new version of WaveCloud, which can be run 'out of the box' from within Matlab, and does not require building any third-party components. This version only shares the name with the original WaveCloud, and its engine was re-designed from the core."

"Professor Trevor Cox is a British academic and science communicator, a Senior Media fellow for EPSRC, and is President of the Insitute of Acoustics for the 2010-12 period. Cox has presented a range of popular science documentaries for BBC Radio 4, BBC Radio 3 and BBC World Service, including Sounds of Science, Aural Architecture, Life's Soundtrack, Science vs Strad, The Pleasure of Noise, World Musical Instruments, Dragon's Lab, Biomimicry and Save our Sounds. He was co-originator and judge of BBC Radio 4' 'So You Want To Be A Scientist?', a competition to find Britain's best amateur scientist. He has gained worldwide news coverage for stories such as "Does a duck quack echo?" and "The Worst Sound in the World". He has also investigated the World's scariest scream. In addition, he has appeared in features on BBC1, Teachers TV, Discovery and National Geographic channels, and as an expert in news items on a variety of television and radio channels"

"Acousticians cannot yet comprehensively quantify the acoustic character of spaces. There is a lot we know about acoustic design, but there is a great deal to be learned. Excellent concert halls are a rarity even for the most experienced teams and well-funded projects. When the scaffolding comes down, acousticians are granted short windows of time to listen, measure, and tune. Acoustic parameters are extracted and a report is delivered, and usually relegated to a dark corner of a server. Design decisions made years earlier become irreversible in the built condition as the first audiences listen closely. Opinions either aggregate or dissipate, at best tenuously connected to measurable metrics. Design teams move on once a building is occupied; innovations become hard to mine and harder to embed deep enough to take root in our methods."

"Climate change is existentially terrifying and also frustratingly abstract-a combination that makes it really hard for many people to connect with in a personal way, as one does with say, a work of art. Enter the Chicago-based duo Luftwerk-Petra Bachmaier and Sean Gallero-who have bridged that disconnect with their latest public art installation, White Wanderer, currently on view in Chicago's Riverside Plaza through October 1st. Bachmaier and Gallero are known for their luminous light-based installations in public spaces and architecture, and their latest effort is their first attempt to incorporate climate change messaging into their work. Outstream Video   00:00 00:00 "

"Even if you're aware that glaciers are melting and sea levels are climbing, these facts can be difficult to connect with on an emotional level. A sound artist at the University of Virginia is hoping to change that by turning scientific data into music, and, well, the result is pretty damn cool."

"Some people prefer utter silence as they kayak down a river. The ambient sounds of birds flapping their wings or water whooshing beneath them is sufficient. Others, however, might opt for a little music. Or how about some eerie, underwater sounds that can help scientists track pollution and climate change?"

"Gordon Hempton is the type of person who gets into something and doesn't let it go. As an acoustic ecologist, most of his obsessions are sounds. Specifically, natural ones. Hempton's been on a crusade for years to highlight the sonic beauty of the natural world, and draw attention to the fact that we're slowly letting that beauty disappear in a sea of noise pollution. Along the way, he picked up a mentor who has helped inspire him and open his ears to nature: naturalist Jon Muir. Though he's been dead for more than 103 years, Muir has helped guide Hempton, who has walked in his steps literally and figuratively."

As the concrete details of Hamm's beating were slowly erased amid years of trials and new racial atrocities perpetuated by law enforcement, Come Out even anticipates the sort of numbness and exhaustion that now results from a 24/7 news cycle that blends outrages and atrocities into a dangerous, undifferentiated mass.

"Composer, performer, and sound artist Miya Masaoka considers the vagina to be the "third ear," a site for new ways of listening and perceiving. "

"Sound has been used throughout history as a way of exerting power and control. Today, hi-tech sound techniques and playlists of "extreme" music, from children's TV themes to death metal, are employed as weapons of torture and espionage. Room40 boss and experimental musician Lawrence English explores the phenomenon and explains the impact sound has on all of us."

"INSIDE is a fantastic sounding game full of craft, polish and the sorts of perfect choices that only experience can bring. I have zero opinion on its overall loudness, and its weighted dynamics probably fall within the ranges we'd all aim to ship a game within. But its perceived dynamics are staggering"

"Close your eyes for a moment and listen to the space you are in. From my chair, I can hear the rhythmic agitation of my washing machine's spin cycle muffled only slightly by a closed door. In the next room, my fiancé picks out a lilting melody on his mandolin. Even further away, the hint of a low drone, like that of a jet passing by in the sky, reminds me of the presence of the refrigerator upstairs in the kitchen. If I concentrate more, I can hear the distant whine of leaf blowers down the street, though what they could possibly be blowing in the middle of the winter is beyond me. And right next to the click clack of my typing as I commit these words to the page is the purr of an external hard drive, a reassuring sounding of the digital age."

"The conception of these soundscapes stems from a deep love of history that I have had since childhood. The idea of recreating the sound of the past in a way that was meaningful to modern listeners provided me with a creative challenge. My aim was to tell a story solely through sound while simultaneously presenting an authentic and valid interpretation of a group of people at a specific point in time."

"UK chemists even followed their noses to the Tate, where they tested three decades-old plastic sculptures."

"The following is writing from an earlier time in my recent research project, Wayback Sound Machine: Sound through time, space, and place. It felt an appropriate beginning to share here as the first part of the ongoing series, "Wayback Sound Machine- a constellation of sounding time", that will be exploring various works and writings approaching the concept of sound back through time. I will be publishing the call for work shortly, and hope to hear from some of you Sonic Field readers. "

"Ears are a peculiarly individual piece of anatomy. Those little fleshy seashells, whether they stick out or hang low, can be instantly recognizable in family portraits. And they aren't just for show. Researchers have discovered that filling in an external part of the ear with a small piece of silicone drastically changes people's ability to tell whether a sound came from above or below. But given time, the scientists show in a paper published Monday in the Journal of Neuroscience, the brain adjusts to the new shape, regaining the ability to pinpoint sounds with almost the same accuracy as before."

"Mariska de Groot is a Dutch interdisciplinary artist who has been making and performing comprehensive analog light-to-sound instruments and installations for the last few years. Just like Dewi de Vree, who we've featured before on this blog, she is a part of iii, an artist-run platform supporting radical interdisciplinary practices engaging with image, sound and the body in the Hague."