Sound Research

"The Music of the Plants project, created by a spiritual eco-community, investigates how humans can live more consciously and harmoniously with the natural environment."

"From the early avant-garde Futurists to present-day, utopian dreams litter the history of art meeting technology. When it comes to radio and wireless, these often include the dreams that each new technology will conquer space and time; that the overcoming of distance will enable the symbiosis of human with machine and the union of self with other, while the overcoming of time will bring about a simultaneity of experience. For many radio and transmission artists (myself included), our work with so-called "trailing edge" media seeks to critically engage these myths, positing wireless transmissions instead as time-based, site-specific encounters between people and devices over distances small or large, where the materiality of the electro-magnetic spectrum is experienced within a constantly shifting transmission ecology in which we all, people and devices, function."

"When Shane Carruth's film Upstream Color was released in 2013, critics described it in various ways-as a body horror film, a sci-fi thriller, a love story, and an art-house head-scratcher-but they all agreed that it was a film "not quite like any other". And while the film's cryptic imagery and non-linear editing account for most of the "what the hell?" reactions (see here for example), I argue that the reason for its distinctively hypnotic effect is Carruth's musical approach to the film's form: he organizes the images and sounds according to principles of music, including the use of repetition, rhythmic structuring, and antiphony."

"Almost 100 years ago, shortly before the outbreak of the First World War, the Italian Futurist Luigi Russolo proposed the idea that urban and industrial sounds, including the noises of modern warfare, were a new and enthralling source of musical material. Their nature was unprecedented - their intensity, volume, texture and shape - and so musical history should come to an end. The slow evolution of musical language had suffered a massive stroke, to be replaced by a vigorously healthy art of noises. Musician and composer David Toop looks at The Art of Noise"

"An ongoing project that started life during a one week residency at the Soundfjord Gallery. My proposal was as follows: A letter written to the journal IEEE in 1969 suggests the curious possibility of clay sound recordings from antiquity. Claiming to have evidence, an enigmatic scholar named Richard G. Woodbridge III outlines a hypothesis: sound, by causing a shimmering of airwaves, leaves traces on materials the waves break upon; wet paint, for example, or the soft, wet clay spun by a potter. Using suitable technology a contemporary listener might hear these traces, so allowing a rehearing of whatever sonic activity was occurring in that original impact of sound wave and substance."

"Three geometric objects out of aluminium: a sphere, a cube and a tetrahedron, they all have the same volume. Together they form a new instrument which shows how form changes its acoustic characteristics by using its individual resonance. With the use of electronics the shapes can be used as instruments or acoustic (reverb) chambers. "

"Soundtracks is about remembering sounds. Everyday of our lives we are confronted with sounds. They set the tone, the atmosphere for our daily lives. Yet when we remember the important moments of our lives, we never remember the sound. Our mind just doesn't work that way. We can close our eyes and picture the moment before us, but when asked to do the same with sound, things become more difficult. Sound works much more insidious, and when asked to remember a sound, to recreate it in our heads, we have to rely a lot more on our imagination, our crosslinks between feelings, thoughts and memories to attempt to hear it again. And by using that imagination, we explore what it was that made a certain sound special to us, and why it stuck with us."

"Spectroscapes explore music as physical models that are generated from the signal strength of frequencies present in the waveform of an individual song."

"Human Sound Objects is an interactive installation in which every participant becomes an object in an ever-evolving soundscape. By Giori Politi, Doron Assayas Terre and Eran Hilleli Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art, 2016"

"Ariel Guzik designs and produces mechanisms and instruments to enquire into the various languages of nature. He is also a musician, draftsman and illustrator. He is the director of the Nature Expression and Resonance Research Laboratory in Mexico (Laboratorio Plasmaht de Investigación en Resonancia y Expresión de la Naturaleza, Asociación Civil), an organisation which explores natural resonance, mechanics, electricity and magnetism and how these phenomena can be applied to music and sound experiments."

"I've experienced a number of works by Ryoji Ikeda over the years, from gallery installations to live concerts to a screening at Kyoto Experiment a few years ago… While his oeuvre is well defined, and often includes extremes (volume, frequency, minimalism) the idea of experiencing his first works written for percussion intrigued me enough to book my tickets for Japan - what form could such work take? "

"Sound as Color is an exploration in converting audible frequencies to electromagnetic waves perceptible to human eye relative to that of the audible frequency range of the input sound signal."

"This year I took part in Audio Game Jam 2. A game jam with the goal to raise awareness of accessibility issues experienced by visually impaired people when playing video games. If you haven't heard of audio games, these are games which are played mostly or solely through audio. There's lots of audio games across many genres like narrative adventures, flight simulators, RPG's, RTS games or even GTA style games."

"Traveling between Red Hook and Manhattan by ferry, an AI app talks to the water - and gets the water to talk back."

"It's a sonic phenomenon that occurs in only certain pockets of desert around the world. The sound of sand grains shuffling down hot slopes that can recall the angry buzz of bees or the deep, groaning thrums of a didgeridoo group. Scientists refer to these shifting dunes as "singing" or "booming" sands, which for centuries mystified explorers from Charles Darwin to Marco Polo. We know now that these strange sounds are caused by the vibrations of grains avalanching, at relatively slow speeds, down dunes, and that the grain size and speed influence the notes of these curious hums of nature."

"As part of RBMA L.A Festival, Ryoji Ikeda presented a new piece called A [for 100 cars], another one based in his exploration of sine waves. This time the concert was done through the custom sound systems of 100 cars which gathered in Los Angeles, each of them equipped with a custom sine wave synth created by Tatsuya Takahashi. Each devices was designed to play a score which goes around the different conceptions of the fundamental note, A, commonly considered in 440Hz, but here questioned in mesmerizing variations."

"For an exhibition at the Hessel Museum of Art, the artist wired five groups of corn plants to five music devices, forming a biofeedback system. Control signals were generated by measuring the electrical resistance of the plants' vegetable tissue, which in turn activated the MIDI synthesizers. Viewers were encouraged to interact with and touch the plants, which affected the sounds being played. The audience and cornfield were not just participants but actors, acting together-in concert-to produce the work."

"Julius created a variety of meaningful and moving sound-vision works that explore for the attentive viewer-listener the symbiotic relationship between visual art and noise music. Julius specifically augmented the history of audio art by meticulously working in the Zen zone between everyday sculptural objects, dim dins, and quietness. In his often derelict but delicate works, subtle noise vibrations become palpable, physical things. "

"a Half-Buried Roof Shelters Oral Histories"