Sound Research

"Most non artists think that a work of art begins with an imaginary grand design, which is then made real by using the techniques the artist has developed.   That's not the way it usually happens.   It's certainly not the way interesting art usually happens.  In the beginning there is most often nothing, and nothing, and nothing for hours and days, and sometimes weeks and months.  There are scores or hundreds of false starts.  Then, when something does pop into the artist's head it isn't anything close to a grand design.   It's usually an inkling, a notion, a fleeting feeling.  It's an unintentional smear in one corner of the same canvas the painter has been fruitlessly fiddling with all along.  But it suggests something.  It's a start, only an idea, a hunch, but nevertheless something concrete to work with."

"Chris Watson shares his experience as a composer and location wildlife sound recordist, discussing the technical elements of field sound recording and presenting his recordings of the rainforests near Iguazu Falls in Brazil and Brinicles (icicles forming under sea ice) in the Arctic and Antarctic. He concludes with a case study, presenting a piece of sound art, commissioned by the National Gallery, created in response to John Constable's The Cornfield."

"What do we really hear when we hear the wind? If you step from a wood into an open field, the sound changes, although it is the same wind blowing over both. A winter pine tree far from the coast makes the wind perform like an angry sea, while a neighbouring bare birch makes a gust-like sound as soft as the brushings of a jazz drummer. A single blast can turn telephone cables and barbed wire fencing into the strings of a wind-harp."

"600 prepared dc-motors, 58 kg wood Zimoun 2017"

"This monthly theme of "Mistakes" got me thinking. Mistakes to me can be a negative outcome to an intended or an unintended action. Something called a "dictionary" says mistakes can be "an action or judgment that is misguided or wrong." But there are also "happy accidents" which is more fun to talk about than "sad accidents" so lets do that. As a fairly high-strung person, "rolling with it" doesn't come very naturally. Fortunately my chosen vocation and hobbies allows for a little bit of wiggle room when creating and/or messing up. "

"Every Time A Ear di Soun is a documenta 14 Radio Program in collaboration with Deutschlandradio Kultur that explores sonority and auditory phenomena such as voice, sound, music, and speech as mediums for writing counterhegemonic histories. Every Time A Ear di Soun reflects on how the sonic impacts subjectivities and spaces, especially through the medium of radio."

"There's different ways of sonifying data, and it's often hard to strike a balance between making it musical or "listenable", and translating the data into sound in a correct manner. We've seen different ways of sonifying data before in this "Sonify…"-series. With FedEx's SoundTrack, they very clearly went for music. Which seems logical considering SoundTrack is a marketing gimmick."

"Quick-what does a brain sound like? Time's up! The answer is, of course, "nothing." If you said "lightning and sparks," though, you're forgiven. Odds are good that every "trip" you've taken inside the brain has featured a CGI image of squiggly gray matter, accompanied by the sizzling sound of electricity. This and other sonic clichés-blood whooshing through veins, organs squishing and pulsing-are as much a part of a certain type of hour-long TV drama as a plot twist before a commercial break. They're also a staple in documentaries, where such sounds accompany visuals depicting smaller dramas, like the journey of a blood cell, or the ravages of puberty."

"From 1976 to 1982, Tony Conrad (1940-2016) created "Music and the Mind of the World," a piano composition comprising over 200 hours of recorded music. During this time everything Conrad played on the piano was recorded (with the incidental exception of perhaps three or four hours). In this endeavor - which includes the sounds of practicing, banging on the keys, formal exercises, experiments with the harmonic sonority of the piano itself, and even "On Top of Old Smokey" - we witness what might in essence be described as the total encounter between an improvising performer and the central instrument of Western musical culture. Now, for the first time, this influential yet largely unknown work has been published and is now available online for free at the domain musicandthemindofthe.world."

"IDEA: An overview of sound and music related art at Art Basel Hong Kong WHAT: Art Basel's fifth edition in Hong Kong features 242 premier galleries from 34 countries and territories, as well as a new sector, Kabinett. This year's show features 29 new galleries and half of the galleries showing overall have exhibition spaces in Asia and the Asia Pacific region. The show takes place at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre."

"It is common knowledge that babies and small children fall asleep in the car quite easily. This could be a few things, the muffled engine noise, the slight vibration of the car, a regulated temperature. Furthermore it could be a conditioned response: when kids are put in a seat and strapped in, they can't really move around much and are kind of forced to relax. They have probably slept in the car before so are conditioned to do it again. Using this knowledge, Ford is promoting it's new vehicle range with "Max Motor Dreams", a baby crib that reproduces the sounds, movement and light of a parent's car. Parents are even able to use an app to collect data from routes and replay it in the crib at home."

""I watched a great horned owl sitting on a saguaro cactus," Mr. Wheeler, 77, an amateur pilot, said last week at the museum. "And when it took off, it was just amazing. There was no sound, at least nothing I can describe as sound, but just a kind of almost imperceptible percussiveness in the air.""

"As visitors strolled through a recent display of Madame de Pompadour's coffee grinder, an 1840s Sèvres porcelain coffee set, tea canisters, sugar bowls and other European decorative arts at the Detroit Institute of Arts, the scent of roasted coffee beans arose in one room. Bach's "Coffee" Cantata played in the background. Not far away, cocoa pods were not only on display but also meant to be touched. In the final gallery, a tasting station offered two kinds of liquid chocolate, one adapted from an Aztec recipe and the other from an 18th-century French formula. Museums usually aim to offer a feast for the eyes, but this Detroit museum had much more in mind for "Bitter|Sweet: Coffee, Tea & Chocolate," which just closed at the institute. Officials, who used art objects to illustrate how the introduction of those beverages to Europe in the 16th century from Africa, Asia and the Americas changed social and consumption patterns, wanted the exhibition to be a banquet for all five senses."

"Sacred Spaces examines the crucial role sound has played in our spiritual and religious lives for thousands of years, and explores the sonic similarities between different religions, and different types of sacred space from across the world."

Soundcities was the first online open source database of city sounds and soundmaps from around the world, using found sounds and field recording. There are now thousands of sounds from around the world on the website. The concept started in 1995 with various iterations. In 1996 Stanza devised the term soundmaps and initiated the various works that developed into soundcities.com. Stanza's interactive soundmaps have been online since 2000 and the Soundcities database since 2004. This project allows the audience the possibility to remix the hundreds of samples recorded from cities around the world in an online database. The sounds can be listened to, used in performances on laptops, or played on mobiles via wireless networks. The Database is also open so anyone can upload sounds they collect from world cities, thereby making a contribution to the project and making an online sounds archive.

"Three custom guitars, a gong, maracas shaped like large closed fists, and a series of drum-heads ornated with his classic hand and slogans like 'LOOK AT THIS' and "PLEASE WAIT" The gong states the self-explaining text 'GONG'. While crafted with a luthier's precision, the artist's mischievous design-guitars with one string, some fretless-results in unexpected sounds. The black-and-white guitars are connected to small amplifiers. Alongside the instruments, Shrigley will also present a new series of black and white drawings."

"Spanish Sound Art Festival FASE 6 has uploaded some videos with full performances/lectures by Salomé Voegelin and Brandon LaBelle, plus a dialog on "aurality and environment" with both artists. "

"Joe Banks is a sound artist, author and researcher, originally specialising in radio phenomena and electromagnetic noise. For over twenty years Joe has been performing, releasing albums and exhibiting under the guise of Disinformation. This Disinformation brand name allows for a critique of corporate identities and modern communication, and uses a sonic palette sourced from errant radio waves, natural earth signals, and interference from the sun and from the National Grid, etc. In 2012, Joe published "Rorschach Audio - Art and Illusion for Sound" on Strange Attractor press, a book that explored the subject of EVP (ghost voice) research in contemporary sound art practice. Joe's work currently focusses on language and evolutionary neuroscience. Joe lives in London, 40 metres from the spot where physicist Leo Szilard conceived the theory of the thermonuclear chain reaction."

"Lead poisoning can stunt my growth / And mess with my mind / We would like help if you don't mind. Rather than water, words from poet Ken Silas, a student at Carman-Ainsworth High School in Flint, Michigan, flowed through a copper pipe and out of the faucet I'd just turned on, bearing my introduction to Beyond Streaming: A Sound Mural for Flint, conceived by artist Jan Tichy."

"For Landscape / Soundscape at the University of Pennsylvania's Arthur Ross Gallery, 10 sound artists were commissioned to create soundscapes responding to ten landscape photographs in the university's art collection. "I spent a lot of time just meditating on the photographic images, and I began yearning to hear some sort of sonic interpretation of the imagery," co-curator Heather Gibson Moqtaderi, who is associate curator and collections manager at Penn's University Art Collection, told Hyperallergic. "I felt that a balanced experience between sight and sound would most effectively convey this idea.""