Sound Research

"Acknowledging a lack of solutions to help visually impaired children to apprehend their movements and surroundings, a team lead by IIT-researcher Monica Gori created the ABBI project. Built with young children in mind, this bracelet is generating audio based on body movement and spatial localisation and, therefore, helping them interacting with other and their surroundings."

"This sound piece comes from the experience of walking at night along the path of the Mac Leose Trail in Saikung Country Park, Hong Kong, with stars as the only source for lights. Darkness becomes a useful friend to focus on the ambient noises and rhythms."

"Acoustic Subtractions are events in public space: Twenty minutes of white noise followed by twenty minutes of "silence." "

"The research project focusses on how sound data can be converted into understandable and actionable information by humans and machines.

"Artistic innovations spurred by curiosity rather than by intellectual principles arguably produce more compelling and enduring breakthroughs. And Pauline Oliveros was undeniably curious when it came to music. By the time she was 9, she picked up the accordion; soon, she learned to play the tuba and the French horn. She quickly proved to be a highly versatile and accomplished instrumentalist. The capacity that really shaped Oliveros's career as an experimental composer and electronic-music pioneer, however, was not her skill as a musician per se but her awareness of the broader sonic field that surrounded her as she played."

"Here's an interesting lecture philosopher Christoph Cox gave recently (January 18) in connection with a sound intervention by Andrea Hornick in the Collection Gallery of Barnes Foundation. The lecture, entitled "A brief history of sound art" explores pretty much what its name suggests, going from historical works and artists to relations between sound and other art forms. The philosopher "traces the history of sound art from the invention of audio recording in the late 19th century to the genre-bending compositions of John Cage to the explosion of sound installation in the 1960s. Cox surveys a range of sonic practices, revealing how they resemble and resist approaches in the visual arts.""

""Toward the Circle" is silent short film created during a research residency at the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) in Troy, NY. It presents a sequence of enclosures, each with a simulated burst of sound energy, that hints at an important relationship between sound and architecture. Zackery Belanger can be reached at zb@arcgeometer.com"

"As If It Were The Last Time is a subtlemob about celebrating the present, about home, belonging and loss. A snapshot of the world around you, a chance to savour the moment, and make new connections with the people and the place surrounding you. This is no requiem, this a celebratory slow dance, a chance to present in the world, and to see it with fresh eyes."

"Such an elegant and delicate way of manifesting our issues demonstrates how we can do something without saturating ourselves, instead using art, simplicity and sound to be as direct as we can, not playing the dirty game of those to whom we are reacting. Actually, the project was finely installed in the Rauschenberg studio, where an old Nagra recorder, and a beautifully exposed tape, reproduce the hypnotizing call for action, which in this case could start just with an act of listening, constantly, to all of our words of concern."

"A textile map plays back field recordings when touched."

"This is me walking through different rooms of the same building. I compare the acoustic response of each room by means of a pair of metal plates that I attached to the sole of my shoes."

"The Cathedral of Noyon houses the most unusual-and largely unknown-installation of acoustic vases in Western Europe, the caveau phonocamptique, a chamber installed beneath the pavement of the crossing. Acoustic vases are simple earthenware pots placed in the walls and vaults of postclassical churches, their installation inspired by Marcus Vitruvius Pollio's De architectura libri decem. "

"While exploring language and its political, social and cultural roots in many of her artworks, artist Inmi Lee became fascinated with the question, What does the pure form of sound look like? For her piece, Mother, she attempted to answer this question: a collaboration with code artist Kyle McDonald, Mother translates sounds into objects. Claims Lee, "It's one thing to hear a sound- it goes into your ear and dissipates." Representations of sound, however, "Reveal certain relationships between sound and shape.""

"His latest piece includes some of those elements usually present in his installations but instead of being fixed in rooms and sculptures, are used in an improvised performance called Small Movements, in which feedbacks, grains, objects, tiny spaces, delicate rhythms and thin drones interact to create a beautiful dynamic continuum of microsonic silhouettes."

"BLIND people often substitute sound for sight, and some can even use echolocation to steer around objects. But it turns out that sound can be tailored to convey visual information. That phenomenon is now being used to help build better navigation aids for blind people."

"Sound journeys is an experiment into how sound shapes the way we understand the world, created by The Principals in collaboration with sound recordist Chris Watson (sound recordist for David Attenborough and formerly of the band Cabaret Voltaire). Shot and edited by Samuel Russell, title design by Olivier Lebrun, sound and lighting technicians Pablo Gnecco and Nate Turley. Sponsored by Ford and B&O Play."

"Learn why listening to three-dimensional sound in the real world and listening on headphones are two different experiences - and how you can bridge the gap."

"That color and smell have a sensory connection is long-established, but there's debate about whether associating the smell of strawberries with red or smoke with black is something structured in our brains, based in language, or resulting from experience. A study published this week in the peer-reviewed, open-access PLoS One called "Cross-Cultural Color-Odor Associations" suggests it may be cultural."

"It wasn't quite as Earth-shaking as Marconi's 1901 cross-Atlantic radio transmission or Alexander Graham Bell yapping at this assistant on the first telephone call in 1876, but this week the 21st century got its inaugural transatlantic scent message. At the American Museum of Natural History in New York on Tuesday, the smell of champagne and chocolate wafted from the new "oPhone" in a message sent from Le Laboratoire art center in Paris."

"In Famous Deaths, you experience the smells and sounds of the last four minutes of someone's life, all while closed inside a metal mortuary drawer. The project developed by scientists and designers with Avans University of the Applied Sciences in Breda, Netherlands, involves curated scents for John F. Kennedy's final motorcade, Whitney Houston's last bath, Princess Diana's fatal ride, and Muammar Gaddafi's violent end."