Sound Research

"Researchers in Indonesia have developed an innovative way to remove microplastics from water without the need for expensive filters. It works, says Dhany Arifianto, an engineer at the Institut Teknologi Sepuluh Nopember in Surabaya, Indonesia, by passing contaminated water through a pipe, while underwater speakers make the pipe vibrate like the sound board of a guitar."

"Fabric/Fragment of An Urban Wilderness is a sound work and an investigation of the built environment, produced by giving voice to the city's thickly layered range of electromagnetic fields (EMFs) projected by cell phone base stations."

"In May 2019, Kathy Hinde invited people to join her on a 'Deep Listening Walk' to focus on the hidden sounds of Europe's largest blanket bog in The Flow Country in the far north of Scotland. Using specialist listening devices such as hydrophones, she made audible the sonic qualities of peat gently moving, and tuned in to the minuscule sounds emitted by small organisms living within this rich and biodiverse ecosystem. Blanket bog is a very special ecosystem, and the idea of 'Deep Listening' in this context was to listen into the peat at different depths, and to think about listening 'back in time' as these deep layers of peat have taken centuries to form, preserving organisms within its layers. What is it like to listen to these layers and different depths that hold deep time?"

Kathy Hinde is an audiovisual artist inspired by behaviours and phenomena found in nature and the everyday expressed through audiovisual installations and performances that combine sound, sculpture, image and light. Composed of hand-made objects, electronics and a blend of digital and analogue systems, her work represents a cross between kinetic sound sculptures and newly invented instruments. She frequently works in collaboration with other practitioners and scientists and often actively involves the audience in the creative process.

"This study examines evidence of the health benefits of natural soundscapes and quantifies the prevalence of restorative acoustic environments in national parks across the United States. The results affirm that natural sounds improve health, increase positive affect, and lower stress and annoyance. Also, analyses reveal many national park sites with a high abundance of natural sound and low anthropogenic sound"

"Encountering a boxing match projected on the wall of a darkened room is pretty unlikely while roaming around Chelsea galleries - unless you're at a Paul Pfeiffer show."

"This paper traces the relationship between art and atrocity, materiality and decay, and the aural possibilities of hospitality in a time of terror. There is one site in particular that seems to speak so poignantly to the complex workings of trauma, ruin, and memory, and it is the use of sound in this place that I wish to draw attention to here. The September 11 Memorial and Museum may not appear, at first, to signal the ways in which sound might usher in a new way of thinking about the philosophically complex concept of hospitality nor the promises of decay. Yet, one installation in particular manages to do just that. Located in the Museum's Historical Exhibition, and evocative of death, mourning, and haunting, William Basinski's sound and video installation, The Disintegration Loops, offers a fitting yet unique elegy to the loss of the towers and nearly 3,000 innocent people."

""Sound travels as compression waves through gases and liquids. Stable in its immateriality it remains true to its original data. Here sound input has a stronger power over a flow field. It creates waves that propagate through the fluid. When two sound waves run towards each other, they collide and interfere with each other's patterns. A snapshot of this collision is translated into a 3D model and produced with a milling machine." -Eva Schindling"

Sound artist Rutger Zuydervelt and designer Gerco Hiddink have teamed up to organize a new audio project called Bridges. The project asked a group of eight well-known improvisational musicians to "react" to four Dutch bridges (or, more accurately, to field recordings made on, under, and near those bridges). The project is thus as much about musical improv as it is about infrastructural acoustics-a structural ecology of sound vibrantly humming in the spaces around us. "

soundartist (1999, Spain) Currently based in Utrecht For me, creating a work always begins with sound research. In my concerts and installations, I explore the boundaries of the concept music using my own made instruments and extended techniques. To perceive sound, you need a source that vibrates (moves) the air and someone who can perceive those vibrations: "Sound is movement". As an artist I communicate with sound waves, with movement. Everything that sounds in my work is "aLive": lively, playful and produced in the moment.

"In an interview in the October 1920 issue of The American Magazine, Edison confirmed that his scientific curiosity was intrigued by the nature of what happens to us after death. In his interview he posed the question, does our consciousness simply disappear as our bodies decompose or does some essence of our personality still linger in some form in this dimension of reality? Edison admitted that he didn't know, but the scientist in him wanted to find out whether that question could be answered. He told his interviewer that he was actively pursuing a device that would help him find that answer, saying, "I have been at work for some time building an apparatus to see if it is possible for personalities which have left this earth to communicate with us." For Edison, who took his inventions very seriously, this was not a simple throwaway remark, it was an announcement."

Composed of "drops"

"An aural history of the Cold War technologies that underpinned the space race and the arms race. "

Artist reference In this interview artist Jem Finer discusses his recent body of work with David Rooney, Curator of Timekeeping at the National Maritime Museum. In his Longplayer project Finer set himself the challenge to develop a 1000 year long musical score, working within the confines of today's technology and considering how sustainable the possibilities may be over time.

"Hearing is a vastly underrated sense. We tend to think of the world as a place that we see, interacting with things and people based on how they look. Studies have shown that conscious thought takes place at about the same rate as visual recognition, requiring a significant fraction of a second per event. But hearing is a quantitatively faster sense. While it might take you a full second to notice something out of the corner of your eye, turn your head toward it, recognize it and respond to it, the same reaction to a new or sudden sound happens at least 10 times as fast. "

We are pleased to announce the launch of SoundEffects, a new international peer-reviewed journal on sound and sound experience operating on the Open Journal System. SoundEffects brings together a plurality of theories, methodologies, and historical approaches applicable to sound as both mediated and unmediated experience. The journal primarily addresses disciplines within media and communication studies, aesthetics, musicology, comparative literature, cultural studies, psychology and sociology. In order to push the boundary of interdisciplinary sound studies into new areas, we also encourage contributions from disciplines such as health care, architecture, and sound design. As the only international journal to take a humanities-based interdisciplinary approach to sound, SoundEffects is responding to the increasing global interest in sound studies.

This is just one video, poke around on the site to find more. "Anechoic is a 'collections story' that uses sound instead of visuals to interpret the essence of key garments from the Autumn/Winter 2006 collections by leading fashion brands. Part of a series of projects devoted to exploring 'The Sound of Clothes', these interactives and fashion films explore sound 'generated' by the garments themselves."

"That's the idea, at least. I'm walking westward from New York City for nine months or so. If everything goes according to plan, I'll be in Oregon when the clock runs out. If nothing goes according to plan, maybe I'll end up in Peru or Mongolia or Pennsylvania. "

"Henrik Håkansson (b. 1968 Sweden) devotes his work to studying the complex connections between humans and nature. He carefully constructs environmental experiments that ask participants to explore their impact on the environment that surrounds them, such as in the installation Frog For e.s.t. (eternal sonic trance) (1995). This piece consisted of a room filled with inflatable pools, humidifiers, insects, frogs, strobe lights, and a DJ mixing techno music on site. Projects like Frog For e.s.t. examine the intrusion of human artifice on the environment: what happens when we attempt to recreate delicate ecological systems? What are the effects of human-made sounds replacing the natural soundscape?"