Sound Research

"After his friend Toru Takemitsu, Toshi Ichiyanagi is one of the most famous Japanese composers of the 20th century. He was an early member of Fluxus and a student of both Aaron Copeland and John Cage, but unlike most of his contemporaries with similar pedigrees, he is largely unknown outside of the country of birth. His important contributions to Fluxus have been largely lost within the long shadow of historical revisionism. Like the efforts of many of his peers, they are somewhat obscured by the success of his first wife Yoko Ono."

symposium

"magine a wide, twisting column of bass in the center of a room with percussive moons spinning around in its orbit. A beat would smash in one corner, and then echo away in a spiral around the room before the pattern continues with the next beat in the following corner. That was a portion of Zemi 17's recent surround sound installation in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Listeners lay strewn about the carpeted, dark room taking in the aural tale through a multi-channel sound system that he built."

"Sub Pop Records has signed some of the most famous and influential indie bands of the last 30 years, including Nirvana, Sleater-Kinney, The Postal Service, and Beach House. Over time, the stars and hits have changed and the formats have evolved as well, from vinyl to CDs to MP3s. In recent years, however, the label has started releasing new albums on a medium few thought would ever see a comeback: the cassette. But there's one big user group that never entirely stopped using the old school technology. The United States prison system has the largest prison population in the world and many of its inmates listen to their music on tape. For this group, cassettes aren't necessarily the cheapest or hippest way to listen to music; in some cases, it's the only way."

"Immerse yourself in a sound world created by two blind performers exploring and navigating public space"

"Early experiments with Mini-Oramics from composers Ain Bailey, James Bulley and Jo Thomas "

"Andante" was created by MIT's Tangible Media Group as a way to promote an understanding of the way that music is rooted in the body, an experience that transcends more than just the ears. The group, led by Professor Hiroshi Ishii, gives physical form to abstract digital information, providing delightful visuals to more complicated processes."

"This issue of Interference asked authors to consider sound as the means to which we can explain the sonic. Contributions to the study of sound, apart from practice-based works, are often disseminated through language and text. This is the case for most analysis or research into sensory based and phenomenological studies. There is of course a strong case to be made for text; it is the universal way in which contemporary knowledge is transmitted. But perhaps there is an argument to be made for new ways to not only explore sound but to disseminate ideas around the sonic. For example, in what way can 'sonic papers' represent ideas about the experience of space and place, local and community knowledge? How can emerging technologies engage with both the everyday soundscape and how we 'curate this experience'? What is the potential of listening methods as a tool to engage community with 'soundscape preservation' and as a tool to critique and challenge urban planning projects?"

"Filmmaker and Filmmaker contributor Alix Lambert is a guest producer on this week's Theory of Everything, where she learns that it's not just hipsters causing a revival in the audio cassette format but prisoners. Indeed, for most prisoners, cassettes are the only music delivery device they're allowed. Listen to her episode, "Analog Time," embedded here, as Lambert talks to some incarcerated men for whom cassette tapes are an escape, a salve, and even a medium of exchange."

"Between 1967 and 1988, Maryanne Amacher produced a 22-part series she titled City-Links. In City-Links, Amacher transmitted live sonic feeds from cities (or multiple sites within the same city) via high-quality telephone lines and mixed these sources live during installations, performances, and radio broadcasts. Sonic environments she selected included harbors, steel mills, stone towers, flour mills, factories, silos, airports, rivers, open fields, utility companies, and musicians "on location". The first in the series, In City (1967), was a 28-hour live mix connecting eight locations around Buffalo via phone lines to WBFO, Buffalo public radio. A very early example of telematic performance, or 'long distance music', the project enabled Amacher to connect acoustic spaces distant from each other and thus hear synchronicity 'live' as it is."

"The Listening Reader, edited by Sam Belinfante and Joseph Kohlmaier, brings together a number of essays that explore the role of sound and listening in the context of contemporary art. They engage with the specific timbre that the act of listening, and the paradigm of sound bring to the practice of artists; how this paradigm is present within a broader discourse, including the creative arts, sciences, philosophy and politics; and how art that begins with, or requires listening circulates in the world of the art gallery."

"Georges René Marage - plaster moulds of the mouth pronouncing vowels, France, late 19th century."

"We are a nomadic multispecies collectivity experimenting in the intersection between art and science. We embrace hybridized practices among different disciplines and living organisms, open knowledge and precarity as a challenge.Our current lines of research are based in the use of sound to understand the bioelectrical activity of different bacterial consortiums, plants, slime molds and humans using DIY and custom-made sets of hardware we call ontological machines. "

"When was the last time you enjoyed a shared vibrational experience? Spend a little time around Detroit-based artist and educator Chris Reilly and you will likely get the opportunity, in one of his Intimate Instrument Workshops, which offer participants a unique interpersonal art activity."

"Stimulate your sense of taste, touch, smell and hearing in this immersive art experience at Tate Britain."

Urban sound has a huge influence over how we perceive places. Yet, city planning is concerned mainly with noise, simply because annoying sounds come to the attention of city officials in the form of complaints, while general urban sounds cannot be easily captured at city scale. To capture both unpleasant and pleasant sounds, we propose a new methodology that relies on tagging information of georeferenced pictures. We propose the first urban sound dictionary and compare it to the one produced by collating insights from the literature: ours is experimentally more valid (if correlated with official noise pollution levels) and offers wider geographic coverage. From picture tags, we then study the relationship between soundscapes and emotions. We learn that streets with music sounds are associated with strong emotions of joy or sadness, while those with human sounds are associated with joy or surprise. Finally, we study the relationship between soundscapes and people's perceptions and, in so doing, we are able to map which areas are chaotic, monotonous, calm, and exciting.Those insights promise to inform the creation of restorative experiences in our increasingly urbanized world.

Thriller foley

Slow motion - paint - impact waves

"If you flip on a waterfall to fall asleep, if you keep rainymood.com in your bookmarks, if you associate well-being with the sound of streams and crickets or wonder why the beach never quite sounds as tranquil as you imagine, it's because of Teibel. New York's least likely media mogul was the mastermind behind Environments, a series of records he swore were "The Future of Music." From 1969 to 1979, he took the best parts of nature, turned them up to 11, engraved them on 12-inch records, and sold them back to us by the millions. He had a musician's ear, an artist's heart, and a salesman's tongue, and his work lives on in yoga studios, Skymall catalogs, and the sea-blue eyes of Brian Eno. If you haven't heard of him, it's only because he designed his own legacy to be invisible. "