Sound Research

"Two women who switched continents get to know each other through the data they draw and send across the pond"

"Fermentophone is a multi-sensory installation in which an algorithmically generated musical composition is performed by living cultures of bacteria and yeast. The installation comprises a series of different vessels containing actively fermenting foodstuffs and beverages, which are wired with electronic sensors. Each colorful, odorous, and edible ferment has its own musical vocabulary which is expressed according to microbial activity.( The installation was presented at the Hacking Arts festival at the MIT Media Lab."

"Tower Bridge has the acoustics of a small cathedral' … Iain Chambers in the Bascule Chambers, where Docklands Sinfonia will perform his work during the Totally Thames festival."

"In Neerpelt, a small town in the very north of Belgium on the border with the Netherlands, there's the very unique Klankenbos (or Sound Forest). A public forest filled with sound art installations hidden between the trees, accessible to anyone for free any moment of the day. Something so unique, it's strange we've never written an article about it here on Everyday Listening. Time to make up for that."

"Researchers attempting to document the sounds made by giraffes recorded almost 1,000 hours of audio at three different European zoos, even leaving their recording equipment in the enclosures at night. And there, near the edge of human hearing, the researchers picked up the unusual low sounds giraffes make at night -- the mysterious hum. "

Italian sculptor Pinuccio Sciola uses stone to make incredible sound sculptures

"Sound in Context is a short documentary exploring the unique practice of sound within the visual arts world. Through conversations with a number of key art institutions/galleries, artists and curators working with sound in the UK, Sound in Context allows practitioners to discuss some of the issues of presenting and exhibiting sound in the gallery and contemporary art domain."

"In my project SHRINE I wish to create a public sound sculpture that allows the spectators to express themselves and play music directlythrough the sculpture in Meriken Park. In effect SHRINE functions as a „Speakers Corner" (like at Hyde Park in London) or a social „hub" where people meet by chance or „rendezvous". The massive PA system has 8 channels so that 8 people can interact simultaneously. People can use their smart phones spontaneously to talk through the sculpture: connections happen directly on site, locally or internationally."

These architectural objects are "gigantic wooden megaphones" for the forest, part of an acoustic installation in Estonia's gorgeous Pähni Nature Centre for amplifying the sounds of the landscape.

Are jee be? Haroon Mirza - Irish Museum of Modern Art

This is a sound that was electronically placed onboard the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft.

Hearing Modernity - Sawyer Seminar at Harvard by Miguel on Aug 12, 2015 No Comments Sound, fleeting and immaterial, has long proved resistant to academic inquiry. Faced with the impenetrable difficulty of pinning down sounds themselves, scholars have largely focused on written texts (instead of spoken words), while musicians have largely focused on notes (instead of sounds). In recent years, however, a number of very promising approaches from a variety of fields, which often bridge the arts and the sciences, have sprung up and have begun to capture this phenomenon in its wider context.

Weather for the blind is a live streaming site of a musical instrument which is played by the weather. The base station - pictured in the foreground - is called Weather Warlock and is located in New Orleans Louisiana. The weather sensors - pictured in the distant surf - are mounted to a post and detect temperature, wind, sun, and rain. This all analog synthesizer produces a wide range of tones and harmonics based around a consonant E major chord with special audio events occurring during sunrise and sunset. Occasionally our streaming will be down. If that is the case, please visit the ARCHIVES to enjoy past weather entries."

"Sounds of Seismic (SOS) is an art-science, auditory display software system broadcasting continuous seismic sound generated from realtime collected global earthquake data. An internet audio streaming service, SOS webcasts electroacoustic music as multi-channel seismic generated sounds creating an infinite computational earth system soundscape! "

"Until the arrival of the phonograph nearly 140 years ago, the only way to have music in the home was to perform it. Royals and the wealthy supported composers and performers to provide entertainment in their manor houses and castles; their residences often featured music rooms, where instrumentalists were presented front and center, like artwork on display. Other abodes placed the musicians in a separate room or loft, acoustically connected to grand halls to provide discreet accompaniment for banquets and events. Oddly enough, that dichotomy-show of the music, or hide it-still exists, even in our modern, electronic era. "

"Fuzzy Logic is a speculative project that responds to noise pollution with music composition. Traffic noise is now the inorganic combination of individually designed sounds. A recent European law states that new models of electric and hybrid vehicles will have to make a noise by 2019: a great design opportunity! Exploiting the potential of current shifts towards electric transport, the project presents an alternative: noise itself becomes the object of design, and traffic is turned into a musical experience. Future e-cars are approached as speakers on wheels and rather than design the sound of single vehicles, we can compose the sound of traffic as a whole. Indian traffic epitomizes the future of noise, in increasingly overpopulated urban ares across Asia and Africa. The focus is on the iconic indian tuktuk. Each one plays an instrument as part of a system designed to be randomly harmonic and make musical sense as a whole - regardless individual tuktuks driving patterns. Traffic becomes a jam session, a kind of moving orchestra."

"In recent years the work of French artist Christian Boltanski has shifted from the work of memory towards the creation of myths. The artist has been dedicated to creating installations that seek to be permanent monuments for humanity in distant places. They are works that give rise to a new mode of transmission through ideas and not just objects."

"The ephemeral and varied character of subversion in musical creation makes it a challenging, complex concept to clearly define and illustrate. In this issue it is approached and reflected upon via a range of experimental practices with turntables, tapes and other devices, fringe genres, sound sculptures, and alternative models of music distribution. "

"The sounds of crickets courting and flies flying familiar to many of us, but have you heard a rice weevil larva eating inside a wheat kernel, a termite cutting a piece of wood, or a grub chewing on a root? Modern insect detection and control technology makes use of these subtle signals, sampled below. Most of the sound files on this page were selected from noise-free sections of recorded signal, but you can hear some typical background noises mixed with insect sounds at I below. The insect sounds have higher frequencies and shorter durations that make them relatively easy to separate from background."

"Jacob Kirkegaard has just come back from a last visit to his first major solo exhibition at Roskilde Museum of Contemporary Art, "Earside Out". An exhibition which displayed Kirkegaard's work as a sound artist, although his body of work spreads into field recordings, film sound, photography as well as producing and creating experimental music. "Earside Out" garnered much interest and Kirkegaard's parting gesture was to give a talk in the local library, very much preaching to the unconverted. It sounds like hard work, but Kirkegaard seems to enjoy precisely this, and very much prefers it to being idle."