Sound Research

"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."

"Dell Glover manufactured CDs for a living, but he began to wonder: if the MP3 was just as good, why bother with the CD?"

"The 80-acre green space is the Buitenschot Land Art Park. Its trenches and ridges hold bike paths and sports fields, but these recreational features are a bonus. Its main purpose is to deflect ground noise, the low-frequency drone that planes make when they take off and land."

"ernoudt Jacobs is an artist fascinated with sound in all its forms and possible expressions. He collects fields recordings around the world but he also creates installations based on Bell's photoacoustic effect that reveals the sonority of any material hit with a strong beam of light, builds sound microscope that magnifies the freezing and melting process of water or suspends coils, magnets and 1000 tin cans into the air to play with the laws of electromagnetic induction and generate tiny vibrations that produce sounds. It is as if everything in the visible and the invisible world provides him with endless opportunities for sound exploration. "

"Though Robin and Joan Rolfs owned two rare talking dolls manufactured by Thomas Edison's phonograph company in 1890, they did not dare play the wax cylinder records tucked inside each one."

"The radiofrequency spectrum is at the heart of telecommunications, used by police, emergency personnel and public transport services, as well as the armed forces. Every day, this spectrum ensures the proper functioning of mobile phones and wireless devices. Seen as an essential resource by some and as a health hazard by others, the electromagnetic fields generated by radiofrequency spectrum activity have multiplied exponentially since humans first learned to harness electricity. In his Electrosmog series, Jean-Pierre Aubé searches out ambient radio frequency activity in the urban landscape of Montréal, which for Aubé forms a singular territory, characterized by its density in the city and by the political and economic issues that accompany it. Equipped with a radio, an antenna, and home-made software, the artist sweeps the titular spectrum of radio frequencies. Every tenth of a second, the device takes a snapshot of its readings - a measure of electromagnetic activity on a specific frequency. This information is then paired with images of Montréal, digitally altered by these same measurements, to create a "documentary in sound" of the city's spaces. Montréal, well-known to the artist after years of radiofrequency experiments here, is the eighth city in which Aubé has measured and visually presented this urban Electrosmog. Electrosmog, Montréal, 01.1 MHz - 144 MHz, 2012 Text from the CCA and Elektra - video abstract original length : 11 minutes - built with Processing"

When a plant reacts to a butterfly larvae feeding on its leaves, it releases chemical substances, or compounds. The characteristics of these compounds have been analyzed in collaboration with the Ecological Chemistry Research Group at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, and then transposed into amplitude and intensity of sinus tones, recorded at EMS (Electroacoustic Music in Sweden), Stockholm. Thus these beautiful graphic score and soundtrack by Swedish artist Christine Ödlund are direct transpositions of "the plant's life, struggle and death"."

"Christine Ödlund - graphic scores inspired by plant chemistry."

"You might have seen the news last month that two students from George Mason University developed a way to put out fires using sound. "It happens so quickly you almost don't believe it," the Washington Post reported at the time. "Seth Robertson and Viet Tran ignite a fire, snap on their low-rumbling bass frequency generator and extinguish the flames in seconds." "

Feedback is a phenomenon which is not uncommon in sound art. Steve Reich's Pendulum Music used swinging microphones over speakers to create different tones in a certain rhythm, already back in 1968. There is something primeval about feedback, the way it can run out of control and become chaotic. Because of that, it's no wonder there are still a lot of artists working with it.

Liminaria aims at narrating the territory of Fortore, a marginal rural region located in the South of Italy, through an artistic point of view, putting together the ability of digital storytelling and the approach of different disciplines (literature, sociology, aesthetics, anthropology) and different fields of investigations (design, oenogastronomy).

"I have been making optical sound film experiments since I discovered that a 16mm film projector has this thing called an optical sound head, which 'reads' light and dark and marks on the film surface and turns them into sound."

"What is "sound art"? Should we define it within the context of experimental music or the visual arts or both? While the term first came into being in the 1980s, sound in the visual arts has a far longer history, ranging from Modernist experiments with synesthesia to the avant-garde exploits of Dada and Futurism. Sound art also has a distinctly musical heritage, emerging from the compositional experiments of John Cage, Tony Conrad, La Monte Young, Maryanne Amacher, and Pauline Oliveros, among others. This conversation will serve as the keynote to an all-day interdisciplinary conference on sound art and experimental music."

"Sound maps of rivers and songs for cicadas are two examples of a new kind of music inspired by 19th-century German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz. Inventing his own resonator, the scientist broke down the frequencies of tonal sounds, indirectly showing music as the gathering of disparate elements in space. Foot Notes: On the Sensations of Tone, currently on view at apexart, takes Helmholtz as its patron saint of ecologically minded sound art, with nine practitioners presenting their own experiments with unconventional music."

"The unsafe use of personal audio devices and high sound volumes at events are putting over a billion teens and young adults at risk of permanent hearing loss, the World Health Organization (WHO) warned on Friday."

Christine Sun Kim

"Though she was born deaf, Christine Sun Kim's favorite medium to work with is sound. We visited her Brooklyn studios and she showed us what she has in store for her Lincoln Reimagine Project. As a Lincoln Reimagine Project honoree, Kim will create a walk-able art installation that employs the attendee as the moving instrument. She showed a small preview of the work at this year's TEDActive in Whistler."

In November, Gillis and his label, Illegal Art, released the fifth Girl Talk album, "All Day," as a free download. Within 24 hours, several sites had posted annotations of "All Day," cataloging the samples on the album -there are 373 of them. Download traffic was so heavy that MTV News ran the headline "Girl Talk Apologizes for Breaking the Internet" - hyperbole, but not far from the truth. Illegal-art.net reports that "All Day" was downloaded so often that the servers crashed. In Girl Talk's honor, Pittsburgh declared Dec. 7, 2010, "Gregg Gillis Day."

"Long Wave Synthesis. A huge land-art scale sound art installation that investigates infrasound, and probes the relations between how we perceive the landscape and long-wave vibrations. "

Camera Lucida is a highly introspective immersive spatial art work creating a fleeting ephemeral materiality by intersecting ultrasound with hyperlight… in essence the creation of a sonic aurora. Domnitch and Gelfand's piece rejects any possibility to be fixed in space and time, but rather offers up the very definition of an unstable work of art, existing entirely for and within the perceptive realm of the viewer." - Stephen Kovats, Director of Transmediale 2008"