Sound Research

How can sound help us better understand our environment and engage in today's critical ecological issues? The Ear to the Earth festival kicks up the volume of the earth's sonic life with concerts, installations, public art, and panel discussions that expl

Pulses of inhaled and exhaled air form hypnotic compositional streams. Hans van Eck presents his sound-world delivered from the unique architecture of the bass box.

Product Design and Electronic Music. Some very fun and far out ideas here. A jelly fish theremin!

Experimental Musical Instruments is an information outlet for interesting and unusual musical instruments of all sorts. Here you'll find how-to materials on instrument making, as well as books and CDs featuring the work of the most inventive instrument ma

great collection of odd homemade musical instruments

Five ways of mapping the world. One story about people who make maps the traditional way-by drawing things we can see. And other stories about people who map the world using smell, sound, touch, and taste. The world redrawn by the five senses.

What kinds of sounds can you find in New York City? With sound-seeker, you can zoom, pan and search for sounds with interactive satellite photos or detailed maps.

Natural Car Alarms is a project consisting of three cars rigged with modified car alarms whose typical six-tone siren has been replaced with a similar one made only of bird calls. Some of the bird sounds are shockingly electronic in character; others are

students at Codman Academy Charter Public School in Dorchester, Massachusetts, did a project where they wrote and narrated an audio guide about the sounds of birds in Boston and the surrounding vicinity. They used bird sound recordings from The Cornell La

show at the hirshhorn that examines connections between visual art and sound

Radia is a network of independent radio stations who have a common interest in promoting and producing artworks for the radio, and in forming projects based on broadcasting and cultural exchange. We produce a weekly radio show that is broadcast by each of the member radio stations. Our shows represent the local artistic community of each station, whilst at the same time these new works point to an emergent collective notion of self-determined art for radio. radia.fm"

"framework began broadcasting in june, 2002 on the newly reformed resonance 104.4fm in london. the show now airs on 5 radio stations around the world, with more to follow soon, and streams and podcasts here on it's own website. framework is consecrated to field-recording and it's use in composition, and began broadcasting at a time when a new community of sound artists with a special interest in found sound was developing, a community spread across the world that, thanks to the internet, was no longer limited to a specific geography. framework sees itself as an outlet for this ever-growing and developing community, a folk-tool in a new folk movement, a community driven exchange point for creators and listeners alike. framework's goal is to present not only the extremely diverse sound environments of our world, but also the extremely diverse work that is being produced by the artists who choose to use these environments as their sonic sources. we hope to ask this question: is 'field-recording' a style, or a genre, or is it in fact as uncontrollable and undefinable an instrument or tool as any, that may be interpreted, manipulated, and appropriated by anyone with a microphone and an idea? these works are its definition, and not vice versa."

Not sure if anything ever became of this NYC pirate radio project: "THE THING in collaboration with r a d i o q u a l i a, and Jan Gerber started on May 5 2002 to build a radio network in NYC using internet audio (via wireless and wired connections) and miniFM. Initially the network will consist of 2-5 transmitters based around New York."

video documentation of past events. Since its inception in 1994, the bi-annual Sonic Acts festival has questioned, examined, assembled and exhibited contemporary and historical developments at the cutting edge of art, technology, music and science. for the 2012 festival go to http://2012.sonicacts.com

"Center for Visual Music is a nonprofit film archive dedicated to visual music, experimental animation and avant-garde media. CVM is commited to preservation, curation, education, scholarship, and dissemination of the film, performances and other media of this tradition, together with related historical documentation and artwork."

Oorwonde is an interactive aural installation in which the visitor becomes a willing 'patient' to hear, feel, influence and manipulate the soundtrack of a fictitious operation. Speakers, electro-magnets, vibrator motors and piezoelectric disks entwine with the human body, creating a unique composition and performance. Based on Bernhard Leitner's philosophy that "listening is understood to extend to all parts of the body and sound to touch a deep nerve", Oorwonde explores the concept of bodily hearing as multiple elements target different body parts. Hearing is no longer restricted to the ears.

"Sound is ubiquitous and permanent, and embraces us as an envelope. Therefore, the experience of the auditory can be considered an environmental experience par excellence. The term and concept of soundscape reflects this idea. It implies, that sounds do not exist in isolation, and have to be understood as being embedded in and interacting with other sounds and perceptions coining the perceptional abilities of individuals and societies and their social relations: soundscape is a system in which all elements are interdependent."

Another nice looking physical representation of a sound wave is created by Andrew Spitz from { sound + design } in collaboration with interaction designer Andrew Nip. Paper Note is made using a laser cutter to create discs of paper who form the waveform when joined on a piece of string.

Echolocation "Experimenting with human boids during the previous sessions sparked the idea to use sound to determine the movement of our human agents. As we were looking at boids as a mean to simulate flocking behaviour of birds, it was proposed to explore also the behaviour of animals that employ echolocation to navigate in their environment, like Bats."

"since 2006, when scientists at Denali began a decade-long effort to collect a month's worth of acoustic data from more than 60 sites across the park - including a 14,000-foot-high spot on Mount McKinley - Betchkal and his colleagues have recorded only 36 complete days in which the sounds of an internal combustion engine of some sort were absent. Planes are the most common source. Once, in the course of 24 hours, a single recording station captured the buzzing of 78 low-altitude props - the kind used for sightseeing tours; other areas have logged daily averages as high as one sky- or street-traffic sound every 17 minutes."