Sound Research

"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?"

"Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez's (literally) transporting film-shot inside a cable car that carries pilgrims and tourists to and from a mountaintop temple in Nepal-is radically simple in conception. Each of its 11 shots lasts as long as a one-way ride, which corresponds to the duration of a roll of 16mm film. A kind of head movie that viewers are invited to complete as they watch, Manakamana is thrillingly mysterious in its effects: a staged documentary, a cross between science fiction and ethnography, an airborne version of an Andy Warhol screen test. Working within a 5-by-5-foot glass and metal box, Spray and Velez have made an endlessly suggestive film that both describes and transcends the bounds of time and space."

"No field of study based on sensory experience seems to be overburdened by terminology to the same extent as that dealing with sound and hearing. The visual sense, of course, has received as much attention as the auditory from physics, psychology, neurophysiology, and the visual arts, which have all contributed terminology and jargon alike, but a great deal of it seems to have entered the common vocabulary already, and at least the general notions involved are seldom foreign to the average citizen or student. Terms such as perspective, foreground, background, colour, spectrum, shadow, focus, image, reflection, transparent, translucent and the wealth of descriptive visual terms, not to mention common visual impairments and the complexity of visual language found in contemporary cinema and photography - all of these have found public familiarity in a way that it is hard to imagine their sonic counterparts ever matching. Almost every school child knows what white light is, and how it is composed, but would he know what white noise is, even though the likelihood of it having an adverse effect on him is far greater? The ability to perceive three-dimensional visual perspective when projected onto a two-dimensional surface, by no means a simple achievement given the lateness of its appearance in our civilization, is irrevocably ingrained in the child's perceptual habits at an early age, and yet the ability to distinguish acoustic parameters, or experience subtle nuances of timbre (supposing he knows what timbre, the sonic equivalent of colour, is) may never be among his perceptual skills."

"The farthest distance in every direction from which sounds may be heard. Incoming sounds from distant sources define the outer limits over which acoustic communication may normally occur, and thus help to define the perceived geographical relationships between communities"

A work by Bill Fontana. "Notre Dame has been described as the soul of Paris. As a result of the tragic fire in 2019, its bells have fallen silent. However, these bells were not damaged in the fire and are silently waiting and secretly "listening" to the sounds of Paris around Notre Dame. This is a continuous live streaming sound sculpture that makes audible the simple physical fact that these bells are secretly ringing all the time. I think of this secret ringing as being the heartbeat of Notre Dame. The sounds that the bells produce are created by their harmonic response to the ambient sounds of Paris that surround Notre Dame, as revealed by a live network of accelerometers mounted and live streaming from all ten of the bells. The physical fact that these bells are harmonically excited by the ambient sounds of Paris is a phenomenon that this artwork makes public in a way that will not only be beautiful to hear but will have a healing relevance to Notre Dame's fire, a healing relevance to the suspended sense of time created by the Corona Virus, the tragic war in the Ukraine and the ongoing environmental threat of climate change."

" At the turn of the millennium, improvised music from Japan became incredibly quiet. Clive Bell explains why previously noisy artists turned the volume down."

"What do you think we are not hearing? Can listening encourage us to challenge our assumptions, and change our behaviour and decision-making processes concerning our relations to non-human species? Can human opinions on invertebrates be shifted through listening? I have been developing a process for constructing synthesized "built" soundscapes of hidden sounds. Built Hidden Soundscape: Pipeline Road, Gamboa is a preliminary result from this research. I made the field recordings for this built soundscape while at the Digital Naturalism conference in Gamboa, Panama in August 2019. The video shows a scrolling image of a spectrogram. A spectrogram is a bioacoustic tool that shows how sounds sit together in a soundscape. The Y axis represents frequency (Hz) and the X axis represents time. This spectrogram, however, focuses on 'hidden sounds' - sounds that cannot be heard by humans without the use of technology; sounds that are easily heard by human ears are excluded from this synthesized, artificial rendering of a soundscape. The sound work consists of field recordings from Pipeline Road in Gamboa, bookended by the dynamic dawn and dusk soundscapes of Pipeline Road. This built soundscape includes ultrasonic sounds (above the range of human hearing, played back at lower frequency), substrate-borne vibrations, and otherwise very quiet sounds. "

"ATTA (Amplifying the Tropical Ants) is a multimedia research project on ant acoustics in the Brazilian Amazon producing results in bioacoustic anaylsis, sound works, and music composition. I first visited Manaus, Brazil as an artist-in-residence with Labverde in July 2017. On this trip I made preliminary recordings of ant species and their habitats and used these as the basis of several new music compositions. Since then, I have been collaborating with entomologists Erica Valle and Fabricio Baccaro at the Universidade Federal do Amazonas / INPA on a collaborative research project encompassing bioacoustics, field recording, behavioral ecology, taxonomy, music composition, and acoustic ecology. Ants are doing so much of the vital work maintaining tropical rainforest ecosystem functions: herbivory, seed dispersal, predation, decomposition, soil aeration - and their habitats are in turn crucial to global climate regulation. Can listening to ants generate empathy and encourage us to do our part in countering climate change? Can listening to insects remind us how little we know - and that we are not in charge of nature? Can it shift our perspective and encourage us to consider a biocentric viewpoint? "

"smallest functional unit was founded in 2020 by Ute Wassermann, Tony Buck, Mazen Kerbaj, Magda Mayas, and Racha Gharbieh with the aim of performing and publishing unconventional scores by international composers. The first published edition, under the title Graphème Vol.1 will be launch in October 2021."

"A marching machine is a percussion instrument designed to produce the sound of marching feet when played on a wooden or metal surface.[1] It is constructed from a number of short pieces of wooden dowel suspended by string netting within a wooden frame.[2]"

"Artist and composer Tom Phillips ponders musical notation, and the brief but glorious union of art and sound"

"How do you play a picture? Composers and artists from John Cage to Brian Eno have experimented with notation to create extraordinary visual scores that rival the best contemporary art. Here, Notations21's Theresa Sauer introduces a selection of her favourites. "

""I can hear how the bees are behaving - if they're agitated, if there are other bees trying to get in the hive, or if it's too crowded or too hot or too cold," said Aerial Gilbert, an avid beekeeper in Petaluma. What you want to hear, she said, is a calm steady buzz. That indicates that everything in the hive is going smoothly."

"In these works, Sung Tieu looks into alleged sonic attacks targeting the U.S. and Canadian embassy staff in Havana in 2016. This installation includes video, sound, texts, and architectural interventions that attempt to understand the incident, highlighting the impossibility of ever fully knowing what happened. Along these series of works, Sung Tieu also refers to other subjects related to the psychological dimension of warfare and acoustic weaponry, such as her research for the film No Gods, No Masters (2017) which focuses on Operation Wandering Soul, the U.S. military operation during the war in Vietnam in the 1960s"

"This curated collection is part of a broader research endeavor in which data, sonification and design converge to explore the potential of sound in complementing other modes of representation and broadening the publics of data. With visualization still being one of the prominent forms of data transformation, we believe that sound can both enrich the experience of data and build new publics."

An example of data sonified: "Did you ever wonder what the history of all life sounds like? Well this sonified data set gives you a sense of the sound of all the major extinctions since the beginning of life (well, about 550 million years). There is also a pseudo-tutorial on what kinds of steps you'll need to do to be able to make this sort of thing yourself, if you'd like to play with a little Python!"

"Kjetil Trædal Thorsen, founding partner and architect at Snøhetta, talks sound and space with reSITE at RESONATE. He emphasizes the importance of "transpositioning" in an increasingly specialized world to ensure architecture remains collaborative and interdisciplinary. Kjetil also encourages the use of all senses, especially sound, in his work."

"Elizabeth Diller, founding partner of Diller Scofidio + Renfro, speaks on the importance of sound in architecture and the evolving role of the architect in an increasingly multidisciplinary world. She contemplates how to design buildings that transcend time and withstand the continuous evolution of the activities and art forms that will exist within them."

"Hear from Meyer Sound and Foster + Partners on how they manipulate and shape spaces through invisible architecture. The creation of spaces that take people into environments that they've never experienced comes with the technological advancements in sound engineering."

"Viennese artist Bernhard Leitner talks about how he uses sound as a building material to create new worlds, and as a tool of design itself. He has worked for the New York Department of City Planning and researched how three-dimensional movements of sounds shape new architectural spaces, with physical-acoustic analyses of spaces."