Sound Research

"Composer Charles Amirkhanian, soundscape ecologist Bernie Krause, and film editor and sound designer Walter Murch consider the environmental implications and artistic possibilities of aural landscapes and ambient sounds."

Interface: Listening to music through your teeth. 12/13/11 Play-A-Grill is the combination of a digital music player and the mouth piece jewelry usually associated with Hip Hop and Rap music genres known as a grill. Grills are almost always made of precious metal, most notably gold or platinum. They are completely removable, and almost used as a retainer. This piece of jewelry presents a perfect opportunity to merge an arbitrary music fashion object and reintroduce it as the music player itself. Because the grill is worn over the teeth, sound can be transmitted using bone conduction hearing instead of outside speakers or headphones. Play-A-Grill is an iteration of a music fashion object of that becomes the music player itself.

Cities and Memory is a sound project that attempts to record both the present reality of a place, but also its imagined, alternative counterpart - remixing the world, one sound at at time. Every faithful field recording document here is accompanied by a reworking, a processing or an interpretation that imagines that place and time as somewhere else, somewhere new. The listener can choose to explore locations through their actual sounds, or explore interpretations of what those places could be - or to flip between the two different sound worlds at leisure.

A descriptions of master field recordist Chris Watson's field recording techniquess.

"Headphones are the norm. The new addiction replacing smoking, headphones frame the head and the perception of most urbanites today in some form or other. Whether commuting with an iPod, exercising to the radio, talking on a hands-free cellphone… or actually listening to music, headphones create a mobile and continually changing architecture that follows the listener, wrapping them in a private bubble. As the world rapidly interfaces, overlaps and confronts the boundaries of Private and Public through technologies and legislation, headphones become a quiet and invisible site of investigation. The audio tracks in this collection attempt to define a body of work that is fundamentally connected to the phenomenon of headphone listening. Some work was made specifically for headphones such as Bernhard Leitner or Janet Cardiff, other work was not originally composed for headphones, but when played over headphones a unique experience of the work is created-sometimes against the original intention of the artist or at least as a surprising by-product. While the most common thread between the works is the unique spatialisation of headphones, other attributes of headphone listening-such as intimacy and privacy-are also explored and included. "

"The ElectroAcoustic Resource Site (EARS) project has been established to provide resources for those wishing to conduct research in the area of electroacoustic music studies. EARS will take the form of a structured Internet portal supported by extensive bibliographical tools. To aid the greater understanding of the opportunities offered by these radical forms of sound organisation, as well as their cultural impact, the project will cite (or link directly to) texts, titles, abstracts, images, audio and audio-visual files, and other relevant formats. "

Something to look into: The purpose of the ESPeri.IRBud is to allow a regular human to associate an audible tone with a temperature from an infrared contactless thermometer.

"It has long been known that some plants can respond to sound. But why would a plant evolve the ability to hear? Now researchers are reporting that one reason may be to defend itself against predators."

"the human telephone was like an electromagnetic update to the oracle at Delphi: a lone female figure with access to distant voices, dancing slowly across a dance floor secretly wired from below, an interactive surface whose hidden technology extended up into her very clothing. "

"A tree's year rings are analysed for their strength, thickness and rate of growth. This data serves as basis for a generative process that outputs piano music. It is mapped to a scale which is again defined by the overall appearance of the wood (ranging from dark to light and from strong texture to light texture). The foundation for the music is certainly found in the defined ruleset of programming and hardware setup, but the data acquired from every tree interprets this ruleset very differently."

"The idea is to highlight the physical nature of 'cloud computing' and to remind people that whilst their phones might be sat silently in their pockets, somewhere out there, a huge hive of hard drives and fans is spinning around frantically; managing our digital identities."

"Chris Watson, who has worked on Attenborough's Frozen Planet and Life in the Undergrowth, shares a remarkable insight into sound recording, some exclusive clips - and his feelings about music in wildlife shows"

This a travel guide to our Sound World - listing places where what you hear is an important part of the experience. I'm very interested in suggestions for possible places with interesting sounds and other acoustic phenomena. Find places either via the soundmap, this list of all sites, via a search or click on the Tag Cloud."

"Ethan Rose's Hum responds specifically to the Jefferson Substation, an electrical substation that is located just outside the loop of downtown Chicago. The step down transformers at the Substation emit an audible 60 cycle hum. This rich harmonic drone permeates the surrounding city blocks. For this site-specific radio broadcast, installation, and performance, Rose assembled a small choir of vocalists who will be positioned at a near distance to the transformers. The choir hums the overtone series in harmony with the transformer's buzz."

Alec Wilkinson writes about Carl Haber, an experimental physicist who discovered a way to use the same ultra-sensitive detectors found in the CERN particle collider to resurrect previously unplayable recordings from the earliest days of recorded sound.

"Some of the toughest stuff in nature is spider silk - as strong, ounce for ounce, as nylon. And a silk web makes a great trap for prey, as well as a nice place for a spider to live. But scientists have learned that spiders can do something else quite extraordinary with their webs: They can "tune" them, like musical instruments."

"Music for a Changing Tide was written for the Mediate Art Group new media biennale: Soundwave. This event will take place at Ocean Beach on July 27th as part of this festival. More info here: me-di-ate.net/ For this event, the audience will download this piece of music and put it on their iPod or other portable listening device and gather at Ocean Beach, San Francisco. Evans will then give the cue for everyone to press play and participants will sit back and observe while listening. The music is written to trace the changing of water movement and changing of light in the evening as the tidal change is observed. Intermingled with the music is a series of field recordings - the roar of Ocean Beach from a distance, airplanes combined with discreet sounds of barnacles, mussels and other intertidal creatures shifting and clicking at low tide, and water bumping rocks around as the tide slowly arises. In all - a site-specific sound and music event designed to allow participants to feel a greater sense of place and awareness of the moment and of our ever-shifting landscape."

"Weather guitar is a robotic guitar player that responds to variations in weather conditions. The focus of this project is an attempt to draw parallels between the scientific inquiry of measuring and quantifying the natural elements, and the romantic notion of the weather acting as a source of artistic inspiration."

"Digital Sanctuaries, Manhattan is an urban soundwalk combining the original music of Electric Kulintang (Susie Ibarra and Roberto Rodriguez) with the visual art of Makoto Fujimura and interaction design by Shankari Murali. Built for both IOS and mobile web app, Digital Sanctuaries invites the public to alight on a virtual pilgrimage through the built environment of a cityscape, finding meditative spaces in unexpected places, marked by an ever-changing musical score. As the audience engages with the music in each place, they are encouraged to discover the hidden qualities of the world without while taking time to contemplate the world within."

"Central to Doug Aitken's "100 YRS" exhibition is a new "Sonic Fountain," in which water drips from 5 rods suspended from the ceiling, falling into a concrete crater dug out of the gallery floor. The flow of water itself is controlled so as to create specific rhythmic patterns that will morph, collapse and overlap in shifting combinations of speed and volume, lending the physical phenomenon the variable symphonic structure of song. The water itself appears milky white, as if imbued and chemically altered by its aural properties, a basic substance turned supernatural. The amplified sound of droplets conjures the arrhythmia of breathing, and along with the pool's primordial glow, the fountain creates its own sonic system of tracking time."