Sound Research

Contact: A Journal for Contemporary Music (1971-1990)

"Atmosphere of Sound: Sonic Art in Times of Climate Disruption" is a multi-year research project culminating in a large-scale exhibition of sound-based art. UCLA Art | Sci Center proposes to explore the relationship between sound as a post-object art form, and our shifting relationship to the world of things as necessitated by climate change.

Bureau gallery's archive devoted to sound works by artists.

"During the Occupy Wall Street protests, Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste was hit with a high-frequency sound beam from a long-range acoustic device (LRAD). The sensation is singular: a pain that rips through your ears and into your head. It's "the feeling of irreparable damage being done to your hearing," as the artist writes in "Siren Mode," an essay on the use (and legal misrepresentation) of sonic weapons. "

"Sound has no center. Unlike vision, sound wraps around you, comes and goes, is fleeting. In the online exhibition SOUND MACHINES, seven artists explore the strange world of sound through new technologies. Their works cross optical and aural domains, creating new interfaces between the realms of sound, technology, and art."

convert an image into sound

"SonicPhoto is an audio program to convert from pictures to sound. Use your existing photo collection or draw your own in Photoshop (or any other paint editor) and with a click of a button, watch SonicPhoto create the sound before your eyes. Inspired by the existing PhotoSounder program from Michel Rouzic, SonicPhoto loses the internal paint editor and sound importer, but gains automatic and convincing stereo, and a unique harmony filter to help create distinct and professional effects ranging from sparkling synths and rippling arpeggios, to roaring bass and metallic drones. "

"VOSIS is a synthesizer that creates complex wavetables by scanning and filtering greyscale pixel data from images, videos, or live camera input. The audification and filtering of pixel luminance correlates visual shape to sound timbre. Scan rate in terms of octave, interval, and scale allows for use as a musical instrument. Thus, VOSIS is a tool for image sonification, sound design, and visual music composition."

Artist China Blue and auditory neuroscientist Dr. Seth S. Horowitz have just finished their third session at NASA's Vertical Gun at the Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, recording hyper-velocity impacts in the giant near-vacuum chamber that lets planetary geologists simulate and understand the forces that have shaped terrains on earth and throughout the solar system.

"This site is the online presence of the project ( nula.cc ), which consists of a series of filecasts, each an assemblage of sounds, images, and words, and made available for download, sharing, commentary, and further manipulation."

"Bureau for Listening is an attempt to foster, engage with, and care for listening…We do not wish to set up limits or boundaries for the possibilities and potentials of listening, and likewise do we not wish to set them up for this bureau. We will as a bureau evolve as we entangle ourself with listening through practice, research, projects, failure, friendship etc… We hope to get lost. At our core, for the moment, is a chance to experiment and research - what can listening be (?) and what can we as a bureau for listening do for this phenomena?

"Plants are the most abundant life form visible to us. Despite their ubiquitous presence, most of the times we still fail to notice them. The botanists James Wandersee and Elizabeth Schussler call it "plant blindness, an extremely prevalent condition characterized by the inability to see or notice the plants in one's immediate environment. Mathew Hall, author of Plants as Persons, argues that our neglect towards plant life is partly influenced by the drive in Western thought towards separation, exclusion, and hierarchy. Our bias towards animals, or zoochauvinism-in particular toward large mammals with forward facing eyes-has been shown to have negative implications on funding towards plant conservation. Plants are as threatened as mammals according to Kew's global assessment of the status of plant life known to science. Curriculum reforms to increase plant representation and engaging students in active learning and contact with local flora are some of the suggested measures to counter our plant blindness."

Infrasonica is a digital platform of non-Western cultures. We record, analyze and debate the eeriness of sound and its auras, linked to the world with the audible, the hidden and the sensitive. Infrasonic waves operate at a frequency that is undetectable by human ears even though they are often generated by massive ecological phenomena, such as the movement of tectonic plates or the deep currents of the ocean. Infrasonica aims to be a catalyst for those vibrations. The platform includes archives of experimental sound and visual artists, as well as theoretical musings on contemporary critical thought. By relying on a borderless network of collaborators, Infrasonica blends essays, conversations and speculative works that encourage critical curatorial and research projects.

"M.A.P // A.M.P Music Library aims to create a repository of activist music, which will serve as an archive to amplify the reach of music as an expression and a tool of social and political activism. This library is an effort to bring together such voices from the region that may have gone unheard. In the process, we hope to create a rich and diverse range of activist music that will span all genres and generations of music and poetry."

This is an article about wind, dust, and their relations to life. It is a meditation on the liveliness of wind and airborne particles as they are experienced on the ground; in cultural texts including film, poetry, and oral history; and in the medium of satellite imagery. In dialogue with recent work in the social sciences and humanities that demonstrates how air and dust from the "South" are treated as foreign "intrusions" into Europe, this article proposes a focus on wind's animacies to further probe and nuance these claims. Situated primarily in Italy and the Balkans, two places where the author has familial relations and, in the case of the Balkans, deep ancestral history, the animacies of wind are examined specifically in relation to Scirocco and Jugo, two interrelated southerly winds commonly blowing in spring and autumn that sometimes bring "Saharan dust" to Europe. As a framework and scaffold, the article draws from Mel Chen's notion of "differential animacies": the ways animacy is bestowed on humans, animals, elements, and objects in hierarchies that are both revealing and "leaky." Exploring the animacies of Scirocco and Jugo shows how the wind acts as a force of de/humanization, as agency leaking across borders of life and nonlife, and as shape-shifting coauthor of collective memory.