According to the sound bath practitioner Sara Auster: A Sound Bath is a deeply-immersive, full-body listening experience that intentionally uses sound to invite gentle yet powerful therapeutic and restorative processes to nurture your mind and body. Sound Bath by Guadalupe Maravilla Here is a LINK to Maravilla’s project at Creative Time. Sound File of Maravilla’s…Continue Reading What is a Sound bath?
Today, the role of sound in science extends beyond the range of audible frequencies: Ultrasonic and other silent acoustic waves have made their way into researchers’ repertoire, helping them push the boundaries of conventional medicine and research.
In examples from four Stanford labs, scientists are investigating the full spectrum, harnessing the nuances of noise and the power of acoustics to generate inventive, if not unexpected, technologies that show just how potent the combination of sound and science can be….Continue Reading Scientific innovations harness noise and acoustics for healing
Through Totemic Sculptures and Sound Art, Guadalupe Maravilla Explores the Therapeutic Power of Indigenous Ritual. Maravilla works across painting, sculpture, and sound-based performances all veiled with autobiography, whether informed by the Mayan architecture and stone totems that surrounded him as a child or his cancer diagnosis as a young adult. His pieces are predominately therapeutic and rooted in Indigenous ritual and mythology,…Continue Reading Planeta Abuelx – Guadalupe Maravilla
Onyx Ashanti is a Berlin-based artist who fuses electronic, free-jazz, and science fiction, creating live performances with instruments he invented. …Continue Reading Onyx Ashanti
“Red Bird” (1977) is a 45-minute piece of musique concrète in four movements. Made for the most part of bird sounds, body sounds, and selected mouthed words, it weaves an intricate network of symbols. Completed in 1977, it was made with traditional electro-acoustic techniques. …Continue Reading Trevor Wishart – Red Bird: A Political Prisoner’s Dream
Anna Mlasowsky is a German-born glass artist who works across many media including video, installation, and performance. As the description below for the project “Resonance” attests, her work with sound emerges from her own challenges with hearing perception. …Continue Reading Anna Mlasowsky – Glass and Sound
Humans come into contact with sound all the time. Our first tactile listening experience is in the womb, feeling our mother’s heartbeat. This kind of physicality continues into our everyday: We feel our own hearts beating, we hear the sound of our footsteps. By its very nature, direct contact with music through its natural vibrations introduces us to an experience we’ve been missing, one that is crucial to our proper understanding of it….Continue Reading Feeling Music – artists exploring the physical impact of sound
The ground is in motion. GROUND acts as a LOOKING GLASS, as an AMPLIFIER for what we normally can´t perceive – tectonic plates are continously shifting … the permutations of landscapes constitute an infinite process of becoming… geosphere is a complex system that interferes with biosphere but also with anthroposphere, that part of the environment, that is made and modified by humans.
GROUND is moved by immense mechanical forces. The motion can be felt, heard and seen. Rough sounds are mechanically produced through friction between the concrete elements … visitors might experience the loss of their visual reference points, it becomes unclear what is still and what isn´t… there is an afterglow of a moving ground in the visitors physical memory after leaving the installation. …Continue Reading Anke Eckardt’s GROUND
Audible Spaces presents three sound installations that encourage participants to explore the subtleties of listening. Tristan Perich, Zarouhie Abdalian, and [The User] have each created immersive environments using seemingly uniform sounds that dissolve into tonal, tactile, and temporal variations as participants engage with them….Continue Reading Audible Spaces: Exhibition explores physicality of sound
A 40-metre wall with a 1.5-metre gap at each end is built to bisect the gallery. Hidden
inside the wall are a series of microphones connected to a PA system. The entrance side of the gallery is empty. On the other side of the gallery, coming out from the bisecting wall a baseball bat is attached to a steel chain. The audience is invited to strike the wall. Their action is amplified at 120db….Continue Reading Marco Fusinato – Constellations
Maryanne Amacher was an experimental sound artist who composed music and created site-specific sound installations. Early in her career she played music on multiple tape machines and mixed them live. She was interested in the experience and perception of sounds in particular spaces….Continue Reading Maryanne Amacher: Sound, Body, Space
Close your eyes and think about the last time you were at a gig. How did it sound? The band is rocking out on stage, your friends are talking in a group over to your left, a busboy says “excuse me” as he slides past your right shoulder, and the din of the crowd is…Continue Reading Sound All Around: The Continuing Evolution of 3D Audio
Tony Oursler’s Imponderable (2015–16) offers an alternative depiction of modernism that reveals the intersection of technological advancements and occult phenomena over the last two centuries. Presented in a “5-D” cinematic environment utilizing a contemporary form of Pepper’s ghost—a 19th-century phantasmagoric device—and a range of sensory effects (scents, vibrations, etc.), Imponderable is an immersive feature-length film…Continue Reading Tony Oursler: Imponderable
Peter Middleton’s and James Spinney’s Notes on Blindness is a dramatic account of English theologian John Hull’s loss of sight. Here is a fascinating use of sound! …Continue Reading A Deeply Intimate Movie About Going Blind
Artist Christine Sun Kim was born deaf, and she was taught to believe that sound wasn’t a part of her life, that it was a hearing person’s thing. Through her art, she discovered similarities between American Sign Language and music, and she realized that sound doesn’t have to be known solely through the ears —…Continue Reading Christine Sun Kim
The video opens with a cute baby lying in his mother’s arms. They are sitting in a doctor’s office, about to activate a cochlear implant, a device that will help the child hear. The doctor turns on the implant, the baby’s mother says his name… and he smiles so wide his pacifier falls out of…Continue Reading Stop Sharing Those Feel-Good Cochlear Implant Videos
Illustrator Ben Katchor’s sonic dining comic…Continue Reading The Eustachian Restaurant
For those of us who have trouble staying in tune when we sing, Deutsch has some exciting news. The problem might not be your ears, but your language. She tells us about tone languages, such as Mandarin and Vietnamese, which rely on pitch to convey the meaning of a word. Turns out speakers of tone languages are exponentially more inclined to have absolute (AKA ‘perfect’) pitch. And, nope, English isn’t one of them. …Continue Reading Behaves So Strangely
Ready to hear some trippy stuff? Check out these audio illusions from Diana Deutsch (of Sometimes Behaves So Strangely fame). Explanations for each illusion are at the bottom the post. All the audio and explanations come from Diana Deutsch’s Audio Illusions site, where you can check out her CDs for more brain-bending tracks. And let…Continue Reading Musical Illusions
Tremulously I stand in the subways, absorbed into the terrible reverberations of exploding energy. Fearful, I touch the forest of steel girders loud with the thunder of oncoming trains that shoot past me like projectiles. InertI stand, riveted in my place. My limbs, paralyzed, refuse to obey the will insistent on haste to board the train while the lightning steed…Continue Reading Helen Keller – From My Later Life
Have you ever got a song stuck in your head that you just can’t seem to shake? That catchy piece of music on a recurrent loop in your brain, also known as an earworm, may seem torturous but pales in comparison to actual sound torture employed for military purposes. Sound torture is a type of…Continue Reading Torture Methods With Sound: How Pure Noise Can Be Used To Break You Psychologically
Technician examines one of the high frequency horns in the Reverberant Acoustic Test Facility at NASA Glenn Research Center’s Plum Brook Station in Sandusky, Ohio. How loud is 166 decibels? It’s about as loud as the thrust of 20 jet engines or a rock concert with 36,000 speakers. It’s also the level of noise some…Continue Reading NASA – Reverberant Acoustic Test Facility
Ok besides the incredibly campy delivery in this demonstration, it is a great example of the power of stereo imaging and headphone listening….Continue Reading Virtual haircut
On a typical day, Jennifer Bottom makes her way around London with her guide dog in tow. Sometimes, “I just wander about, ask people and get directions,” she says. “But if you’re not comfortable with that or you don’t have a lot of free time, it can be quite frustrating and scary.” Enter Cities Unlocked, a…Continue Reading Cities Unlocked, Sound-Based System for Guiding Blind People Through Cities
from Everyday Listening: Korinsky is a Berlin-based art collective using technologies and the knowledge about human hearing processes to create sound installations that play with the contrast of visual and acoustic impressions. The thrilling and quite intimidating architecture of the cathedral church is the central space of the soundinstallation „Volum“ at the Berliner Dom. The…Continue Reading Korinsky – Volum in the Berliner Dom
Sergei Tcherepnin created a work for a single listener that involves a sort of sonic massage. from the New York Times “the main attraction — which was booked in 15-minute private appointments — was the “massage,” performed in a back room behind makeshift curtains. It took a few minutes for me to experience the sensations…Continue Reading Sergei Tcherepnin’s Music for One – Massage Performance
Also known as Surface Transducers and other things… https://www.sparkfun.com/products/10975 “Surface transducers give you the awesome power to turn almost any surface into a speaker. They’re essentially just a speaker except instead of a cone, the coil is attached to a pad that conducts the vibration into whatever you press it against. Hook it up to…Continue Reading Tactile Transducers
Science has been messing with light like a middle-school bully since forever: shoving it all together to make a laser beam, bending it to make invisibility cloaks, giving it wedgies until it stops altogether. Maybe it’s time to pick on something else. Might we suggest sound? It doesn’t seem as sexy as light, but by…Continue Reading 5 Bizarre Ways You Won’t Believe Sound Screws With Your Body
Sway is a space where sound and physical form meet. The environment reflects the palpable experience of listening to music, in which many small parts work together to create a larger whole. When visitors become immersed in the mass of translucent reeds that form the geometry of the room, the sound composition reacts at the…Continue Reading Sway – Caitlin Morris
Pressure sequence is an exploration of movement, a question of presence, a reconnaissance of body language. Pressure Sequence started out as a question: Dancing is body language at its purest. But can you transform, translate this language? …Continue Reading Pressure Sequence – Dance and Sound – Stijn Demeulenaere
Tunaeble Touch provides an alternative configuration to what the majority of us experience as the material world. To that end, it employs the sense of touch, a sense that we use for verification especially when we doubt our vision. The sense of touch is often taken as affirmatory and undeceiving, as it grounds and comforts…Continue Reading Ebru Kurbak – Tunable Touch
I ran across this piece in the fascinating exhibition HOW THINGS DON’T WORK in the Kellen Gallery at 2 west 13th street. Here’s information from the artist’s website The Knitted Radio is a project developed in collaboration with Irene Posch at Eyebeam Art + Technology Center in New York. It is part of an ongoing…Continue Reading The Knitted Radio – Ebru Kurbak
(It’s not really the earwax.) http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/03/voice-sounds-different-weird-recordings_n_5928492.html?ncid=fcbklnkushpmg00000063…Continue Reading Why Your Voice Sounds Weird…to you.
I stumbled across this article that was, oddly enough, written by a friend of mine I have known since high school. Rob Henson is a talented musician and composer who lives in Seattle and works in the ever-evolving world of image and creative content licensing (stock photos, video, etc). I thought this was a nice…Continue Reading 5 Reasons Why Musicians Succeed in Business
A joint is the locale where bones articulate a tension. Crackers are compulsive about the release of that tension. A crack is incontinent. A cracker too. As the sound of the cracks echo, some wince, others feel relief. A crack is a body nonsequitur, a crack is a bone edit, a crack is a broken…Continue Reading Christof Migone
Chris Downey explains it like this, “Beethoven continued to write music, even some of his best music, after he lost his hearing…What’s more preposterous, composing music you can’t hear, or designing architecture you can’t see?” Chris Downey had been an architect for 20 years before he lost his sight. It would be understandable to think…Continue Reading 99% Invisible – Sound and Feel
“This 1940s old as dirt med school classic video describes how humans hear sound and how the human ear works. The video covers the anatomy and physiology of the ear and discusses the outer ear, the middle ear and the inner ear. Other topics include the eardrum (tympanic membrane), hammer (malleus), anvil (incus), stirrup (stapes),…Continue Reading Human Ear Anatomy and Physiology: How an Ear Works
