Category: Site + place + environment

Susan Hiller – Witness 2000

Witness 2000. Each speaker in the installation Witness 2000 transmits a voice telling a story. A wide variety of languages represent testimonies from all over the world. The witnesses describe the experience of an encounter with UFOs or creatures from other spheres. A range of similarities emerges in the descriptions and in the type of…Continue Reading Susan Hiller – Witness 2000

David Tudor – Rainforest IV

Here’s an example of tactile or surface transducers in action. David Tudor (1973) — Rainforest IV: collective performance The fourth version (1973) is the result of a collaborative work environment, mixing in space sounds live suspended sculptures and found objects, and transformed by an audio system reverberations. Here’s another version: From the Getty Research Institute:…Continue Reading David Tudor – Rainforest IV

Pierre Sauvageot’s Harmonic Fields

Sauvageot describes his creation as “a symphonic march for 1,000 aeolian instruments and moving audience”. It is not only a striking piece of land art, but a carefully constructed piece of music, with an integral balance of theme and structure. “It’s important that it is not just a circuit of weird noises,” Sauvageot says. “The…Continue Reading Pierre Sauvageot’s Harmonic Fields

Alvin Lucier – I am Sitting in a Room (1981)

The first recording of I am sitting in a room was made at the Electronic Music Studio at Brandeis University in 1969. This recording, from October 29 and 31, 1980, was created in the living room of Lucier’s home in Middletown, Connecticut. It consists of thirty-two generations of the composer’s speech and was made expressly for…Continue Reading Alvin Lucier – I am Sitting in a Room (1981)

In The Garden of Sonic Delights – videos

You Are the Sweet Spot by Stephen Vitiello & Bob Bielecki Listening Is as Listening Does by Suzanne Thorpe We Fall Like Light by Laurie Anderson & Bob Bielecki Catenary by Eli Keszler Wild Energy by Annea Lockwood & Bob Bielecki Sunken Gardens by Betsey Biggs Diacousticon by Stephan Moore The [Music] Room by Francisco…Continue Reading In The Garden of Sonic Delights – videos

Max Neuhaus – Times Square

From Gothamist: Visit The Eerie Circa-1970s Sound Installation In Times Square The late Max Neuhaus, a percussionist known for creating site-specific sound sculptures, created one of his best known pieces in Times Square in 1977, a sound installation that filters up through the subway grates on Broadway. According to Dia Art Foundation, the installation originally…Continue Reading Max Neuhaus – Times Square

Pandemonium – Janet Cardiff and George Burres Miller

A site specific sound installation at Pennsylvania’s Eastern State Penitentiary. The project draws from the locations complicated past and stories drawn from that history. from Janet Cardiff and George Burres Miller’s website: Tip tap tip tap. Is that the sound of dripping or is it someone in a cell tapping a code on the wall?…Continue Reading Pandemonium – Janet Cardiff and George Burres Miller

Digital Empathy

Digital Empathy greets High Line visitors with a variety of messages. At some sites, computer-generated voices speak messages of concern, support, and love, intermingled with pragmatic information. In other sites, those same digitized voices recite poetry and sing love songs to park visitors. http://art.thehighline.org/project/julianneswartz/…Continue Reading Digital Empathy

Headphones – Sound without Space

Headphones: Sound Without Space Curated by Charles Stankievech Architectural Association Independent Radio: aair.fm Headphones: Sound Without Space stems from the research consolidated in  “From Stethoscopes to Headphones: An Acoustic Spatialization of Subjectivity”  in Leonardo Music Journal (MIT Press). Vol. 17. 2007. Download article here. Click here to download an archive of the broadcast in mp3…Continue Reading Headphones – Sound without Space

Stephen Vitiello – A Bell for Every Minute

Stephen Vitiello’s site-specific sound work A Bell For Every Minute was installed in 2010 in the High Line’s 14th Street Passage, a semi-enclosed tunnel between West 13th and West 14th Streets. Vitiello’s subtle tribute to New York City is comprised of recordings of bells from throughout New York City, which range from the iconic ring…Continue Reading Stephen Vitiello – A Bell for Every Minute

Arup Sound Lab

About Arup Founded in 1946 with an initial focus on structural engineering, Arup first came to the world’s attention with the structural design of the Sydney Opera House, followed by its work on the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Arup has since grown into a truly multidisciplinary organisation. Most recently, its work for the 2008 Olympics…Continue Reading Arup Sound Lab

Hailuoto Sound Choir

One of my favorite discoveries of the past couple of years, a project that brings people together to connect vocally to the sounds in the small and remote island of Hailuoto in northern Finland. “The Hailuoto Sound Choir recreates the sounds of the island with vocal tools and learns a program of pieces composed or…Continue Reading Hailuoto Sound Choir

Janette Sadik-Khan – Honk, Honk, Aaah

Janette Sadik-Khan, the former Commissioner of Transportation under Mayor Bloomburg, was instrumental in creating pedestrian plazas throughout the city. Besides becoming places where one might stop and rest or eat lunch, they have an impact on the movement of traffic — and therefore, NOISE. here’s how an article from New York Magazine (available online) describes…Continue Reading Janette Sadik-Khan – Honk, Honk, Aaah

Acoustic Mirrors

“A forerunner of radar, acoustic mirrors were built on the south and northeast coasts of England between about 1916 and the 1930s. The ‘listening ears’ were intended to provide early warning of incoming enemy aeroplanes and airships about to attack coastal towns. With the development of faster aircraft the sound mirrors became less useful, as…Continue Reading Acoustic Mirrors

Living Symphonies

Living Symphonies is a musical composition that grows in the same way as a forest ecosystem. Portraying the thriving activity of the forest’s wildlife, plants and atmospheric conditions, it creates an ever-changing symphony heard amongst the forest itself. Composed and realised by James Bulley and Daniel Jones, Living Symphonies will be taking place across four…Continue Reading Living Symphonies

R. Murray Schafer – Listen

Listen by ONFB, National Film Board of Canada “A soundscape is any collection of sounds, almost like a painting is a collection of visual attractions,” says composer R. Murray Schafer. “When you listen carefully to the soundscape it becomes quite miraculous.” David New’s portrait of the renowned composer becomes a lesson unto itself, gracing viewers…Continue Reading R. Murray Schafer – Listen

Stillspotting – Arvo Pärt and Snøhetta – To a Great City

http://stillspotting.guggenheim.org https://snohetta.com/project/31-stillspotting-guggenheim While the vitality and stimulation of the urban environment can be pleasant, those living in or visiting densely populated areas, such as New York, can have wildly different experiences. The ever-present cacophony of traffic, construction, and commerce; the struggle for mental and physical space; and the anxious need for constant communication in person…Continue Reading Stillspotting – Arvo Pärt and Snøhetta – To a Great City

Reverberation and Echo – Echo Bridge, Massachusetts

Built in the 1870s, this forty-metre wide arch spans the Charles River. There are steps down to a specially built platform so visitors can test out the sound effect. In September 1948 Arthur Taber Jones wrote to the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, detailing a small study. ‘A handlcapp [sic] is returned in…Continue Reading Reverberation and Echo – Echo Bridge, Massachusetts

Cities and Memory – Mapping the real and imagined sounds of the world

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…Continue Reading Cities and Memory – Mapping the real and imagined sounds of the world

Bird Language

‘Bird Language’ or Kus Dili, is a centuries-old whistled dialect used to communicate across hillsides in the village of Kuskoy, Turkey. Will it survive the digital age? WSJ’s Joe Parkinson reports. Here’s a report from the Atlantic online: For centuries, residents of Kuşköy have communicated over rural Turkey’s vast distances with kuş dili, which literally…Continue Reading Bird Language

Liminal – The Organ of Corti

Organ of Corti is an experimental instrument that recycles noise from the environment. It does not make any sound of its own, but rather it attempts to draw our attention to the sounds already present by framing them in a new way. Named after the organ of hearing in the inner ear, it uses the acoustic technology of sonic crystals to accentuate and attenuate frequencies within the broad range of sound present in road traffic or falling water. By recycling surplus sounds from our environment, we hope to challenge expectations of what might constitute a piece of music by adding nothing to the existing soundscape but rather offering new ways of listening to what is already there. This instrument is a device that, for us, rematerializes our experience of sound, inviting us to “listen to ourselves listen”….Continue Reading Liminal – The Organ of Corti

Stephen Vitiello – Sounds Building In The Fading Light

Recorded during a 5 month period on the 91st floor of The World Trade Center. Inexpensive contact microphones were fixed to the windows and routed into a mixing board, tweaked by equalization and a Sherman Filter Bank. Additional experiments were done at night with an amplified photocell placed into the eye of a telescope. http://www.stephenvitiello.com/…Continue Reading Stephen Vitiello – Sounds Building In The Fading Light

Forest (for a thousand years) – Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller

Forest (for a thousand years); 2012; Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller This is a 6 minute excerpt from a 28 minute audio installation created for dOCUMENTA (13). http://www.cardiffmiller.com “A remarkable thing about Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s utterly captivating sound installation is how it blurs distinctions between site and art. You enter a…Continue Reading Forest (for a thousand years) – Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller

Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller – Alter Bahnhof Video Walk

Alter Bahnhof Video Walk; 2012; Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller “Here is an attempt to document our 2nd piece made for dOCUMENTA (13). Viewers are given an ipod and headphones and asked to follow the prerecorded video through the old train station in Kassel. The overlapping realities lead to a strange, perceptive confusion in…Continue Reading Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller – Alter Bahnhof Video Walk