http://createdigitalmusic.com/2014/10/nasa-posts-huge-library-space-sounds-youre-free-use/…Continue Reading OCT 22 2014 NASA Posts a Huge Library of Space Sounds, And You’re Free To Use Them
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
http://longplayer.org Longplayer is a one thousand year long musical composition. It began playing at midnight on the 31st of December 1999, and will continue to play without repetition until the last moment of 2999, at which point it will complete its cycle and begin again. Conceived and composed by Jem Finer, it was originally produced…Continue Reading Jem Finer – Long Player
Stephen Vitiello creates sound installations that often feature pristine recordings of natural environments and phenomena – the Amazon rain forest or flapping moth wings for example– sonically magnified to expose their internal detail and beauty. His installation work also focuses heavily on the use and implications of space as a compositional parameter. Vitiello has released…Continue Reading Stephen Vitiello – Documentary
When walking down Church Street in Tribeca, keep an eye out for a black door with a cryptic white sign that reads THE DREAM HOUSE. Although this is not your typical dream house with a 4-door garage, it guarantees to be a one-of-a-kind experience, with its completely absorbing, constantly fluctuating soundwaves accompanied by neon pink…Continue Reading Dream House – La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela
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, 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
http://davidddunn.com/~david/writings/terrnova.pdf Fascinating article on creating and recognizing relationships in soundscapes….Continue Reading Nature, Sound Art and The Sacred
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
Dawn Scarfe Listening Glasses Installation with glass sculptures This sculptural installation invites people to use acoustic glasses to discover musical tones in the sound of their environment. Listening Glasses are hollow spheres with a funnel on one side (inserted into the ear) and an opening on the other. Each glass is calibrated to a particular…Continue Reading Listening Devices
It’s unclear if this project still exists, but the idea is interesting, to make audible the twitter traffic in a specific geographic location. The country in question is Germany. from Heavylistening http://heavylistening.com: #tweetscapes converts all German tweets into sounds and images – live and in real-time. — #tweetscapes aims to add a sensual element…Continue Reading #tweetscapes
Our culture is cluttered with examples of quantitative and qualitative made visual. Flip through any New York Times or Wall Street Journal and you will find graphs, charts, and maps that visually explain anything from weather patterns to death tolls. We are in an age of mapping. While the history of mapping and visualization extends…Continue Reading Sound and the Weather – Sonification
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
We so often consider the places we visit by what there is to see. How about planning your next trip around what you’d like to HEAR?This site is a place to start. http://www.sonicwonders.org…Continue Reading Sound Tourism for Travellers
Musician Matt Parker recently recorded the sounds of a medium-sized data center at the City South Campus of Birmingham City University. Parker then took the sounds and remixed them into a new composition playing with all the whirring and beeping. “The idea is to highlight the physical nature of ‘cloud computing’ and to remind people…Continue Reading A Recording Project Exploring the Physical Sounds of Cloud Computing
http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2014/06/guided-by-voices.html “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. “…Continue Reading The first sound art installation?
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
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
Whispering in the Leaves(5:08) Chris Watson’s Whispering in the Leaves is an extraordinary sound installation, using recordings and natural history broadcast to transport us to the far-flung, dense rain forests of South and Central America. Throughout Kew Gardens’ Summer festival, the Palm House whisperingintheleaves.org was diffused with the dawn and dusk choruses of the myriad of…Continue Reading Chris Watson – Whispering in the Leaves
Live performance of HUM 7 8 9 performed by the audience as part of Make Music New York, June 21, 2012. Performed at the Consolidated Edison Farragut Substation DUMBO Brooklyn, NY. About: For the third year, participants will gather near the ConEd Farragut Substation in DUMBO to join in a large group hum-a-long. We will…Continue Reading John Hastings – Hum 789
A recording at Union Square – Free Tibet Rally. May 2011….Continue Reading Times Square Free Tibet Rally – John roach
Decades after the fact, French composer Luc Ferrari recalled that the first time he played “Presque Rien” for his colleagues at the Groupe de Recherches Musicales, their faces turned to stone. Such dismay is often the fate of any art that takes its medium to a wholly logical yet previously unacceptable conclusion, let alone art that changes the game. This 21-minute piece, which was first heard in 1970, did both, and the work of contemporary artists as disparate as Chris Watson and Vanessa Rossetto owe it a hefty debt….Continue Reading Luc Ferrari – Presque Rien N°1 ou Le Lever Du Jour Au Bord La Mer
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); 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
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
12min Jack Hitt visits Toby Lester, who has mapped all the ambient sounds in his world: the hum of the heater, the fan on the computer. (12 minutes) https://m.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/110/mapping?act=2#act-2…Continue Reading This American Life – episode110 – Mapping (mapping hearing)
The sound emanating from a traffic signal box in Brooklyn. The sound has been processd to remove all but the hum…Continue Reading John Roach – Electrical Hum
13th Street and 5th Avenue – Recorded by John Roach…Continue Reading 13th Street and 5th Avenue – Recorded by John Roach
As his career grew, David Byrne went from playing CBGB to Carnegie Hall. He asks: Does the venue make the music? From outdoor drumming to Wagnerian operas to arena rock, he explores how context has pushed musical innovation….Continue Reading How architecture helped music evolve – David Byrne
The BQEar is an enormous trumpet-like horn perched atop the fence of the outdoor sculpture venue The Art Lot in Red Hook, Brooklyn.The project was meant to be a listening device to transfigure the sound of the Brooklyn Queens Expressway (the BQE) johnroach.net/pages/2010_bqear.html (Source: http://johnroach.net/)…Continue Reading John Roach – the BQEar
This brief clip is from the film Touch the Sound, a documentary about the world renowned percussionist Evelyn Glennie who happens to be deaf . While the entire movie is beautiful, this particular snippet is a great example of the mingling of sounds in the city and the way that attention alters the way that…Continue Reading Film – Touch the Sound
“A Balloon for Linz” brings to light the acoustic response of specific locations in Linz. Together with the video, a series of exploratory walks were organized in the city of Linz. Participants were invited to pop balloons and listen to the acoustic architecture of the urban space. The project received an honorary mention at the…Continue Reading David Tidoni – A Balloon for Linz
It’s been said that many make sacrifices for their music, but, in the recording of 4 Rooms, Jacob Kirkegaard went above and beyond. Almost 20 years after the Chernobyl disaster, Kirkegaard traveled into the villages surrounding Chernobyl, places largely uninhabited and still teeming with radiation, an unheard and unseen but never forgotten result of Reactor 4’s fateful meltdown in April 1986….Continue Reading Jacob Kirkegaard – 4 rooms: Gymnasium
Soundbridge Köln/San Francisco» In 1987 the first satellite bridge in the history of radio was produced with two sound sculptures: Soundbridge Köln – San Francisco. The «orchestra» consisted of 18 sound sources in the city of Cologne and 18 in San Francisco. Simultaneous events in the two cities, parallel but completely independent of one another,…Continue Reading Bill Fontana – Satellite Soundbridge
A Walk Through The City (1981) for solo tape with poetry and reading by Norbert Ruebsaat Length: 16:05 A Walk through the City is an urban environmental composition based on Norbert Ruebsaat’s poem of the same name (see below). It takes the listener into a specific urban location – Vancouver B.C.’s Skid Row area –…Continue Reading Hildegard Westerkamp – A Walk Through The City (1981)
9.11.01 Scapes was composed to accompany a series of collaged images created by Jo-Anne Green the day New York’s World Trade Center was attacked. Green’s palette consisted of NASA images of earth and photographs of diatoms and ground Zero. Each Scape consists of multiple layers. Thorington used the layers’ titles, and the texts that accompanied the NASA images to weave her multilayered narrative for the Notes; and much as Green used found ‘pigments’, Thorington used found sounds to create the soundscore for the series. 9:11:01 Scapes was the winner of an Honorable Recognition, Prix Bohemia Radio Festival, Czechoslovakia, 2003; and the Winner, Aether Festival, KUNM-FM, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 2003….Continue Reading Helen Thorington — 9-11 scapes
info here: http://www.allmusic.com/album/108-walking-through-tokyo-at-the-turn-of-the-century-mw0000983708…Continue Reading Sarah Peebles – Walking through Tokyo at the Turn of the Century
info about Sounds from Dangerous Places here: http://sounds-from-dangerous-places.org/ info about the oilfield recordings here: http://sounds-from-dangerous-places.org/caspian_uk.html Field Recording as Sonic Journalism http://sounds-from-dangerous-places.org/sonic_journalism.html ‘Sonic Journalism’ is the aural equivalent of photojournalism. It describes the practice where field recordings play a major role in the discussion and documentation of places, issues and events and where listening to sounds…Continue Reading Peter Cusack – Oil Field Soundwalk
A vividly colorful audio snapshot from one of the world’s most exotic locations, India. Trains, bells, peacocks, and ocean waves mix with the incomparable sounds of humanity: quiet conversations, laughing children, salesmen, gamblers and hustlers. From bustling metropolis to rural village, with a variety of feelings and moods, “Indian Soundscapes” takes you to the Asian…Continue Reading India Soundscapes – Loudspeaker
