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
In the often derelict but delicate works of Rolf Julius, subtle noise vibrations become palpable, physical things….Continue Reading Rolf Julius – Work That Is Audible to the Naked Eye
Bohyun Yoon is from Korea and currently living in Richmond Virginia. He is an assistant professor at Virginia Commonwealth University. Inspired by the idea of sound from clear glass, he choreographed avenues for this glass to become a sonic instrument. His residency at Harvestworks included the use different materials like multi channel audio, contact microphones and amplifiers. His recent projects include Glass Helmet (2004), Glass Tube (2012), and Glassorganism (2013). …Continue Reading Bohyun Yoon – Glass, Sound, Interaction
Our human mechanisms for hearing, are, like our tools for seeing, very subjective. It is easy to imagine that everyone sees like we do, hears like we do. At the very least, hearing AND seeing change over time, they are also extremely sensitive and easily damaged which leads to changes in the way we perceive…Continue Reading Hertz, Hearing, Frequency and Pitch
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
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
From Joan LaBarbara: One of my earliest pieces, “Hear What I Feel”, was a self-exploratory, sensory-deprivation experimental work, designed to help me discover new sounds, delve into psychological aspects, as well as communicate with the audience on a pre-verbal level of awareness. After spending an hour in isolation with my eyes taped shut and not…Continue Reading Joan LaBarbara – Voice is the Original Instrument
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
From Stephanie Lawless’ website Cricket, Tree, Crow is a quadraphonic sound piece in three movements that investigates the voices of the cricket, the crow, and the maple tree. All sonic material in the work is based on vocal mimicry of the sounds produced by members of the species themselves. The piece is driven by…Continue Reading Stephanie Loveless – Cricket, Tree, Crow
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
“Putting a spring back into your step could be as simple as listening to the sound of lighter footsteps, new research suggests. Scientists at University College London believe it is possible to ‘hear yourself happy’ by changing the noises that the body hears as it moves around. “…Continue Reading How hacking the sounds in your head could be the key to happiness
Using motorized swinging speakers, multichannel sound, and high intensity smoke and light projections, Sadja transforms this expansive industrial space into an architectural and alchemical sonic ecosystem. 8.1 Channel Sound Installation with motorized swinging speakers at the Fragmental Museum in Long Island City….Continue Reading Doron Sadja “I Am Immensely In Touch With My Emotions And Music Is Magic To Me”
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
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
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
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
Sound and Garments from Parsons Faculty Jeannine Han. A 2-year project involving the development of textile-based modules and interfaces for the control and synthesis of music during performance. A textile instrument provides a natural link between action and sound, enabling alternative compositions and improvisations impossible with traditional instruments….Continue Reading Textilen & The Electric Ribbon
(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.
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
The human voice is a flexible tool that can convey a great deal more than language. While this track, from 1930, employs the voice in a far more traditional way that the manipulations of someone like Henri Chopin, it is nonetheless an effective example of the way that the voice can undergo transformation. In this…Continue Reading Tommy Settlers and His Blues Moaner – ” Shaking Weed Blues “
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
“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
