Tag: sound as matter

Steel-Fonics – Ricardo Iammuri Robinson

The STEEL-FONICS attempts to shed light on a hidden contribution to Pittsburgh’s industrial past. In this culture, African Americans are typecast dancing, singing or marching against a backdrop of poverty, crime or packed arenas in order to be recognized.  This installation employs the power of stereotype and reimagines a creative collective of black industrial steel workers called The STEEL-FONICS.  The African American contribution to the enormous expansion of the American steel industry has been all but invisible.  This exhibition is a new kind of labor strike against historical omission….Continue Reading Steel-Fonics – Ricardo Iammuri Robinson

Anna Mlasowsky – Glass and Sound

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

Feeling Music – artists exploring the physical impact of 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

Anke Eckardt’s GROUND

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: Exhibition explores physicality of sound

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

Bohyun Yoon – Glass, Sound, Interaction

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

Christoph Cox – Dematerialization

Very nice meditative lecture on the idea of the ephemeral in art by Christoph Cox. There is a strong sonic emphasis here, but also on other forces like wind, fire, electromagnetic energy, etc. He begins with an intro but the actual performative lecture begins around 8:11. The names of all of the artists and writers that he uses in the lecture are included at the end….Continue Reading Christoph Cox – Dematerialization

Julian Treasure: Why architects need to use their ears

Because of poor acoustics, students in classrooms miss 50 percent of what their teachers say and patients in hospitals have trouble sleeping because they continually feel stressed. Julian Treasure sounds a call to action for designers to pay attention to the “invisible architecture” of sound. This video is a good accompaniment to many other posts…Continue Reading Julian Treasure: Why architects need to use their ears

NASA – Reverberant Acoustic Test Facility

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

Extracting audio from visual information

Algorithm recovers speech from the vibrations of a potato-chip bag filmed through soundproof glass. Researchers at MIT, Microsoft, and Adobe have developed an algorithm that can reconstruct an audio signal by analyzing minute vibrations of objects depicted in video. In one set of experiments, they were able to recover intelligible speech from the vibrations of…Continue Reading Extracting audio from visual information

Scientists Use Sound Waves To Levitate And Manipulate Matter

A team of researchers in Switzerland have developed a way of levitating and transporting small objects using nothing but sound. Using ultrasonic waves that is, sound waves whose frequencies are too high for humans to hear, scientists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich have made water droplets, instant coffee crystals, styrofoam flakes,…Continue Reading Scientists Use Sound Waves To Levitate And Manipulate Matter

The Singing Comet

Rosetta’s Plasma Consortium (RPC) has uncovered a mysterious ‘song’ that Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko is singing into space. RPC principal investigator Karl-Heinz Glaßmeier, head of Space Physics and Space Sensorics at the Technische Universität Braunschweig, Germany, tells us more. RPC consists of five instruments on the Rosetta orbiter that provide a wide variety of complementary information about…Continue Reading The Singing Comet

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)

Ebru Kurbak – Tunable Touch

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

Listening Devices

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

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

Anechoic – By Show Studio

Anechoic is a ‘collections story’ that uses sound instead of visuals to interpret the essence of key garments from the Autumn/Winter 2006 collections by leading fashion brands. Part of a series of projects devoted to exploring ‘The Sound of Clothes’, these interactives and fashion films explore sound ‘generated’ by the garments themselves. http://showstudio.com/project/the_sound_of_clothes_anechoic/fashion_films    …Continue Reading Anechoic – By Show Studio

David Tidoni – A Balloon for Linz

“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

Annea Lockwood – Glass Music

“The Glass Concert” given periodically between 1968 and 1973 (76 times, to be exact), Annea Lockwood’s 1973 LP The Glass World is the composer’s most recognized work. The original performances took place in the dark, with most of the sounds being produced offstage and amplified into the concert space. On-stage antics included “curtains of fine glass tubing; trees of bottles inverted in a spiral pattern; a mobile of large panes of wired glass, surrounded by mirrors.” …Continue Reading Annea Lockwood – Glass Music

Jacob Kirkegaard – 4 rooms: Gymnasium

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

Toshiya Tsunoda – Bottle at park

The most important thing for my field work is the possibility of describing the experience of landscape,” he reports. “I want to know how to fix the experience of landscape. It’s a different method to using photography to fix it. We can see the outline of objects clearly in photographs. But when recording, things are not so clear and it is difficult to distinguish what vibrations travel in the place. It’s like a moving sculpture….Continue Reading Toshiya Tsunoda – Bottle at park