Data Garden recently finished a Kickstarter for there new revolutionary product Midi Sprout! An awesome new device that generates synthesized sounds from the biorhythms of our plants (and even your own body!) Check out their first music video completely controlled by the impulses of living plants. …Continue Reading Data Garden : Bio-feedback Art
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. Inert I stand, riveted in my place. My limbs, paralyzed, refuse to obey the will insistent on haste to board…Continue Reading Helen Keller
The soundscape, in depth: http://www.theverge.com/2014/8/28/6071399/scientists-are-recording-the-sound-of-the-whole-planet…Continue Reading Scientific approach to the soundscape with visual tools
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
The Daxophone was created by the guitarist Has Reichel. Here’s a Wikipedia entry for The Daxophone. “The daxophone, invented by Hans Reichel, is an experimental musical instrument of the friction idiophones category. It consists of a thin wooden blade fixed in a wooden block (often attached to a tripod), which holds one or more contact…Continue Reading Instrument – The Daxophone
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
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
“Without all the beeps and chimes, without sonic feedback, all of your modern conveniences would be very hard to use. If a device and its sounds are designed correctly, it creates a special “theater of the mind” that users completely buy into. Electronic things are made to feel mechanical. It’s the feeling of movement, texture…Continue Reading 99% Invisible – Sounds of the Artificial World
A piezoelectric disc can be used to either generate sound by running electric current through it can, or when contacting a surface, translate the vibrations of that surface into sound. Piezoelectricity describes the naturally occurring electric charge found in certain geologic materials. This property was first discovered in crystals in 1880 by Pierre Currie, who…Continue Reading Piezos and Soldering
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
Nicolas Collins is a very prolific artist and beyond his many accomplishments which you can get a taste of in this Wikipedia entry: Nicolas Collins was “a pioneer in the use of microcomputers in live performance, and has made extensive use of ‘home-made’ electronic circuitry, radio, found sound material, and transformed musical instruments.”[3] He has…Continue Reading Nicolas Collins – Handmade Electronic Music
Data glitching appears to have become a mainstream tool with plenty of online solutions, hacks and plug ins to turn your home movies into big hot data mess. But as long as there has been media there has been media corruption and media manipulation. As far as sound is concerned, here are two artists that…Continue Reading Worshipping the glitch – Milan Knizak & Christian Marclay
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
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
The idea of “sculpting” sound is a critical aspect Henry’s “approach” to composition. In 1981, Henry himself said, “The origin of this music is also found in the interest in ‘plastifying’ music, of rendering it plastic like sculpture.” …Continue Reading Pierre Henry – Variations for a door and a sigh (1963)
I tried to stay absolutely still for as long as possible, to see if I could hear anything at all. I listened and listened. I held my breath and listened again. I had a queer feeling that the whole wood was listening with me, the trees and the bushes, the little animals hiding in the…Continue Reading Roald Dahl
Sound is made of waves that travel out (or propagate) from their source until they dissipate, bounce off a surface or are absorbed into a surface or substance. …Continue Reading Absorption and Reflection
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
The Great Stalacpipe Organ is an electrically actuated lithophone located in Luray Caverns, Virginia, USA. It is operated by a custom console that produces the tapping of ancient stalactites of varying sizes with solenoid-actuated rubber mallets in order to produce tones. The instrument’s name was derived from the resemblance of the selected thirty-seven naturally formed…Continue Reading Stalactite Organ
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?
From the New York Times online It has long been known that some plants can respond to sound. But why would a plant evolve the ability to hear? Now researchers are reporting that one reason may be to defend itself against predators. To see whether predator noises would affect plants, two University of Missouri researchers…Continue Reading Noisy Predators Put Plants on Alert, Study Finds
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’ 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
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
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
The Intonarumori were a family musical instruments invented in 1913 by italian futurist painter and musical composer Luigi Russolo. They were acoustic noise generators that permitted to create and control in dynamic and pitch several different types of noise. …Continue Reading Luigi Russolo – Intonarumori
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
