There’s a remarkable pool of resources out there that can expand your sonic tool kit. There are web-based electronic instruments like drum machines, downloadable audio manipulation tools, and plug ins you can add your the audio editor of your choice (like Audition). Click on the tabs below for a few options! Warnings and side effects…Continue Reading Free and cheap sound tools!
There is no quieter place to record audio on campus (or in most places you might have access to) than the voice over booth at Arnhold Hall. This is an acoustically isolated space that is an excellent location to record vocals, foley, an instrument, a conversation, etc….Continue Reading Booking the voiceover booth at 55 west 13
A post about the textural qualities of sound…Continue Reading Sound and Texture
Sometimes you don’t have access to a quality recording device and you want to capture something quickly. Most of us own a recorder that we have with us at all times — a smart phone. …Continue Reading A recorder in your pocket – using your phone to record sound
The voice is often viewed as a primal connection to who we are. What does it mean when suddenly is is separated from our bodies and “performed” by a device? Being Siri Voice as Ecology: Voice Donation, Materiality, Identity Voice and Deepfakes Voice Cloning…Continue Reading AI, Siri and Deep fakes
Here are a few links to pieces that focus on ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response). ASMR is a neurological condition in which people feel physical sensation (tingling) through other sensory stimuli like sounds. The rise of popularity of ASMR videos in social media likely doesn’t signal a surge in cases of folks who experience this…Continue Reading ASMR as Art?
Here’s an article in the New Yorker about the challenges of vehicles that hardly make any sounds. “E.V.s are virtually silent, so acoustic designers are creating alerts for them. A symphony—or a cacophony—of car noise could be coming to city streets.” LINK New Yorker ↗…Continue Reading What Should a Nine-Thousand-Pound Electric Vehicle Sound Like?
For three days in New York City an immersive multi-room sensory experience designed by the studio Dave & Gabe for Sonos in partnership with Google Assistant invited visitors to delve into interactive installations of sound, music, and light to explain the properties and experience of sound….Continue Reading Sonos – The Brilliant Sound Environment
A locative audio work that explores the idea of surveillance within the context of the museum.
What do states keep secret? What secrets do other states attempt to uncover with their intelligence services? How is this information passed on, compiled, evaluated? When can state secrets become valuable currency? The value of every piece of information changes at the very moment it is shared with someone else: when does it become worthless?…Continue Reading Top Secret by Rimini Protokoll
Kevin Beasley engages with the legacy of the American South through an installation that centers on a cotton gin motor from Maplesville, Alabama. In operation from 1940 to 1973, the motor powered the gins that separated cotton seeds from fiber. Here, the New York-based artist uses it to generate sound as if it were a musical instrument, creating space for visual and aural contemplation. …Continue Reading Kevin Beasley – A view of a landscape
Onyx Ashanti is a Berlin-based artist who fuses electronic, free-jazz, and science fiction, creating live performances with instruments he invented. …Continue Reading Onyx Ashanti
Sound artists have experimented with everyday noises for centuries. Now this music is making a comeback….Continue Reading Making music from noise – Soundhunters | DW Documentary
THE BOUNCY BEEPS of Pac-Man. The percussive build-up in Legend of Zelda. The effusive gibberish of The Sims. The sounds in videogames tell us to speed up, start over, and of course, to keep playing. But how does one set of beeps so effectively tell you you’ve gained power, while another indicates your character has died? And how, exactly, does someone create the sound of the Dark Knight punching the Joker in the face? The answer: Genius sound design….Continue Reading The Beeping, Gargling History of Gaming’s Most Iconic Sounds
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
Nice collection of projects that Incorporate sound and mechanical elements.Use the slider on the right side to scroll through years worth of posts. https://llllllll.co/t/mechanical-sound-sculpture/803/43…Continue Reading Thread about Mechanical Sound Sculpture
John Oswald’s piece de resistance. Twenty minutes of some of the most insane editing, cross-fading, beat matching, cultural name dropping and sampling. No other work even comes close to the intensity of Plexure. John Oswald proves he is a virtuoso of Pro Tools, over a thousand different artists edited, spliced and mixed together….Continue Reading John Oswald – Plunderphonic mashups
Long before sampling, hip hop, needle drops and mashups John Cage had created his incredibly dense magnetic tape cut-up masterwork Williams Mix (1952). …Continue Reading John Cage – Williams Mix
Here’s an example of a more cut and paste style of editing by the experimental outfit P16.D4…Continue Reading P16.D4 – Okay She Said With Her Customary Total Lack Of Consideration
80’s TV Broadcast of the David Letterman Show where “Jimmy” demonstrates many of the objects, some of which he built himself, used to create the sound effects of many of Disney’s early animation classics….Continue Reading Foley with Disney master on Letterman show
Walter Murch is one of the most accomplished sound designers and editors in the business and a prolific thinker and theorist when it comes to the relationship between sound and image. Here is a nice description and example of the roles of sound editors and mixers in film….Continue Reading Sound editing vs. Sound mixing (Walter Murch)
Resolution in an audio file is similar in some ways to thinking about resolution in a digital image. In Photoshop if you have more pixels in an image it is rendered more accurately: In audio, the waveforms and the fidelity of the sound are also impacted by the amount of digital information in the file. There…Continue Reading Audition – What is Sampling Rate and Bit Depth?
Really nice commercial that shows how the sound effects for this animation were created. …Continue Reading Foley – f701 Sennheiser headphone commercial
Close your eyes and think about the last time you were at a gig. How did it sound? The band is rocking out on stage, your friends are talking in a group over to your left, a busboy says “excuse me” as he slides past your right shoulder, and the din of the crowd is…Continue Reading Sound All Around: The Continuing Evolution of 3D Audio
Award Winning Short Film about Foley Artists, Directed by Daniel Jewel…Continue Reading The Secret World of Foley
The dial tone, that curious electronic sound of latent communication, is the subject of two ongoing telephonic sound art pieces by Aura Satz. The first piece is currently showing at the Hayward Gallery’s Mirrorcity exihibition, which features work by London-based artists who are influenced by sci-fi, new speculative philosophies, and the internet age. …Continue Reading Dial Tone-Inspired Sound Art – Aura Satz
For those of us who have trouble staying in tune when we sing, Deutsch has some exciting news. The problem might not be your ears, but your language. She tells us about tone languages, such as Mandarin and Vietnamese, which rely on pitch to convey the meaning of a word. Turns out speakers of tone languages are exponentially more inclined to have absolute (AKA ‘perfect’) pitch. And, nope, English isn’t one of them. …Continue Reading Behaves So Strangely
Luke McKernan, lead curator of news and moving image, wrote in the January 12 announcement: “Archival consensus internationally is that we have approximately 15 years in which to save our sound collections by digitising them before they become unreadable and are effectively lost.” The recordings date back to the 1880s, including everything from the voices of…Continue Reading British Library Says 6.5 Million Sounds Are in Jeopardy
The first trademark for a sound in the United States was issued in 1978 to NBC for their chimes. MGM has a sound trademark for their roaring lion, as does 20th Century Fox for their trumpet fanfare. Harley Davidson tried to trademark the sound of their motorcycles, but after years of litigation, they finally withdrew their application. Right now…Continue Reading 99% Invisible -Episode 148: The Sizzle
Ok besides the incredibly campy delivery in this demonstration, it is a great example of the power of stereo imaging and headphone listening….Continue Reading Virtual haircut
Lawrence Barker has finished his audiovisual autobiography, The Field Recordist. This film is a personal reflection of my own passion for audio field recording over the past 45 years. All film audio is from recorded narrative and original captured field recordings and does not contain fabricated or synthesized audio, or non-field recorded music. Any layered audio tracks will be individually recognised, such…Continue Reading The Field Recordist – Film
The history of field recording is central to the development of electronic music, with artists – from Eno through Scanner to Burial – drawing on its theories and strategies to create distinctive soundworlds. Lawrence English – boss of the long-running Room40 imprint, and the man behind this year’s exceptional Wilderness of Mirrors – presents this beginner’s guide to…Continue Reading A Beginner’s Guide To…Field Recording
Writer Frank Swain has been able to hear Wi-Fi signals for the past week, and no, it’s not “the result of a sudden mutation or years of transcendental meditation,” he says. Swain wears a special hearing device that gives him the ability to translate wireless frequencies into sounds. Alongside sound artist Daniel Jones, Swain created…Continue Reading This Man Can Hear Wi-Fi
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
Brian Eno is known as many things: a recording artist, a music producer, and a visual artist to name a few. He is acknowledged for coining the term “ambient music” which harkens back in many ways to Erik Satie’s idea of music that would complement situations in everyday life that he called Furniture Music. And…Continue Reading Furniture Music – Brian Eno
Another great resource related to sonification: This video is derived from a slideshow that was presented by Patrick Feaster at the 2011 ARSC Conference: “Pictures of Sound: One Thousand Years of Educed Audio: 980-1980” is a book/CD set produced by Patrick Feasterhttp://www.dust-digital.com/feaster/…Continue Reading Patrick Feaster – Pictures of Sound
Also known as Surface Transducers and other things… https://www.sparkfun.com/products/10975 “Surface transducers give you the awesome power to turn almost any surface into a speaker. They’re essentially just a speaker except instead of a cone, the coil is attached to a pad that conducts the vibration into whatever you press it against. Hook it up to…Continue Reading Tactile Transducers
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
Brian Eno once said that “repetition is a form of change,” but Basinski’s tape loops physically revise that and bring the idea back as “repetition is change.” More at http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/11/10/looped…Continue Reading William Basinski – Cascade – repetition is change
