Category: Media and technology

Patrick Feaster – Pictures of Sound

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

Tactile Transducers

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

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

Listen to Wikipedia

Listen to the sound of Wikipedia’s recent changes feed. Bells indicate additions and string plucks indicate subtractions. Pitch changes according to the size of the edit; the larger the edit, the deeper the note. Green circles show edits from unregistered contributors, and purple circles mark edits performed by automated bots. You may see announcements for…Continue Reading Listen to Wikipedia

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

Headphones – Sound without Space

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

Conet Project – Recordings of Shortwave Numbers Stations

The Shortwave radio spectrum has been used by the worlds intelligence agencies to transmit secret messages. These messages are transmitted by hundreds of Numbers Stations. Shortwave Numbers Stations are a perfect method of anonymous, one way communication. Spies located anywhere in the world can be communicated to by their masters via small, locally available, and…Continue Reading Conet Project – Recordings of Shortwave Numbers Stations

Happy Halloween – VOICES FROM THE DEAD – EVP

From BBC News magazine In 1969, a mysterious middle-aged Latvian doctor turned up in Gerrards Cross with a large collection of tape recordings. He had, he said, been conducting experiments in communication with the dead, and had established contact with Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini and many other deceased 20th Century statesmen. The recordings – 72,000 of…Continue Reading Happy Halloween – VOICES FROM THE DEAD – EVP

Acousmatic listening and other sound and politics.

In light of our reading on sound in public and private space, here are some links that might be called “Sound and Power”. http://soundstudiesblog.com/2014/10/20/the-acousmatic-era-of-surveillance/ “NSA dataveillance listens acousmatically because it hears the patterns of relationships that emerge from various combinations of data—e.g., which people talk and/or meet where and with what regularity. Instead of listening to…Continue Reading Acousmatic listening and other sound and politics.

The Knitted Radio – Ebru Kurbak

I ran across this piece in the fascinating exhibition HOW THINGS DON’T WORK in the Kellen Gallery at 2 west 13th street. Here’s information from the artist’s website The Knitted Radio is a project developed in collaboration with Irene Posch at Eyebeam Art + Technology Center in New York. It is part of an ongoing…Continue Reading The Knitted Radio – Ebru Kurbak

Arup Sound Lab

About Arup Founded in 1946 with an initial focus on structural engineering, Arup first came to the world’s attention with the structural design of the Sydney Opera House, followed by its work on the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Arup has since grown into a truly multidisciplinary organisation. Most recently, its work for the 2008 Olympics…Continue Reading Arup Sound Lab

Acoustic Mirrors

“A forerunner of radar, acoustic mirrors were built on the south and northeast coasts of England between about 1916 and the 1930s. The ‘listening ears’ were intended to provide early warning of incoming enemy aeroplanes and airships about to attack coastal towns. With the development of faster aircraft the sound mirrors became less useful, as…Continue Reading Acoustic Mirrors

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

99% Invisible – Sounds of the Artificial World

“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

Piezos and Soldering

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

#tweetscapes

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

Sound and the Weather – Sonification

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 – Handmade Electronic Music

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

Worshipping the glitch – Milan Knizak & Christian Marclay

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

A Recording Project Exploring the Physical Sounds of Cloud Computing

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

Vladan Radovanović – Voice From The Loudspeaker

глaс из динамика, or Glas iz zvučnika, or Voice From The Loudspeaker This is a wok created in 1975 by Serbian composer, visual artist and theoretician Vladan Radovanović (b. Belgrade, 1932). Voice From The Loudspeaker is a conceptual text about the recorded voice, the magnetic tape medium and the loudspeaker’s reproduction of the recording. In…Continue Reading Vladan Radovanović – Voice From The Loudspeaker

Language Removal Services

Language Removal Services is a pioneer in the arena of language removal services for language removal applications. Our laboratory is, we believe, the only one of its kind in the world. LRS facilities include our state of the art vocal observation chamber; a special storage facility for our archives, including the world-famous Raymond Chronic Static…Continue Reading Language Removal Services

William Burroughs, “The Silver Smoke of Dreams”

William Burroughs, “The Cut Up Method” The cut-up technique is an aleatory literary technique in which a text is cut up and rearranged to create a new text. Most commonly, cut-ups are used to offer a non-linear alternative to traditional reading and writing.[citation needed] The concept can be traced to at least the Dadaists of…Continue Reading William Burroughs, “The Silver Smoke of Dreams”

Blow Out – Brian DePalma. Recording and Listening. (2 vids)

John Travolta, Sound Recordist. From Blow Out by Brian DePalma Blow Out is a 1981 thriller film, written and directed by Brian De Palma. The film stars John Travolta as Jack Terry, a movie sound effects technician from Philadelphia who, while recording sounds for a low-budget horror film, serendipitously captures audio evidence of an assassination…Continue Reading Blow Out – Brian DePalma. Recording and Listening. (2 vids)

Forest (for a thousand years) – Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller

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

Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller – Alter Bahnhof Video Walk

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

Pamela Z – Geek Speak

The origins of Geekspeak lie in a 1995 artist residency Pamela Z participated in at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center. She became fascinated by the language and voices of some of the researchers she met there. At times it seemed as if practically no English was being spoken. info here: http://www.yale.edu/yalemus/325a/content/exercises/listening/PamelaZ_GeekSpeak.htm…Continue Reading Pamela Z – Geek Speak