Two Postcommodity members, along with composer Guillermo Galindo, are partnering with members of a fast-gentrifying Santa Monica neighborhood to produce a sound-based artwork of contested histories….Continue Reading Experience the “Sonic Medicine” Treating a Santa Monica Community
Oliver Beer’s “Vessel Orchestra” includes 32 objects, ancient to modern, chosen for the sounds hidden within them….Continue Reading He Turned the Met Museum’s Collection Into an Orchestra
In her visual and audio work, Jennie C. Jones revels in the affective power of silence and lack, staging encounters with forgotten histories and extra-visual phenomena through the bodies of her viewers….Continue Reading Jennie C. Jones – Sonic and visual abstraction
In honor of May Day, Ultra-red release the PDF of our latest workbook for militant sound inquiry, “Five Protocols for Organized Listening” (5.8MB). The workbook compiles protocols for collective listening developed by multiple teams of investigators from 2009 to 2011 in cities across North America and Europe. “Five Protocols” is also accompanied by links to related sound objects on the School of Echoes Soundcloud page. Please feel free to download and distribute. We only ask that you send us feedback on your experiments with organized listening and militant sound investigation….Continue Reading Ultra-Red Five – Five Protocols for Listening
Hong-Kai Wang is an artist who works mainly with sound. Her practice includes processes involved in the production and performance of sound as well as their political and social contexts, and, not least, the organisation of listening. In several of her pieces she has employed collective processes, discussions and workshops….Continue Reading Hong-Kai Wang
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
An engaging sound collage presenting an unique historical documentation of Sound Art from the early 20th century to present day. The composition weaves through different sound works throughout the century with narratives and ideas from some of the prominent artists in the field. …Continue Reading The History of Sound Art (recording with timeline)
Circumstance was established in 2010 as a framework for the collaborations of Duncan Speakman, Sarah Anderson and Emilie Grenier. From 2010 – 2016 we made intimate in-ear stories, subtlemobs, pedestrian symphonies, science fiction theatre , music, and books that go beyond the page.” A Folded Path The performance consists of 30 individual GPS controlled speakers. Each…Continue Reading Circumstance – distributed sounds and subtlemobs
Minute of Listening at Hull Primary Schools Sound and Music in partnership with PRS for Music Foundation, have developed a special version of their Minute of Listening project for Hull (UK) Primary schools, following their core idea of interactively explore listening and music in educational processes. “We are delighted to announce a special Minute of…Continue Reading Education – Minute of Listening
Protest sounds recorded from the 8th floor of 2 west 13th street…Continue Reading New School Protest sound
“Activist Sound is one way to describe the sound pieces, performances, and installations I make from field recordings of protests, testimonies, and other pertinent sonic materials of social change. In my longer works, I’m a reporter who writes novels in sound. I listen to find out whether what we hear harbors the power to suspend…Continue Reading Activist Sound – Christopher DeLaurenti
An interesting accompaniment to the David Byrne TED talk and the Diana Deutsch Radio Lab episode “Suddenly Behaves so Strangely”…Continue Reading How the orchestra is arranged by the biology of the brain
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
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
Ready to hear some trippy stuff? Check out these audio illusions from Diana Deutsch (of Sometimes Behaves So Strangely fame). Explanations for each illusion are at the bottom the post. All the audio and explanations come from Diana Deutsch’s Audio Illusions site, where you can check out her CDs for more brain-bending tracks. And let…Continue Reading Musical Illusions
Voices of the Rainforest is a recorded soundscape of a day in the life of the Kaluli people of Bosavi, Papua New Guinea. As the day progresses, one hears birds, water, insects and other ambient voices of the rainforest interspersed with Kaluli songs and instrumental sounds of work, leisure and ritual. The album was recorded…Continue Reading Steven Feld – Voices of the Rainforest (sound anthropology)
Here’s a good example of the way that language can be manipulated to tweak intelligibility and meaning. All About Squid By Gregory Whitehead William S. Burroughs suggests that language often behaves like a virus as it passes from mouth to mouth, gathering microbes along the way: microbes provoking strange mutations that may express themselves through the most…Continue Reading So you want to talk about squid?
Listening — to loved ones, strangers, faraway places — is an act of generosity and a source of discovery. In this episode, TED speakers describe how we change when we listen deeply….Continue Reading The Act Of Listening – TED radio on NPR
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
“This song emulates a ride on the New York City Subway’s 2 Train through three boroughs: Brooklyn, Manhattan, and the Bronx. At any given time, the quantity and dynamics of the song’s instruments correspond to the median household income of that area. Read more about the composition and process of creating this song here: datadrivendj.com/tracks/subway…Continue Reading Two Trains – Sonification of Income Inequality on the NYC Subway
Soundweaving is a recent project by Hungarian design student Zsanett Szirmay that turns patterns used in traditional folk embroidery into music by translating them into laser-cut punch cards fed through a custom music box. The project was partially inspired by actual paper cards used in some weaving looms to easily reproduce patterns for various textiles….Continue Reading Soundweaving: Artist Converts Folk Embroidery Patterns into Paper Scores for Music Boxes
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
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
The sounds of our lives suck! How to make cities better by ending the blight of noiseBad sound is “as detrimental to quality of life as bad streetlights or poor sidewalks,” according to one expert. http://www.salon.com/2014/11/02/the_sounds_of_our_lives_suck_how_to_make_cities_better_by_ending_the_blight_of_noise/…Continue Reading Sound and Cities
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
Digital Empathy greets High Line visitors with a variety of messages. At some sites, computer-generated voices speak messages of concern, support, and love, intermingled with pragmatic information. In other sites, those same digitized voices recite poetry and sing love songs to park visitors. http://art.thehighline.org/project/julianneswartz/…Continue Reading Digital Empathy
A meditative film about our relationship with sound and the impact of noise on our lives. Soon silence will have passed into legend… –Jean Arp from the kickstarter project: ABOUT THE FILM In Pursuit of Silence is a meditative film about silence, our relationship with sound, and the impact of noise on our lives. In…Continue Reading Film – In Pursuit of Silence
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
John Cage’s art of noise. By Alex Ross The New Yorker, October 4, 2010 Issue…Continue Reading John Cage – Searching for Silence (The New Yorker)
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
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.
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
Stephen Vitiello’s site-specific sound work A Bell For Every Minute was installed in 2010 in the High Line’s 14th Street Passage, a semi-enclosed tunnel between West 13th and West 14th Streets. Vitiello’s subtle tribute to New York City is comprised of recordings of bells from throughout New York City, which range from the iconic ring…Continue Reading Stephen Vitiello – A Bell for Every Minute
An interactive site I stumbled upon that maps out noise complaints from 1920s NYC:…Continue Reading Historical Soundscape of NYC
I stumbled across this article that was, oddly enough, written by a friend of mine I have known since high school. Rob Henson is a talented musician and composer who lives in Seattle and works in the ever-evolving world of image and creative content licensing (stock photos, video, etc). I thought this was a nice…Continue Reading 5 Reasons Why Musicians Succeed in Business
Here are a few examples of extraordinary musical Instruments from Tibet, Central Africa and New Guinea…Continue Reading Instruments of the world (just a few)
This is a phenomenal incorporation of the body, routine, common actions into a performance. Like the blues this performance takes as its root the relationship between WORK and SONG, of course the ecstatic fervor that emerges is another story entirely and leads up to the final words: Oh sun, come out, rise over this land,…Continue Reading La Gatta Cenerentola – di Roberto De Simone + OOIOO
Janette Sadik-Khan, the former Commissioner of Transportation under Mayor Bloomburg, was instrumental in creating pedestrian plazas throughout the city. Besides becoming places where one might stop and rest or eat lunch, they have an impact on the movement of traffic — and therefore, NOISE. here’s how an article from New York Magazine (available online) describes…Continue Reading Janette Sadik-Khan – Honk, Honk, Aaah
