Erasing Audio with Christoph Korn

On a symposium about experimental radio art last weekend, I found the conceptual work of german artist Christoph Korn quite interesting in the context of this blog. Since three years he deals with automated audio erasing processes. He presented one piece that will be broadcasted later this year on german radiostation HR3 and is actually [...]

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More Deep Listening?

In a brilliant essay in The Atlantic Nicholas Carr wrote about the effects of screen-reading on our brain and the changes to our media consumption through web-based technologies. Carr received a lot of approving feedback on his article, many admitted having problems to read deeply, to focus the concentration „ necessary to wrestle any text [...]

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Metal Door Tones

Playing a metal door with tuning forks of different pitches, the sound was picked up by contact microphones…

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Chinese Pigeon Whistles

In China there is an old tradition to attach little light whistles to pigeon’s tail-feathers that produce a pleasant sound during flight. They have simpler forms like pan-flutes and more sophisticated ones with a body of ornamental gourd-shells, separated in two compartments producing a deeper “male” tone and a higher “female” tone at once. The most [...]

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Arnaud Jacobs’ Echolocation

In Berlin’s “Großer Wasserspeicher“, a huge, old water reservoir turned into a place for sound installations due to it’s long reverb and distinctive echos, Arnaud Jacobs placed several rotating and low frequency speakers to wash the labyrinthine walls with a subtle atmosphere of dripping-like sounds and interfering textures of electronic tones. However, the key feature of [...]

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The Quietest and Biggest Anechoic Chambers of the World

If you are into superlatives, here are two dealing with anechoic chambers. The acoustic anechoic chamber has an absorbing surface and is shielded from the outer world in order to investigate sound waves with all reflections being removed (more recently there are radio frequency anechoic chambers as well). The experience visiting such an anechoic chamber [...]

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Acoustic Impulses by Jorinde Voigt

The drawings of Jorinde Voigt resemble complex musical scores for unheard rhythms, that many critics compare with the graphical notation systems develloped by composers like Stockhausen or Cage. Her works translate structures and patterns found in such diverse things like top-100-charts songs or kissing interaction into dense rhythmic textures with many layers of repetition and [...]

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Mexico Cityscape

Octavio Paz, grown up in an outlying neighborhood of Mexico City, wrote in one of his poems:
Between what I see and what I say 
Between what I say and what I keep silent 
Between what I keep silent and what I dream 
Between what I dream and what I forget: 
Poetry. 
One can easily replace poetry with sound or noise thinking [...]

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Playing the Building

David Byrne’s “Playing the Building is deceptive in its simplicity. Sitting in the middle of a vast 1909 municipal ferry terminal in Lower Manhattan is the most basic church organ—a little wooden one that looks well worn. Visitors are invited to take center stage and tinker with the organ’s black and white keys, which in turn [...]

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