En la Noche, todos los Ruidos son más fuertes

“During the night all the sounds are louder…” great video from diluvio.
(via the music of sound)

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The Eigenharp – the World’s most expressive Electronic Musical Instrument?

British innovation company “Eigenlab” introduces the world’s most expressive electronic musical instrument in their view, the “Eigenharp Alpha“. In fact, on first sight it looks like a realy versatile and complex Midi-Controller which can produce its own sounds and also can play the whole palette of digital sounds via Apples Audio Units plugIn format. But [...]

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Björk interviews Arvo Pärt

Already from 1997, this interview features the odd encounter of pop fairy Björk and Estonian composer Arvo Pärt. Not much of Pärt’s spirituality and unique compositional style is revealed in this little talk. More insight provides this exerpt from the documentary “24 Preludes for a Fugue”, Arvo Pärt talks about his [...]

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Venice Vaporetti

To get to the Art Biennale of Venice the way to go is usually by a waterbus, the so called vaporetto. The vaporetto station at Biennale is particularly noisy as one section of this sound recording mix can bear witness. The swimming stations are connected to the waterfront with metal bridges that swing up and [...]

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Sound Works in the Movies of Gus Van Sant

I saw Gus Van Sant’s movie “Paranoid Park” on TV recently. Van Sant is well known for his controversial cinematic endeavours between mainstream success like “Good Will Hunting” and arthouse cinema as in his “death trilogy” comprising “Gerry”, “Elephant” and “Last Days”. What ever one might think about his film work, from a sound perspective [...]

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Carsten Nicolai Interview on Gestalten TV

Carsten Nicolai aka Alva Noto talks about his work and a new book called “grid index” in an interview on Gestalten TV. The grids he presents in his publication remind me partly of the Penrose tiling and particularly the islamic ornaments of 15th century buildings such as the Darb-i-Imam shrine in Iran that included mathematical [...]

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Carbon Nanotube Loudspeakers: is this the Beginning of the End of the conventional Loudspeaker as we know it?

There is a fetish for each musical genre: rock has the guitar, DJ culture the turntable and sound artists the loudspeaker, if they create installations. Only few sound artists have sound generating devices that do not need a loudspeaker at some stage to fill the space with sound. Therefore speakers are overly present at sound [...]

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The Microphone is one of the most important biological Sensors…

In a post on the Wired science blog Brandom Keim writes about efforts of biologists to monitor habitats with arrays of microphones spread through the ecosystem in order to analyze the balance of species and their relationships. Bioacousticians already study the sound of individual animals but research in a more holistic manner is rarely conducted. [...]

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War Music

Beethoven’s Ode to Joy is probably the most misused musical tune ever. It was Hitler’s birthday song as well as the official hymn of the European Union. The artists duo Allora & Calzadilla let the tune be played by a pianist standing in a hole cut in the middle of a grand piano. The last [...]

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Small Room, Big Reverb – Big Room, No Reverb…

At Berlin’s tuned city festival it was possible to visit two acoustically manipulated rooms at TU Berlin: the reverb room (in german “Hallraum”) and the anechoic chamber. The contradiction here is that the smaller room has a very long reverb time of up to 8 sec. due to the surface of the walls and the [...]

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