Posted in noisy oddities, tagged sound art on July 19, 2008 | No Comments »
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 [...]
Posted in noisy oddities, tagged noise, sound on June 12, 2008 | No Comments »
Playing a metal door with tuning forks of different pitches, the sound was picked up by contact microphones…
Posted in noisy oddities, tagged pigeons, sound effect, whistles on June 8, 2008 | No Comments »
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 [...]
Posted in noisy oddities, tagged anechoic chamber, silence, sound on June 6, 2008 | No Comments »
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 [...]
Posted in noisy oddities, tagged noisy oddities, sound mirrors on May 28, 2008 | 1 Comment »
Before radar was invented to detect enemy airforces, acoustic mirrors were build around the coasts of Great Britain to provide an early warning system. The huge concrete constructions can be found in Denge and on the Dungeness peninsula among others, for the latter check the video. There has been other quite curious approaches in history [...]
Posted in noisy oddities, tagged field recording, touch radio, venice on May 23, 2008 | No Comments »
The Touch Radio series presents a recording of Enrico Coniglio made in the Venice lagoon on 29th april 2008 at 21:00 in a night-depot of boats of the public transport service at “Riva dei Schiavoni”, not far from San Marco square. One can hear the water lapping and the boats bumping in each other making [...]
Posted in noisy oddities, tagged noisy oddities, sea organ on May 22, 2008 | No Comments »
There is a small group of musical instruments that operate without human interaction, the aeolian harp or wind chimes are commonly known as such unintentional sound producers.The Sea organ based in Zadar, Croatia, is another example: a system of polyethylene tubes situated underneath white marble steps are “played” by the incoming waves of the sea shore [...]
Posted in noisy oddities, tagged music, noisy oddities, suitcase on May 20, 2008 | No Comments »
Jose Angel Olivares and Matthew Young had the idea of creating rhytmic patterns with roller luggage pulled across a specially manufactured surface as we encounter at airports for instance (picture me rollin’). “Tones are produced as the wheels of the roller luggage encounter different textures, and these tones will be arranged in a way to create [...]
Posted in noisy oddities, tagged noisy oddities on May 16, 2008 | No Comments »
Dutch mathematician and physicist Christiaan Huygens observed 1673 that two pendulums mounted on the same beam will come to swing in perfectly opposite directions, an observation he referred to as odd sympathy which in modern times is known as resonance. The tendency of two pendulums to synchronize, or asynchronize, is also refered to as the lock-in-effect. [...]
Posted in noisy oddities, tagged noisy oddities, melody roads, street on May 13, 2008 | 1 Comment »
A team from the Hokkaido Industrial Research Institute has built a number of “melody roads“, which use cars as tuning forks to play music as they travel. The concept works by using grooves, which are cut at very specific intervals in the road surface. Just as travelling over small speed bumps or road markings can emit [...]
I’m Andreas Bick. I compose and I work with sound. This is my acoustic notebook. You can find my thoughts about books and CDs that I like and some sound recordings, that I did on the way. Silent listening is about the fringes of music, the periphery where music turns into sheer sound - concrete, wild, sometimes stunningly beautiful.
Visit me at www.andreas-bick.de.
