Soundwalkers

Half hour documentary from Raquel Castro about sound and listening featuring interviews with Christoh Cox, Janek Schaefer, Peter Cusack, Rafael Toral, Sabine Breitsameter and many others. I liked the story about a young mother who used sound to communicate with her downstair neighbour, an old lady she didn’t liked because the lady controlled her comings [...]

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Zimoun & Pe Lang present Untitled Sound Objects again

Swiss sound artists Zimoun and Pe Lang will present their installation “Untitled Sound Objects” today at club transmediale in Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt. The untitled sound objects are a series of installations that generate sound by vibrating physical material with computer controlled machines and robots. Both artists claim that they focus on the creation [...]

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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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Wet Sounds Festival

Tonight (19th July 2008 ) the Wet Sounds Festival closes its tour through various swimming pool locations in England with a final performance in London headlined by Nurse With Wound and Andrew Liles. “A listening gallery of sound art by artists around the world was played back through underwater speakers to a floating and diving [...]

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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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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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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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Listening to the Environment at higher Volume

“The microphone is an instrument which acts toward the ear as the microscope does to the eye. It will render evident to us sounds that are otherwise ablolutely inaudible. I have heard myself the tramp of a little fly across a box with a tread almost as loud as that of a horse across a [...]

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The Concept of „Sound Object“ (objet sonore) by Pierre Schaeffer

Pierre Schaeffer (1910 – 1995) is considered to be the founder of musique concrète. Trained as a radio engineer instead of a composer, he saw in the invention of radio, tape recorders and phonographs the potential for a new experience of sound, seperated from it’s source allowing sounds to have their own existence. He coined [...]

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Jean-Francois Augoyard and Henry Torgue – Sonic Experience, A Guide To Everyday Sounds

In a word: this book is very rewarding reading: loaded with indepth theory and surprising new concepts about the classification of sound phenomena, it took 10 years to translate this work into english. Nothing for someone new to philosophical considerations about music, sound and  noise, nevertheless the best summary in this area I know so [...]

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