Noise for Airports 

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Nov 30th

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Nov 26th

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Someone Call the Wambulance

For more than half a century we’ve seen incredible advances in sound technology but very little if any advance in the quality of music. In this case the paradigm shift may not be a shift but a dead stop. Is it that people just don’t want to hear anything new? Or is it that composers and musicians have simply swallowed the pomo line that nothing else new can be done, which ironically is really just...

Nov 25th

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Nov 24th

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Nov 22nd

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Nov 20th

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Nov 19th

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Nov 19th

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This audio clip is from Hear the Bill, a project...

Nov 18th

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Machines to Piss Them Off

This weekend, I was at the New England Conservatory to see a performance of George Antheil’s Ballet Mécanique. The piece, originally written in 1924, called for a siren, several electric bells, two airplane propellers, a set of xylophones, a pair of live pianists, some bass drums, and sixteen player pianos. Syncing the pianos proved impossible at the time, so eventually the piece was...

Nov 18th

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Nick Seaver: Rihanna Study #2 This is another of...

Nov 18th

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Nov 17th

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Nov 17th

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Nov 16th

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Nov 16th

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Lady Lux: Buckle My Shoe from Baby Jamz: Nursery...

Nov 16th

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Watch

I know that classical music isn’t usually the focus of this blog, but this video is too fun to not post. Conductor (and according to Google, motivational speaker) Itay Talgam describes the different kinds of relationships between conductors and orchestras, with a set of fantastic videos of various composers. You’ve got a free 20 minutes, right? (via Resources for studying sound...

Nov 15th

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Machines to Enlarge the Ears

I collected this set of photos to my hard drive a while ago from somewhere online, but didn’t want to post them because I wasn’t really sure what they were. I’m now pretty sure they are varieties of sound locators, used during WWI and WWII to detect incoming enemy planes, like this French setup from 1911 (found in an issue of Popular Mechanics): They are amazing machines, and...

Nov 14th

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Nov 14th

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Nov 13th

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Nov 13th

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Nov 12th

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Nov 12th

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Nov 11th

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A Healthy Complexity

This quotation comes from the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard, in an article about biological complexity: When Dr. Ary Goldberger looks at an EKG, he doesn’t just see the signal of a beating heart, he also sees a musical score, with its diversions and sudden shifts in tempo. Or at least that’s what he’d like to see. Because, according to Goldberger, an EKG that...

Nov 11th

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John Kannenberg: Terry Riley’s In C (in four...

Nov 10th

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Mechanical Fidelity

This post is the first of many to come that will be little snippets of thesis-related thought. I’m focusing on a series of objects, people, and practices from the long and weird history of player pianos, and these blurbs are what come out. They’re in no particular order, and they might not make sense individually (although I hope they do). Comments on any aspect are welcomed! ...

Nov 10th

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Mousescapes

At Dustin Curtis’s site, a fun, short article about the ambient sound design at Disney World. He describes how he wrote some software for “manufacturing emotion” with the thousands of new speakers in the park. The system he built can slowly change the style of the music across a distance without the visitor noticing. As a person walks from Tomorrowland to Fantasyland, for example, each of...

Nov 10th

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Data Frenzy at Sanders Theatre

Last night, I had the pleasure of being at the North American premiere of Japanese noise/data artist Ryoji Ikeda’s datamatics [ver. 2.0]. The “performance” was really more of a film: the audience watched a large, high-resolution projection of data, while listening to Ikeda’s signature electronically-produced sounds. (To complicate things a bit, the web page for datamatics...

Nov 9th

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Nov 9th

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Nov 9th

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Nov 8th

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Watch

“Without Records” is an installation by Japanese noise/turntable/multi-talented artist Otomo Yoshihide, put together for the Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media. It consists of about a hundred modified record players distributed around the space, all playing without any records on them. This results in a variety of noise sounds emanating from the players which change as visitors...

Nov 8th

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Watch

This digital sculpture by Daniel Franke is a visual representation of Ryoji Ikeda’s “One Minute.” Pretty. (via Synthtopia)

Nov 7th

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Nov 7th

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Nov 6th

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Watch

This video of a group of Swedes, oxenlike, pulling a large phonograph cone/plow through the countryside is very lovely. It reminds me of this bit of Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Primal Sound” quoted in Friedrich Kittler’s Gramophone , Film, Typewriter (stay with me here): The coronal suture of the skull has—let us assume—a certain similarity to the close wavy line which the needle...

Nov 5th

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Nov 4th

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Nov 4th

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Nov 3rd

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Nov 2nd

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Nov 2nd

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Nov 1st