Vibrations and how they get to your ears.
Noise for airports is a blog about culture, sound, music, and technology.
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Updated (sometimes) by Nick Seaver.
From the Tenement Museum comes this great audio exploration of the former Five Points area in Manhattan. (Actually, it’s a few years old, but new to me!)
You have five points to drag around the map and select from a variety of field recordings, folk songs, spoken word (interviews, sermons, etc.), and some music made specifically for the project. Once you’ve found sounds you like (like “steam through a manhole cover” or “seafood salesman”), you can adjust levels and panning and then save your mix for others to listen to!
Clicking directly on the dots brings up a little info pane so you can find out more about what you’re hearing. This is sort of a complementary project to the Ohio Is a Piano project. Instead of focusing on a data-centric correspondence (88 keys, 88 counties), Folk Music for the Five Points takes a cultural/historical look back. They justify the inclusion of new music by saying that the composer is taking the perspective of a “new immigrant” (although it seems just like a way to make the project more conventionally musical), and their interest is thematic: the daily experience of immigrants in a particular section of New York.
I wouldn’t want to judge one kind of approach superior to the other, but it is certainly interesting to see the different kinds of results that arise from the two approaches.
