Vibrations and how they get to your ears.
Noise for airports is a blog about culture, sound, music, and technology.
You can filter the posts to see just things I wrote or made.
Updated (sometimes) by Nick Seaver.
Acousmatic listening is when you listen to a sound without being able to see its source. It became much more prevalent with the advent of sound recording devices (although hearing a noise in the woods is also an acousmatic kind of listening).
Acousmatic music deals with these sounds specifically, imputing a special quality to the sound whose source is obscured, although all recorded music is, to a certain degree, acousmatic.
For the first day of my summer sound class, I put together a quick and dirty collage of sounds we might encounter of the course of the course. These sounds are all at different depths of recording—some are songs released on major labels, some are field recordings, and at any moment, there are likely a few layers of mediation between you and any individual sound. These different kinds of acousmatic sounds (although one could argue that if you see the speaker they come out of, they are not entirely acousmatic) acted as an introduction and teaser for the students.
I had my students fill out a “listening worksheet” while listening to this, to try and write down what they heard. It was interesting to see the kinds of categories they identified: “a bird,” “techno music,” “T-Pain,” “record noise.”
It’s not a particularly good collage, but in retrospect it seems that I managed to cover a lot of what we would end up discussing in it. (It also contains a large chunk of the sound collage I put together about a year ago to introduce myself to my new classmates.)
