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.
This is a nice and arty short video about R. Murray Schafer and his views on the soundscape. At the end, there is a very nice touch when Schafer holds up a sign that says “Listen.” and the audio fades out so you can listen to your own environmental sounds. (The effect is changed a bit if you’re wearing noise-canceling headphones like I was.)
I (obviously?) disagree with his contention in the video that recorded sounds are not “real,” although I think I understand the sentiment behind it. Sounds played back from a speaker are certainly different from those sounds as captured by a microphone, but imagining the recording device as some kind of sonic hatchet, chopping wild sounds from their sources and letting them loose, seems an oversimplification.
(via Anti-Gravity Bunny)
Heavy decibels are playing on my guitar
We got vibrations coming up from the floor
We’re just listening to the rock that’s giving too much noise
Are you deaf, you wanna hear some more?
Rock and roll ain’t noise pollution
Rock and roll ain’t gonna die
Rock and roll ain’t no pollution
Rock and roll is just rock ‘n’ roll.
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AC/DC’s “Rock and Roll Ain’t Noise Pollution,” in observance of World Listening Day. I very much enjoy how the song seems to be a direct rebuttal of R. Murray Schafer’s list of noise types in his Book of Noise:
Noise has a variety of meanings and shadings of meaning, the most important of which are the following:
- Unwanted sound
- Unmusical sound
- Any loud sound
- Disturbance in any signaling system
I make this point at the beginning of my undergraduate senior essay “The Tubular Groaning of Galactic Refrigerators: Noise in the Age of its Mechanical Reproducibility” [PDF], which is about as coherent as it sounds.
Denoising Field Recordings documents an early attempt at using denoising-techniques in a creative and compositional manner. Instead of utilising noise-reduction-algorithms for their intended purpose (the restoration of damaged audio signals), these processes are applied to various field recordings of trains, streets, swimminghalls and public transport. Due to the fact that these recordings consist entirely of noises this operation transforms the originals into an uncanny hybrid of newly introduced processing artefacts, occasional silence and sporadically audible traces of the original field recordings. What kind of sound-aesthetics can emerge while denoising field recordings? Which audible parameters are able to resist this »audio-erasement-process«? How are these traces comparable to the visual remanences of Robert Rauschenberg’s erasure of a de Kooning drawing?
Shimmering, gorgeous results of applying noise reduction algorithms to “noise.” Click through to hear samples.
(via Everyday Listening)
Slayer all at once. (Clicking through to the YouTube page will reveal that this is some sort of minor metal webvideo meme.)
(via immanent discursivity)
After the sinking of one of their battleships, South Korea is playing loud K-pop across the border to the North:
S.Korea recently put up loudspeakers in 11 locations along the tense border to resume broadcasts that had been suspended in 2004. The installation of the loudspeakers amounted to “a direct declaration of a war” and a “flagrant violation” of the inter-Korean declaration for peace and reconciliation signed in 2000, the North’s statement went on. “Therefore, the revolutionary armed forces of the DPRK will launch an all-out military strike to blow up the group’s means for the psychological warfare,” it said. The North has repeatedly threatened to strike down the loudspeakers if Seoul goes ahead with the broadcasts.
(via Sonicwarfare)
I’m not a sports enthusiast in any sense, but I had to post something about the vuvuzela. Here it is, if you didn’t know already. (And here is an interesting idea for equalizing it out of your TV, if you hate raucous, celebratory noise-making.)
(via immanent discursivity)
update: And a bafflingly thorough roundup of vuvuzela/filtering-related links over at Create Digital Music.
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Alex Ross just posted a PDF of a wonderful lecture on applause he gave at the Royal Philharmonic Society. If you’re interested in performance norms, public social discipline, or stories about Barack and Michelle, then you should read it. The social history of classical music performance is super interesting, especially for me in the ways it intersects with how people think of “live” music.
(via The Rest Is Noise)
As usual, a fantastic sculptural kinetic sound work from Zimoun. When I’m done with my thesis, I think I’m just going to collect large groups of small things for a few months.
(via today and tomorrow)
