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)

David Benqué’s work in progress, “Acoustic Botany,” is a set of hypothetical plants that have been genetically engineered to make sounds. So far, they’re pretty broadly conceptual, like a nut whose insides are “eaten away by bugs engineered to chew in rhythm.” The image above is “Popping Pod Fruit,” which would be engineered to contain small seed capsules that slowly fill with air over the lifetime of the plant, eventually popping in aleatoric rhythm with its neighbors.

Primarily, this seems like a very interesting way to create an opposing form of acoustic ecology. Most work in acoustic ecology is about reducing human sonic influence in nature, and protecting “natural” soundscapes. Genetic engineering (or at least the implausibly specific and sonic version Benqué describes) offers another way to get into nature’s sounds and alter the soundscape.

(via we make money not art)