Friday

'cloak of silence'

Scientists have shown off the blueprint for an "acoustic cloak", which could make objects impervious to sound waves.

radio aporee ::: maps

radio aporee ::: maps is a project about the exploration and reoccupation of our living spaces. it collects audible material (recordings, sounds, spoken words) and connects them via a telephone network to the surface of google maps. thus, navigating through landscapes and cities by means of (hi)stories, thoughts, inventions, it may change the way we experience our daily surroundings.

Review of Terry Allen's "Pedal Steal" And "Torso Hell"

Theater-For-The-Ear, And- The-Eye-Of-The-Imagination, or plain old-fashioned radio drama musical, is how to describe Allens next disc, Pedal Steal, commissioned as a soundtrack by the Margaret Jenkins Dance Co. of San Francisco. More than a hour and a half long, it premiered at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's " Next Wave Festival" in October of 1985.

Negativland's TheWeatherMan Cellphone-Scanning from "Sonic Outlaws" by Craig Baldwin (1995)

Amateur radio today (2003)

Joe Frank

Joe Frank is an American radio personality, known best for his engaging, often philosophical, monologues and radio dramas.

Nikita Dhawan "The Power of Silence and the Silence of Power"

Here, the dynamics between speech, silence and power finds itself at the intersection of two conflicting perspectives on silence: as violence as well as non-violence.

Feeling silence. On Stephen Vitiello

Stephen Vitiello is usually called a sound-artist. Regarding his installations, however, one is in doubt. On the one hand, his work deals with unheard noises, noises which remain unperceived in daily life.

Thursday

jgrzinich "Ant Hill Activity" (2006)

Two contact microphones were stuck into the top of an ant hill. What you hear is the sound of the ants crawling across the surface of the microphones.

Espen Sommer Eide "Sonus barentsicus" (2007)

Gordon Monahan "Speaker Swinging" (1982)

Katie Paterson

website of artist Katie Paterson

Leif Brush

website for sound sculptor

Joan Schuman

website for radio artist Joan Schuman

Henry Jacobs on NPR (2005)


Beginning in 1953, Jacobs hosted a music program for KPFA in Berkeley, Calif. The Folkways record label later released highlights from this show on an LP, Audio Collage, in 1955. His work represented a patchwork of skits, soundscapes and mock interviews.

David Jackson Shields "Selected TimeLine of Music and Media Technology"


1877 - Edison invents the cylinder "phonograph" used to record and playback sound

1877 - Emile Berliner invents the first microphone and sells the rights to Bell Telephone

Niels Werber "Current German Media-Theory and their Ancestors: Benjamin and Brecht" (2003)

In 1972, Jean Baudrillard published his “Requiem of the media”, actually intoning his requiescat in pace not to media, but to certain media-theories. At the end of a close examination of German media theoreticians like Walter Benjamin, Berthold Brecht, and Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Baudrillard states that all these approaches have at least two things in common: a massive overestimation of the social consequences driven by technical possibilities of new media on the one hand and a immense underestimation of the social constraints regulating the utilization of new media on the other hand.

Friedrich Kittler "The History of Communication Media"


What follows is on attempt to discuss the history of communication technologies - as far as this is humanly possible - in general terms. The objective is ultimately the outline of a scientific history of the media - an outline for the simple reason that media sciences is a new field of research which would not exist had it not been for the triumphal advance of modern information technologies.

Hans Magnus Enzensberger "Constituents of a Theory of the Media" (1970)

For the first time in history, the media are making possible mass participiation in a social and socialized productive process, the practical means of which are in the hands of the masses themselves.

Wednesday

Martin Spinelli "Radio Lessons for the Internet" (1996)

Codel finds in the emergent medium a most interesting space: reality and fantastic projection overlap and become indistinguishable.

Ed Osborn

Home page of sound sculpture

Aeron Bergman "Commuting in sound" (2002)


Also, depending on how close you are to the source, hearing damage is sure to result. However, from a taller building, the sound of New York is a lush hum drifting up and around you.

Listening to Eathquakes

Created by Andy Michael, USGS, and Daniel Ross, 12 year old USGS Volunteer for Science.

Janek Schaefer "Recorded Delivery" (1995)


Janek Schaefer's first sound-work, Recorded Delivery, remains one of the wittiest and most interesting in the field of Sound-Art. It is elegant, economical and clever, and makes me wish I'd thought of it first. [Brian Eno 2005]

Robin Minard

home page of artist Robin Minard

Leif Elggren and Jacob Kirkegaard "Vansu" (2007)

Michelle Grabner review of M.W. Burns exhibition (Frieze 1997)

M.W. Burns’ new sound work disorients the familiar multi-media category of art-making with a bias toward understanding spatial arrangements and minimal form.

Seven Radio Plays by Samuel Beckett (2006)

Site to download bit torrent of 2006 recordings of Beckett's 7 radio plays:
Embers
Words and Music
Rough For Radio 1
Rough For Radio 2
Cascando
The Old Tune
All That Fall

Bertolt Brecht "The Radio as an Apparatus of Communication" (1932)

As for the radio's object, I don't think it can consist simply in prettifying public life. Nor is radio in my view an adequate means of bringing back cosiness to the home and making family life bearable again.

Tetsuo Kogawa "Toward Polymorphous Radio"

From Radio Rethink

The term mini-FM was first used in a mass-circulation newspaper in 1982, when a very low-watt FM-station movement started.Mini-FM stations have very little power judged by any standard-usually less than a hundred milliwatts. Although such a weak signal may seem to be of no use for broadcasting, the purpose was not broadcasting but narrowcasting.

Tetsuo Kogawa "Deconstructing Broadcast"

53 minute video of lecture/ performance by Tetsuo Kogawa

Conet Project on NPR (2004)


Akin Fernandez's obsession with "numbers stations" -- broadcasts of seemingly random numbers sequences that still remain officially a mystery -- led to a CD set compiling off-air recordings.

Brandon LaBelle "Towards a Theory of Transmission"

19 minute video of a lecture by Brandon LaBelle

Bernhard Leitner "Sound Space Sculpture" Hamburger Bahnhof

Bruce Nauman "Raw Materials"

Luigi Russolo " The Art of Noises"

This limited circle of pure sounds must be broken, and the infinite variety of “noise-sound” conquered.

Monday

Ron Sakolsky "Rhizomatic Radio and the Great Stampede"

The Introduction to Seizing the Airwaves; A Free Radio Handbook

Paul De Marinis


Installation and Sculptural works by Paul De Marinis

Antonin Artaud "To Have Done with the Judgement of God"


English Translation of Artaud's 1947 Radio Play

Gregory Whitehead "Out of the Dark: Notes on the Nobodies of Radio Art"

If the dreamland/ghostland is the natural habitat for the wireless imagination, then the material of radio art is not just sound. Radio happens in sound, but sound is not really what matters about radio.

Frances Dyson "Circuits of the Voice: From Cosmology to Telephony"

While vocal communication between individuals within culture has received much attention from theoreticians, less has been given to the meaning of voice within different epistemological systems. 'The meaning of voice'... not only indicates a difference fr om 'the meaning of language' but more importantly implies that speaking is not wholly reducible to the predicament of being 'spoken by language' as many post-structuralists would suggest.

Nicholas Zurbrugg "Sound art, radio art,and post-radio performance in Australia" (1989)

What is 'radio-art'? Defined most simply, radio art might be identified as that creativity predominantly dependent upon radio technology for its conception, for its realization, and for its distribution. In its most pure form, radio art might be thought of as exclusively radiophonic materials orchestrated and disseminated by radiophonic technology.

Favourite London Sounds

The aim is to discover what city dwellers find positive about their city's soundscape by asking the simple question, "what is your favourite London, or Beijing, or .......... sound, and why?"

The Mercury Theatre on the Air


All of the surviving Mercury Theatre shows are available from this page in RealAudio format (some are also in MP3 format). There are several Campbell Playhouse episodes available here as well, in both RealAudio and MP3 formats; the rest are being added gradually.

Patrick Ready "THE STORY OF THE HP RADIO SHOW"


Legendary 70's Radio Art Program from Vancouver

NOISE BARRIER DESIGN GUIDELINES (1990)

The purpose of this report is to provide guidelines and suggestions for the improved design of freeway noise barriers in the Milwaukee region and elsewhere in the State of Wisconsin.

When Pirates Ruled the Waves


Photographic History of Offshore and Landbased Free Radio 1964-1991

John Gartner "Point-'n'-Shoot Sound Makes Waves" (Wired, 2002)

Researchers have developed technology that can project a beam of sound so narrow that only one person can hear it.

Infrasonics

Information on natural sounds too low in frequency to be heard, from the Geophysical Institute, University of Alaska

Bernhard Leitner


Website for Sound Installation Artists Bernhard Leitner, in German

Silophone

Silophone is a project by [The User] which combines sound, architecture, and communication technologies to transform a significant landmark in the industrial cityscape of Montréal.

Mosquito Teenager Repellent


The device, called the Mosquito ("It's small and annoying," Mr. Stapleton said), emits a high-frequency pulsing sound that, he says, can be heard by most people younger than 20 and almost no one older than 30. The sound is designed to so irritate young people that after several minutes, they cannot stand it and go away.

Radio is My Bomb

Radio is my Bomb is a classic primmer on pirate/free radio.

Radio Caroline


Official History of Radio Caroline, British Pirate Radio

Simon Crab "A Short History of Sound Weapons Pt2: Infrasound"


Infrasound is low frequency audio beneath the human range of hearing. Infrasound constantly surrounds us, generated naturally; wind, waves, earthquakes and by man; building activity, traffic, air conditioners and so-on. Low frequency sound is used by marine mamals to communicate over vast distances and by birds to determine migration patterns.

Jeff Goldberg "Locating a Mouse by Its Sound"

A Brain Map of Auditory Space
The Value of Having Two Ears
Bat Sounds and Human Speech

Graffiti Research Lab: Mobile Broadcast Unit


The G.R.L. rolls out its newest probably-not-street-legal vehicle, the Mobile Broadcast Unit: audio, projection and L.A.S.E.R. tag systems all mounted on a big tricycle.

Eric Leonardson "PAINTING WITH WAVES: An Interview with Sabine Breitsameter on Sound and Radio Art" (1995)

Sabine Breitsameter is a free-lance journalist, curator, and radio artist at Sender Freies Berlin (SFB), one of Germany's largest public radio stations. She produces a weekly radio program at SFB called Internationale Digitale Radiokunst, presenting radio documentaries, sound art and radio art.

Bill Fontana


website for the sound sculptures of Bill Fontana

Leif Elggren


homepage of artist Leif Elggren

Sunday

Allen S. Weiss "Erotic Nostalgia and the Inscription of Desire"

The linguistic, poetic and rhetorical effects of sound recording transformed both poetical and metaphysical categories.

Jesse Moss Shapins "Walter Ruttmann’s Weekend: Sound, Space and the Multiple Senses of an Urban Documentary Imagination"

On June 6th, 1930 a radically new form of radio was broadcast over the Berlin airwaves. An 11 minute, 20 second long collage of raw sounds greeted listeners accustomed to hearing news reports, occasional classical musical programs and, only very recently, literary works written specifically for radio performance, the nascent genre known as Hörspiel (”radio drama”).

Ubu

UbuWeb is a completely independent resource dedicated to all strains of the avant-garde, ethnopoetics, and outsider arts. All materials on UbuWeb are being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights belong to the author(s).

Third Coast Festival

Radio Documentary Competition and Conference

Neighborhood Public Radio



Neighborhood Public Radio is a guerilla radio broadcast group who share their moniker, NPR, with the station they critique through community-based, noncommercial programming.

Daria Vaisman "The Acoustics of War"

In 1991, the Pentagon issued a directive to test an emerging class of arms: Called "non-lethals," these weapons were meant to disable their targets "in such a way that death or severe permanent disability was unlikely."

Oceanographic Tools: Navigation by Sound


Deep submergence vehicles like Alvin, ROV Jason, the DSL-120 sonar and Argo II use acoustic navigation to determine their positions as they travel over the seafloor, using instruments called acoustic transponders.

Keywords of Media Theory

The Keywords of Media Theory began life as an assignment in the course Theories of Media, taught by W. J. T. Mitchell at the University of Chicago.

Michael Heumann "Ghost in the Machine: Sound and Technology in Twentieth Century Literature"

This dissertation examines the cultural and literary role of sound technology in the twentieth century. By examining the context of sound technology's historical development and the role these machines play in the literature of the twentieth century, I argue that the phonograph, the telephone, and the radio have shaped cultural constructions of origin, gender, and power.

Michel Chion "Three Listening Modes" from Audio-Vision

When we ask someone to speak about what they have heard, their answers are striking for the heterogeneity of levels of hearing to which they refer. This is because there are at least three modes of listening, each of which addresses different objects. We shall call them causal listening, semantic listening, and reduced listening.

Radio Colifata


15 minute video on Youtube about Radio Coafata, a radio station in a mental hospital in Argentina

World Forum for Acoustic Ecology


World Forum for Acoustic Ecology

Christof Migone "The Technology of Entrapment: Open Your Mouth and Let the Air Out" (1992)

For all of radio's broad and far reaching casts, the radio booth rather resembles an implosion. A foreboding cubicle at its point of production in antithesis to its expansive space of diffusion.

neuroTransmitter


neuroTransmitter (Angel Nevarez and Valerie Tevere) was co-founded in 2001 as a project whose work fuses conceptual practices with transmission, sound production, and mobile broadcast design.

Joe Milutis: "Perceptual Gymnastics and the New Context of Radio Art" (1995)

Radio artists Reverend Dwight Frizzel and Jay Mandeville have performed their perceptual gymnastics within this open space of radio.

Hildegard Westerkamp "Soundscappe of Cities" (1994)

Today I want to speak about the soundscape of two very contrasting cities, in each of which I have spent five weeks within the last two years. The cities are Brasilia, capital of Brazil, and New Delhi, capital of India.

Robert Storr interview with Bruce Nauman


Language has been a key element in Bruce Nauman's work. For the fifth in The Unilever Series of commissions for the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, Nauman, who is one of the most important visual artists working today, uses the human voice as the focus of a new installation. Robert Storr talked to the artist on his ranch in Galisteo, New Mexico.

Public Radio Exchange


The Public Radio Exchange is a nonprofit service for distribution, peer review, and licensing of radio pieces

Prometheus Radio Project



The Prometheus Radio Project is a non-profit organization founded by a small group of radio activists in 1998. We believe that a free, diverse, and democratic media is critical to the political and cultural health of our nation, yet we see unprecedented levels of consolidation, homogenization, and restriction in the media landscape.

Darren Almond on Robert Morris' "Box with the Sound of Its Own Making"


The American artist Robert Morris made Box with the Sound of Its Own Making in 1961.

Dan Lander "Introduction to Sound by Artists" (1989)

The desire to compile this anthology was driven by the noticeable lack of information and critical analysis regarding an art of sound. Although there has been an abundance of activity centred around explorations into sonic expression, there is no sound art movement, as such.

Dan Lander "Radiocasting: Musings on Radio and Art" (1999)

Radiocasting: Musings on Radio and Art

Although historical and contemporary artistic and theoretical discourse regarding radio art is scant to say the least, there has been, and continues to be, audible evidence of artists and writers whose considerations on the subject begin to shape a theoretical body.

Eric La Casa on PRI's the World (2006)

Well, that's the sound of an air vent.

"Alone No More" on NPR (2000)

Bernd Klosterfelde talks about his new CD, Nie Mehr Allein (Alone No More), released in Germany last February. The CD is a compilation of household sounds intended to evoke the presence of a non-existent partner. Klosterfelde came up with the idea after his divorce. He says the disc can be used to make one feel less lonely, or to remind one of how annoying a partner can be.

Chris Watson

Amazing sound recordist Chris Watson's homepage

Radios Populares


Locally produced non-commercial radio in Latin America

Willem de Ridder


Website of radio art pioneer Willem de Ridder

Audio Relay


Temporary Services portable radio station Audio Relay built by Brennen McGaffey

Douglas Quin

Natural Sound Recordist

Outfront (CBC)


Outfront is where we hand you the microphone. You make a radio documentary, with our help. Then CBC broadcasts it -- and you'll even get paid!

NPR's war on Low Power FM

National Public Radio continues to move aggressively against Federal Communications Commission proposals that would, if not allow nonprofits to build more Low Power FM stations (LPFM), at least let existing ones survive the intrusion of new full power neighbors.

New Max Neuhaus piece at Menil


Max Neuhaus (and Michael Heizer) at Menil

Neighborhood Public Radio on National Public Radio

Neighborhood Public Radio on National Public Radio

Find Sounds

Search Engine for Sounds

Outdoor Sound Propagation in the U.S. Civil War

Students of military history know that acoustic refraction and unusual audibility have often played significant roles in the outcome of battles. Before electrical and wireless communications became common on the tactical level, the sound of battle was often the quickest and most efficient method by which a commander could judge the course of a battle. Troop dispositions were often made based on the relative intensity of the sounds from different locations on the battlefield.

Acoustic And Vibration Animation

Dr Dan Russell's page which contains "animations which visualize certain concepts concerning acoustics and vibration. The choice of animations coincides with topics covered in the courses PHYS-382, Acoustics I: Sounds and Sources, and PHYS-482, Acoustics II: Sound and Vibration, which I teach at Kettering University."

minoru sato


minoru sato is a japanese artist. he is creating art works per physical phenomena and concepts under the name 'm/s'. he had been running an artist label called 'WrK(1994-2006)'. moreover he is organizing contemporary art exhibitions and various events as curator.

Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller

Website of artists Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller

Gregory Whitehead

Website of artist/ radio producer Gregory Whitehead

The Worst Sound in the World

The hunt for the world's worst sound

Paul Dickinson


Website of Sound Artist Paul Dickinson

Cornell Lab of Ornithology

The worlds largest archive of animal sounds

Turning Earth Noise Into Sound:Notes for a Future "How-to"

Eventually this will turn into a more coherent and comprehensive "how-to" guide to converting seismic data into audible sound. For now it's just notes.

The Sounds Generated by Hydrothermal Vents

Though it was once thought that seafloor black smoker hydrothermal vents make no sound, recent measurements show that these vents are quite loud, and have interesting acoustic signatures that could help scientists study fluid flow within these systems.

Saturday

The Sounds of Train Horns

Included here are various train horn sound files from the Yahoo railroad air horn groups.

Natural VLF Radio

Very Low Frequency Recordings
Sounds of Space Weather

American Association of Electronic Voice Phenomena

Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP) concerns unexpected voices found in recording media. It is a form of after death communication. ITC is a newer term that includes all of the ways these unexpected voices and images are collected through technology, including EVP. Of the many hypotheses designed to explain these phenomena, the Survival Hypothesis has been found to be most effective in answering the evidence.

Douglas Kahn "Sound Art, Art, Music"

"I am not particularly fond of the term sound art. "

Riverbank Labs


Riverbank Labs
One of the scientific experiments documented by Sir Francis Bacon was a levitating machine. The machine was a wooden tube with metal strings attached to it, around which fit another wooden tube with metal strings attached to the inside of it. The center tube was supposed to spin and by sympathetic vibration cause the strings on the outer tube to vibrate. The resonance from the striking would create a force field, which would levitate the outer tube off of the ground. Colonel Fabyan hired Bert Eisenhour, an engineer from Chicago, to construct this machine at Riverbank. Though the machine was constructed, it did not work. Eisenhour was convinced that the strings were not tuned properly, and suggested they consult someone knowledgeable in acoustics.

Sound of Trees

What do trees sound like - from the inside? Pascal Wyse meets the artist whose hi-tech 'ear trumpet' lets us listen in on their secret soundtrack

Moose Hearing Aid

Tony Bubenik believed in his theory. A foremost expert on deer, he looked at the sweeping antlers of a moose and saw an evolutionary wonder. The bony headgear, he said, had morphed into a hearing aid.