Tony Schwartz

from NPR's On the Media
In his 84 years Tony Schwartz produced over 30,000 recordings, thousands of groundbreaking political ads, media theory books and Broadway sound design, invented the portable recorder, delivered hundreds of lectures and had full careers as an ad executive and a pioneering folklorist. And he did it all without leaving his zip code. Schwartz died in June and we offer a piece from the Kitchen Sisters, looking back at his life spent listening.

'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.

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.