12
Mar
…it’s a series of audio recordings by David Foster Wallace, the author of Infinite Jest, which Time included in its All-Time 100 Greatest Novels list.
The collection is here and is broken into four categories:
No tag for this post.7
Mar
Besides the ocean audio stream, the Alfred Wegener Institute has many recordings of underwater acoustic phenomena and ice sounds that you can listen from this page.
Among this materials, there are some sounds caused by the icebergs whose origin is not yet known. Click the image.
26
Feb
The hydrophones of German Alfred-Wegener-Institut transmitting live from the Ocean below the Antarctic Ice in the Atka Bay. This project is called PALAOA (PerenniAL Acoustic Observatory in the Antarctic Ocean) that means “whale” in Hawaiian.
Click here for mp3 audio stream.
Please note, this transmission is not optimized for easy listening, but for scientific research. It is highly compressed (24kBit Ogg-Vorbis), so sound quality is far from perfect. Additionally, animal voices may be very faint. Amplifier settings are a compromise between picking up distant animals and not overdriving the system by nearby calving icebergs. So you might need to pump up the volume - but beware of sudden extreamely loud events.
There is also a webcam showing images like this one (click to enlarge)
22
Feb
An interesting application for iPhone that links sound and gestures. The sound needs some improvements but the idea is stimulating.
Tags: apple13
Feb
Playing the Building is a sonic project by ex-Talking Head David Byrne that came to London in 2009. You could sit down at an “antique organ” and hit whatever keys or chords your heart desired—but you wouldn’t be producing notes.
You would instead trigger a “series of devices,” as Byrne describes them: hammers and dampers distributed throughout the building in which you sat. Distant windowpanes and metal cross-beams, hooked up to wires, would begin to vibrate, tap, and gong. Imagine someone like this sitting in the darkness beneath Manhattan, causing haunted musics and unexplained knocks inside rooms and abandoned buildings around the city. Now, even urban infrastructure will be musicalized.
No tag for this post.15
Jan
The LRAD (Long Range Acoustic Device) can emit a tone higher than the normal human threshold of pain. It was used for the first time in the USA in Pittsburgh during the time of G20 summit on September 24-25th, 2009.
By the way, a good book about it: Sonic Warfare - Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear by Steve Goodman (MIT Press, see also this review on Rhizome).
Tags: guerra14
Jan
This video depicts the collaborative wearable technology project of Bio Circuit in action. Bio Circuit was created at Emily Carr University by Industrial Design student Dana Ramler, and MAA student Holly Schmidt.
Bio Circuit is a vest that provides a form of bio feedback using data from the wearer’s heart rate to determine what “sounds” they hear through the speaker embedded in the collar of the garment. The wearer places the heart rate monitor around the ribcage, resting against the skin and close to the heart. An MP3 audio player embedded in the vest plays the audio track related to that specific heart rate. The audio tracks are soundscapes mixed from a range of ambient sounds. If the wearer’s heart rate is low, the soundscape will reflect a quiet natural area with sounds such as water, birds and insects. If the wearer has a high heart rate then they will hear a cacophony of urban sounds such as people talking and traffic.
Bio Circuit stems from our concern for ethical design and the creation of media-based interactions that reveal human interdependence with the environment. With each beat of the heart, Bio Circuit connects the wearer with the inner workings of their body. In this sense the garment functions like other biofeedback devices that use sensors to provide a person with information about their physiological state. With Bio Circuit, we are proposing that these kinds of devices could extend a person’s awareness to include the environment.
visit danaramler.com for more information
From Vimeo
No tag for this post.5
Jan
Dr. Boulanger has put up a wondeful collection of Csound mp3s at Csounds.com.
Download 4csoundCompositions.zip (99.1 MB)
The pack comes with 20 tracks, with everything from ambient to minimal to cheesy techno to synth-generated halloween sound fx. All of the original source code is included in case you are curious to see what these compositions look like in their original state.
From The Csound Blog
Excerpts:
23
Dec
Last week the Conservatorium (the public school of music here in Italy) where I work in Trento, bought a new mixer for the electronic music studio. It’s a Mackie 1640i with ADC/DAC included, so you can connect 16 in and 16 out to your computer through a single firewire cable (no more wires, wow!).
Looking at the box, I saw the usual set of icons (this side up, fragile, keep dry, etc), but there was one more. A single icon featuring the Jarod face and saying ALIEN SAFE.
ALIEN SAFE???
Here it is. Click the images to enlarge.
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17
Dec
At a first sight Muxicall seems to be another piano on the net like many others. But there is an important and interesting difference: all the people connected play together and everyone can hear all the notes.
All the users connected share the same instrument and a sort of collective improvisation can arouse. Interesting concept, but the reaction time can be a problem: the users can experience a sensible latency due to flash and the network itself.
Muxicall was created by Diana Antunes as part of her work for the New Technologies of Communication degree at the University of Aveiro (Portugal).
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