An event from clarinetist David Rothenberg, the author of Why Birds Sing:  A Journey Through the Mystery of Bird Song.

 Sunday, May 4, 2008Cornelia St. Café, 6pmClarinetist David Rothenberg, author of THOUSAND MILE SONG: Whale Music in a Sea of Sound, addresses this difficult question with Princeton whale historian D. Graham Burnett, author of TRYING LEVIATHAN, illustrious ECM violinist Michelle Makarski and drummer extraordinaire Lukas Ligeti.   Are male humpback whales just singing to get the girls, like birds are supposed to be doing?  How come no one has ever seen a female whale show any interest in the song at all?  Why do the male whales need to constantly change their songs even though no females are listening?  And why was there such an important court case in early nineteenth century New York to determine whether the whale was in fact a mammal or a fish?  The music will blend whale and human melodies and rhythms together in the manner of Rothenberg’s new CD, WHALE MUSIC.  The discussion will make whales even more interesting than they already are.www.thousandmilesong.comOn Sunday May 2, 2008 at 6PM it is, in Roald Hoffmann’s Entertaining Science cabaret at the Cornelia Street Cafe (in the Village, at 29 Cornelia Street between Bleecker and W. 4th; Christopher St. is probably the nearest subway stop). 212-989-9319. See their website at www.corneliastreetcafe.com <http://www.corneliastreetcafe.com/> . Admission $10. Reservations can be made by calling the café, but only from a week before the show, i.e. Monday, Apr. 26, 2008. Don’t despair if you get told that you are on a waiting list; we get most people in, although this event has been known to sell out.Posted by Jennifer Stock. �

   

 

Deep below the rumble of city traffic, there is a cacophony of very-low-frequency noise from factories, lorry engines, fireworks, passing aircraft, distant quarrying and many other human sources.    -Gavreau, Condat, and Saul, Infra-sons, 1966 

Sound artist Kristen Roos creates site-specific audio installations; one of his recent works was a prominent sound happening in Toronto entitled “Ghost Station.”   Crowds of 10,000-15,000 gathered over the course of a single evening in Lower Bay, an abandoned subway station, where low frequency sounds of the city were layered into a complex composition.   Subway recordings were used to vibrate objects in the station, allowing listeners to experience the obscure rumblings of the underground more directly; the installation used infrasound (frequencies of sound too low to be perceptible to the human ear) as well as sounds right at the threshold of human hearing in order to create these vibrations. Subwoofers were loaded into subway cars to transform them into resonating chambers, and tactile transducers suspended from the ceiling vibrated pieces of metal to create a wash of higher frequency sound.  Roos then sequenced these sounds, allowing him to compose the station sounds into a poly-rhythmic soundscape, effectively transforming the entire station into a percussive instrument.   

Roos’ work will be featured at Sound Symposium XIV in St John’s NL Canada July 3-13, where he’ll create an installation at Eastern Edge Gallery using tactile transducers.   You can read more about Ghost Station here.  

 

Posted by Jennifer Stock.  

This great project was brought to our attention by EMF subscriber Richard Lainhart. The Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany has designed PALAOA, an “autonomous, wind and solar powered observatory on the Ekström ice shelf”. PALAOA is equipped with ultra-sensitive hydrophones picking up sub-antarctic sounds which are then broadcast over the internet on this site.

posted by Aleksei Stevens

Bernie Krause is a sound artist renowned for capturing environmental soundscapes throughout the world.  I caught a lovely description of one of his recording sessions in Sam Keen’s  Sightings: Extraordinary Encounters with Ordinary Birds, a slim volume with well-spun little essays on birding. In one, Keen describes a morning spent in the company of Krause, listening to a concert of pre-dawn bird, insect, and other environmental sounds.  Later Keen listened to the recording of that morning’s sounds and was caught off guard, as it emphasized less obvious elements of the soundscape, not all of which were apparent to the listener in the moment:

“I was surprised to hear the songs of many birds I neither recognized nor had consciously heard with my naked ears…the recording revealed not a chaotic collection of random songs and sounds, but a soundscape in which each creature had its unique aural niche.  Bernie explained that insects, birds, mammals, and amphibians in healthy habitats occupy sonic niches that allow each creature to express its voice without competition from others. Listening carefully, I could hear the various singers and players respond to one another like members of a New Orleans jazz band.”     

The soundscape heightens the listener’s awareness of the environment, creating an aural impression that is intact, encouraging sensitive listening, and preserving an order that’s not always immediately discernible. Â

Posted by Jennifer Stock. 

There’s a gorgeous sound library online hosted by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. An array of birds and other animals are cataloged; each listing features a sound sample of the animal and many include video footage, as well. The sounds and visuals are neatly packaged in a viewer specific to the site, which bundles sonogram, waveform, and video viewer for each sample. This site is an incredible educational tool, and it’s nice to see a university putting good effort into a
free, user-friendly resource for sound samples.

Posted by Jennifer Stock.

This year will see the 10th annual Sound Travels Festival in Ontario. Last year’s festival featured Barry Truax and Trevor Wishart as guest composers-in-residence, mentoring a community of sound artists creating electroacoustic concert works and site-specific, interactive installations. One of the works from the 2007 festival included a “Toronto Island Sound Map.” This year’s festival will be held from June 1-October 1, 2008. You can subscribe for information here.

Posted by Jennifer Stock

Touch Radio is the blog/podcast of the UK-based record label Touch. They publish field recordings and experimental music by composers like Chris Watson, Fennesz, Stephen Mathieu, Steve Roden, Lief Inge, and others, and post them as freely available downloads on the site, along with short descriptions of the pieces.

The current post, number 27 in the the series, is a pure, unadulterated, 55-minute field recording of the Icelandic wild, made by Gudni Franzson, and featuring the sounds of snipe, redwings, and other birds. He writes about his recording:

“It was last July, summer 2007, we went to a party at Laugarvatn, one of the few places where there grow natural trees in Iceland, approximately one hour’s drive east of Reykjavik. The party was good and went far into the bright night but we had put up a tent to lie down in the morning. I wasn’t at all tired in the morning but started listening to the incredible birds in the woods and down in the wet low-land until day broke. I was sorry not to have the recording machine with me that night but decided to return the night after with my gear, hoping the birds would still be there. They were and this time I was alone in the place, did but up a small mic and pressed the rec. button, the result is on the Touch Radio.”

posted by Aleksei Stevens

The Phonographers Union, a Seattle-based ensemble, records and mixes
unprocessed live sounds, creating an improvisatory jam session based on environmental sound.

Here’s an example of the group’s work.

Posted by Jennifer Stock.

“Heard Melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on.”
-John Keats

Nigel Helyer, a sound artist and sculptor specializing in environmental installations, has a project list of incredible scope. One of his latest works, a large scale-environmental scuplture called “Transformers,” is a sound sculpture that resonates…silently. The work draws on low-energy electromagnetic fields that are drawn from the atmosphere with antennae; the field then circles through a coil that is wrapped around larvae encased in tubes. The artist comments:

“One of our principal oversights is to demand that nature exists only by virtue of our sense organs…we carelessly assume that events that we cannot perceive do not exist. What the ear fails to hear is therefore mute. Perhaps these are Sound-Sculptures which are simply inaudible!”

The sculpture is on view through December 7 at UnderCliff Vineyard in Wollembi. Info here.

posted by Jennifer Stock

radio aporee :: maps is a fascinating project that uses a map interface to show field recordings made all over the world with mobile phones.

The creators write:

“…the mobile phone becomes a microphone, not only for speech. it’s available almost everywhere, so the idea was to use it as a recorder for sound and voices. radio aporee has several phone numbers (in germany only for now) which are connected directly to the maps project via a voice over IP network. after the recording, the call is online immediately. one can also upload pre-recorded sound files. any place on the map can have more than one recording, which will be played back sequently.”

a screen shot of the radio aporee :: maps interface

posted by Aleksei Stevens