Leonardo Electronic Almanac has inherited a large archive of papers, articles and information. This material was held in the archive as historical documentation and as part of the revamp of LEA we have decided to revisit this history and compare it with contemporary developments.

LEA rekindled 1 is the first historical comparative issue of the Leonardo Electronic Almanac on the history and contemporary developments at the intersection of art, science and technology. For this first issue of LEA rekindled, our editorial intention is to re-open a dialogue with those who participated and contributed towards building the history of contemporary art interactions with science and technology as well as with the new generations of artists, critical commentators, scientists and technology experts. You can find out more information on: http://ow.ly/3pA9D Continue reading

Archival Records @ Asia Art Archive, a sound installation by Cédric Maridet, Hong Kong :: exhibition from February 2, 2010 to May 5, 2010 :: Opening: February 11, 2010; 6.30 - 8:00 p.m :: Hollywood Centre 11th Floor, 233 Hollywood Road, Hong Kong.

Archival Records intends to articulate the Archive’s physical and material space through the medium of sound, and establish a new connection between the Archive’s ‘voices’. It focuses on the realm bridging textual readings (of printed material) and their vocal counterparts, through multilingual audio recordings of excerpts from the collection, supplemented by ambient sounds at the Archive. This sound installation not only aims at exploring the idea of the Archive, but also rediscovering the mechanics of sensory experiences and aural cognition through a composed technological mediation of experience. Continue reading

Sound Continuum - a conference for recording arts and sound archives :: November 21-23, 2009 :: Basyamichi Campus, 1F Hall, Graduate School of Film and New Media, Tokyo University of the Arts, Yokohama, Japan.

Through sponsorship from the Agency for Cultural Affairs Japan and in partnership with the School of Sound, London, Non Profit Organization Image Initiative Yokohama and Tokyo University of the Arts Graduate School of Film and New Media will host Sound Continuum, an international conference for recording arts and sound archives. This conference will focus on exploring the art of sound in moving image. Continue reading

ALKU is incredibly proud to announce the release of the amazing ‘ARCHIVE 1978-1981′ by the legendary San Francisco Bay Area computer music pioneers, The League of Automatic Music Composers.

Formed in 1977 in the San Francisco Bay Area, The League of Automatic Music Composers (John Bischoff, Jim Horton, Tim Perkis, Paul DeMarinis, Rich Gold, David Behrman) is considered to be the world’s first computer network band/collective.

‘ARCHIVE 1978-1981‘ features over 12 hours of previously unreleased archival tapes, documents, interviews and video from these electronic music mavericks. Compiled and edited by Jon Leidecker and presented in a lush limited edition wooden USB flash drive. 968.301.735 bytes worth of computer music history.

More here.

thanks to potaxpotax

The British Library has made 23,700 rare music and sound recordings from its massive collection, reputed to be one of the largest sound archives in the world, available for free online.

The Library announced that 2,000 hours of material — just a fraction of its entire catalogue of sound — are now available on its website. The material represents everything from children’s skipping songs to rare recordings of Ugandan royal musicians, who stopped performing in 1966 when the country’s king was exiled. Continue reading

e-lab/rixc/riga has re-made the Xchange website. Check it out:

Xchange is a pioneering streaming audio and sound art project on the Internet. It was launched in 1997 by Riga based artists group E-LAB (Rasa Smite, Raitis Smits, Jaanis Garancs) in collaboration with various other emerging net.radio initiatives from all over the world. The Xchange mailinglist for information exchange and communication was started in December 1997. The Xchange community reached its’ highest activity in 1998 and 1999 - when the most dynamic experiments with collaborative streaming possibilities took place during X-Open Channel sessions. Co-sessions were facilitated by E-LAB net.radio Ozone weekly webcast-programmes, during which live stream loops were created for connecting two and more participants from different locations of the network. In 1998 Xchange project received the PRIX Ars Electronica “Award of Distinction” in the net.category. Continue reading

The Montréal Sound Map — Call for Participation: Sound maps are in many ways the most effective auditory archive of an environment, touching on political, artistic, cultural, historical, and technological aspects. Montréal Sound Map’s aim is to create an archival database of sound recordings from all over Montréal.

They are accepting all (unprocessed) audio recordings (past and present) of Montreal’s sound environments. As they gather submissions, they will be placing them into a browsable tagging system based on criteria including: Sound Source (characteristics); Location (borough, neighbourhood, municipality); Date (time of day, month, day of week, year, season); Environment Type (park, metro, indoors, outdoors, etc…); Equipment (recording device, microphone, etc…). Files can be uploaded through the form on the ‘Uploads’ section of the website. Continue reading

PINGS springs directly from the geographical distance between two collaborators. Working from their locales Simon Whitehead & Barnaby Oliver explore the physical space between them through rivers and air and a range of other terrains with their own qualities, such as the web, phone, post, and less tangible links of memory and synchronicity. An ongoing project archive is now available on the website. You can subscribe to PINGS as a podcast / RSS 2 feed from the website. And view the exchanges between the two as webpages.

If you’ve never visited ourmedia.org ,you should do so. It has, among other things, an open media directory that lists archives and repositories of music — folkmusic, cylinder collections, audio recordings many in the public domain, music samples intended for use in music creation, early blues recordings, an archive of collaborative online jam sessions available to stream and download in MP3 format. The list goes on; there’s sure to be something there you’ll be interested in.