“With the installation Sonicity, the English artist Stanza adds another significant chapter to his quest for new metaphors to translate the countless interactions produced by data passing through an environment into a sensory plane. Stanza’s aim is to create a data space that is perceived as alive. To achieve this goal he has installed a great number of sensors that are able to detect the smallest changes in variables (such as light, temperature, noise, humidity and the location of certain objects) in the building that houses the gallery. Each of these sensors provides information on the parameters being monitored. These data are then transformed by Sonicity into a sound environment through the use of a wireless network consisting of hundreds of small speakers positioned on the floor and walls of the exhibition space. Continue reading

Florian Hecker :: February 12 – March 28, 2010 :: Lecture: March 18, 7:00 pm :: Chisenhale Gallery, 64 Chisenhale Road, London E3 5QZ.

Chisenhale Gallery is pleased to announce a major solo exhibition by Florian Hecker, his first in a UK public institution, comprising a new installation of sound pieces co-commissioned by Chisenhale Gallery, London and IKON Gallery, Birmingham. Hecker’s new commission continues his investigation of sound in relation to the body and space, employing idiosyncratic psychoacoustic propositions in order to examine and disrupt spatial perception.

At Chisenhale Gallery Hecker will present a series of four independent, electro-acoustic works that lead the visitor around the gallery space, where each work exposes a fault line in the traditional categorizations of auditory events, auditory objects or streams. Continue reading

The Blackest Flux featuring Yutaka Makino:: December 10, 2009, 8:00 - 10:00 pm :: AXIOM Center for New and Experimental Media, 141 Green Street, Jamaica Plain, MA.

The Blackest Flux is an experiment toward abstraction of space/body. By using acoustic and psychoacoustic phenomena, it creates a state of disorientation and a series of tactile movement of sound masses over space.

Yutaka Makino is an artist and researcher currently based in Los Angeles. He seeks to amalgamate the historic precedents of computational composition and science, involving research in non-standard sound synthesis, spatial perception, acoustics, collective behavior, complex dynamical systems and emergence. Continue reading

Cafe Scientifique presents Making Noise, a night of perceptual exploration :: October 26, 2009; 7:30 p.m. :: The Horse Hospital, 30 Colonnade, WC1N 1JD, London, UK.

Join our scientists, artists and musicians as we ask the questions: When does noise gain meaning? And - Are we nearly cyborgs?

Short talks by Dr Mick Grierson’s demo of his computer brain interface - generating noise environments from brain waves! Patrick Degenaar, on visual prosthetics for augmented vision - and the prospects for bionic eyes. Lauren Stewart on what our brain does with music, and why some people (with amusia) just don’t get it. And Joydeep Bhattacharya on why sounds stir our emotions. Continue reading

In the Dark (Belgian premiere) by
Armando Menicacci and Christian Delécluse at City Sonics :: Ateliers des FUCAM, Rue des soeurs noires 2 - 7000 MONS.

In the dark is an immersive sound experience that draws the solitary spectator into a totally obscured room. Without visual reference mark and under the influence of mysterious sound environment, the visitor is tempted to create new references in order to get a hold of the space he hears. Stories, voices, indications suggest the situations taking place in the places he cannot see. In this installation by Armando Meniacci and Christian Delécluse, he can but only imagine them and respond with gestures and movements. He is free to take action, but the sounds hunt him, avoid or invite him… In the dark… thus develops a different perception of the body and offers an intense time, the experience to be another.

Thursday Club: Artemis Papageorgiou: Wii/nd Chime + Ryan Jordan: Sensory Response Systems :: January 15, 2009; 6 -8 pm :: Seminar Rooms, Ben Pimlott Building, Goldsmiths, University of London, New Cross, South East London.

Artemis Papageorgiou will discuss Wii/nd Chime’s collaborative development as an instrument of reminiscence. Wii/nd Chime signifies a shift from the physical realm to the virtual and the simulated. The sonic languages of both wind chimes and the 8-bit video-game sounds are combined into a system of interaction, which invites people to discover the potential of this new, hybrid object. Continue reading

Sensorium Re-Connected — a generative composition for for 5 PCs and 2 voices by Andrew Garton :: January 11, 2009; 11:03 - 11.45 pm CET :: Kunstradio - Radiokunst :: Listen here.

From August 18 to September 6, 1997, Australia’s The Listening Room presented Sensorium Connect / Body Morph, a generative composition by Andrew Garton and comprised of sounds sampled from performances by Stelarc. Sensorium Connect was the first Listening Room project entirely produced for online and was streamed for its entire six week duration.

On January 11, KunstRadio broadcasts an entirely new version of this work. Sensorium Re-Connected commemorates the work of The Listening Room and the contribution this piece made to furthering radio and sound art online in Australia. Continue reading

“… In contemporary discussions of the body in space, of information highways and virtual realities, radiant sound establishes a `ground’ in the discourse of the future - be it utopian or dystopian - built from sound’s long history of transmission (telephony, radiophony) and `spirit’ (electrified by composers such as Cage, Varese and Stockhausen). This ‘ground’ has also been adopted to some extent by the contemporary philosophers Derrida, Baudrillard and Lyotard, who use aural, spatial and incinderal metaphors to raise questions about being, technology, and the future. Thus radiant sound becomes a figure in different but related cultural fields: as a trope for many of the great modernist reconciliations, its history in organicism, romanticsm and individualism, provides a model for the individual dispersed across the electronic field. Continue reading

Music and the Body Colloquium: Amir Lahav - Music and the Brain: Bridging Neuroscience and Rehabilitation Medicine :: November 12, 2008; 6:00 pm :: Brown University Music Department, Orwig 315 (Corner of Hope St. and Young Orchard Ave.), Providence, RI.

Amir Lahav is a Visiting Scientist in Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School.

The Department of Music presents a year-long interdisciplinary lecture series entitled “Music and the Body” in the coming academic year. Broadly-conceived, the series is designed to inform contemporary and historical music-related questions concerning ritual and dance; display and gesture; gender and sexuality; and perception and memory. Continue reading

Wet Sounds- The worlds only underwater sound art gallery returns to Brighton for a special session at Brighton and Hove’s White Night :: October 25, 2008; 9:00 pm - midnight :: Prince Regent Pool, Church Street, Brighton :: for the price of pool admission.

Underwater speakers submerged in the pool will play sounds and music to an audience floating or swimming through the water. Sound travels four times quicker in water than in air so the sound is perceived not only by the ears but also by the bones and the body. Session One is undersea sounds for the under 14s. Later on the grown ups can immerse themselves in a listening gallery of international sound and some leisurely Aquadelica.