The Puzzle of Sound Amplification in the Inner Ear ::

One of the extraordinary features of the mammalian sound detection system is the range over which it works. This extends from 11 KHz in birds to 200 KHz in marine mammals.

This is only possible because the inner ear amplifies sounds by a factor of up to 4000. That’s a huge amount of gain. So much, in fact, that it’s hard to square with conventional thinking about mechanical amplification. So there is much head scratching among biologists over how the ear achieves this amplification. Continue reading

Halsey Burgund, Scapes :: July 13, 2010 - November 4, 2010 :: deCordova, 51 Sandy Pond Rd, Lincoln, Massachusetts.

Halsey Burgund is a musician and sound artist who lives and works in Bedford, MA. Burgund’s projects are collaborative and provide participants with an active role in content creation. Part of generation Wiki and the democratization of knowledge, Burgund uses open source platforms, GPS technology, and interactivity to create musical scores from participants’ spoken words that continuously evolve in real-time. Scapes, Burgund’s project for PLATFORM 3, creates a two-way audio experience for museum visitors influenced significantly by their physical location on deCordova grounds. Participants will use handheld wireless devices and headphones to listen to audio and also to make their own recordings which will be immediately assimilated into the piece for everyone to hear. Organized by former Koch Curatorial Fellow Nina Gara Bozicnik and current Koch Curatorial Fellow Lexi Lee, the exhibition will be accompanied by a full-color brochure.

update_3 | body sound: Collection New Media Centre Pompidou :: until June 20, 2010 :: Zebrastraat, Zebrastraat 32/001, 9000 Ghent, Belgium.

Curator Christine Van Assche endeavours to present a history of sound in the arts with ‘body sound’. Celebrated contemporary artists such as Bruce Nauman, Vito Acconci, Manon De Boer, Céleste Boursier-Mougenot, Casten Nicolai-Alva Noto, Anouk De Clercq, Didier Faustino, Mike Kelly/Scanner, Martin Creed, Adam Mc. Ewen, Keiko Owada, Mika Vaino, Chris Marker, Ugo Rondinone, Emmanuel Lagarrigue and Sémiconductor will be presented, both individually as well as in interaction with each other, on a course of shape and sound. This is realized by a specially designed lay-out of the exhibition, provided by the architects of Mésarchitecture (Paris). Continue reading

Trace Aureity by Adam Nash (aka Adam Ramona) [Needs Second Life account and client (free)] - Trace Aureity is an interactive, immersive, audiovisual sculpture located in the 3-D synthetic world Second Life. There are eighty-eight manipulated field recordings — from city streets, birdsong, to talkback radio — and ninety-six nested rotating objects densely arranged in a three dimensional grid. Avatars, either solo or in groups, generate sounds by moving through the installation. Some of the innermost nested objects, colored red, also spawn glowing spheres which fly out and bounce around inside the work, triggering sounds as they pass through other objects. Because the playable space is so dense, players are rewarded by slowing down their movements as much as possible, since even miniscule movements create differences in sonic output. Continue reading

Call for proposals: Calling all experimental musicians, musical neuroscientists, sound artists, cyborg performers, dance-floor divas and harmonic engineers :: Science Gallery at Trinity College Dublin is currently developing a major new exhibition and event and workshop series entitled BIORHYTHM: Music and the Body and we are seeking your proposals for gallery installations, experiments, events, workshops and performances for inclusion. We will consider both proposals for projects within the Science Gallery building and off-site or roaming projects. Some funding is available to support projects, but projects which can bring other sources of support are welcomed.

How does the body respond to music? Is there a neuroscience of dance? Is there a formula for the perfect hit? Why does a minor cord sound sad? How does a DJ manipulate the emotions of a crowd? Continue reading

“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.