Sound Fields: Mapping Acoustic Territories :: September 23-25, 2010 :: Brooklyn, NY :: :: Call for Submissions — Deadline: September 1, 2010.

image: alvaro_olivares

Exhibition to take place in a massive industrial space in Brooklyn. Sound Fields is about sound and the city, different acoustic territories and the control of them. In public places one wanders in a field of sounds that are ambient and discrete, loud and soft, which form intermittent relationships withone another. This acoustic mise en scène is often deemed distracting or cacophonous, leading to the marginalization of sound that is judged to be noise. Think of the subway, the library, or the church. Continue reading

Roberto Paci Dalo: Atlas of Emotion Stream :: April 18 - May 25, 2009 :: Palazzo delle Arti Napoli, via dei Mille 60, 80122 Napoli Italy.

Roberto Paci Dalo’s newest work is inspired by Giuliana Bruno’s book Atlas of Emotion published in New York in 2002. The installation is made out of a large black and white projection and sound. The sound is immersive also using subwoofers for particularly low frequencies reproduction. That puts the visitor/traveler in the center of the perception field. Sounds are made out of field recordings and electronic sounds. The project is conceived on three different formats: installation, film screening, and live set. Continue reading

Spatial Dissonance, Subjective Imagination and Locative Media: An Interview with Paula Levine, conducted by Barbara Crow, April 3, 2008 on Skype using Call Recorder, Wi Journal: Paula Levine’s “… recent installation, Signature, is inaugural work in the new Contemporary Project Space at the Sonoma County Museum in Santa Rosa, California. Signature is a contemporary portrait of seismic history as it intersects with local lives and landscape. The work uses GPS satellites to trigger the sound of the 1906 Bay area earthquake. The same overhead satellites also cause the surface of a projected digital image of Santa Rosa to rupture and reveal the hidden presence of the Rogers Creek Fault that runs directly through the centre of the city. The sound is converted from a selection of seismograph recordings of the 1906 quake. Santa Rosa was severely destroyed by the 1906 earthquake and subsequent fires. While the Rogers Creek Fault has been quiet for many years, current seismic research refocuses attention on it as a possible continuation of the more active Hayward Creek Fault, lying to the south of the city…” Listen to the Interview and/or Continue reading >>

[Image: Pe Lang + Zimoun, Untitled Sound Objects, 2008] Organizing the Unpredictable: Tim Knowles and Pe Lang + Zimoun at bitforms gallery by Alan Licht: The 2008 works by British artist Tim Knowles and Swiss duo Pe Lang + Zimoun that are teamed up in Unpredictable Forms of Sound and Motion, curated by Steve Sacks at bitforms gallery, leave a bit less to chance than the title implies. The technology-driven pieces in the show take ideas originating in 60s and 70s land art, musical minimalism, and performance art, and situates them within constraints reminiscent of a scientific experiment. The result is that the works emerge as concrete entities, rather than as transient, site-specific or dematerialized experiences. Continue reading

As Andrea Gaggioli writes in the Positive Technology Journal, In addition of being very unpleasant and harmful for our hearing system, noise can have negative impact on general health. For example, Swedish researchers have found that the exposure to even relatively low levels of noise may increase increase the risk of cardiovascular disease, heart attack and high blood pressure.

WideTag, a California Company, has developed an iPhone/iPod touch application - WideNoise - that allows the user to monitor the noise level in the space surrounding her. The noise data are collected and displayed on an online map.

“BronxRhymes (a Turbulence Commission) is an attempt to raise awareness of the history of hip-hop in the Bronx, the northwestern borough of New York City where the musical style is thought to have originated. The history of hip-hop is illustrated through rhymes and plotted on an online map.

The creators specifically set out to create a connection between the physical, digital and mobile planes. The website features a map of the Bronx and an archive of contributed rhymes. They then put up posters near the physical locations marked on the online map, describing the location’s relevance to hip-hip history in a rhyme. The posters also challenged passersby to respond via SMS with their own rhymes about the location, the people who made it famous, or hip-hop in general. The project captures the battle tradition of hip-hop, while informing the community through multiple mediums…” Continue reading BronxRhymes Uses Locality, Maps to Track History of Hip-Hop by Megan Taylor, PBS-MediaShift.

Going Public ‘08 - Port City Safari: The Sound of the City by Zafos Xagoraris, Piazza Garibaldi, Sassuolo :: until December 21, 2008 :: aMAZElab Via Cola Montano 8, 20159 Milano, Italy.

Starting from the text by the famous writer Italo Calvino ‘Le città invisibili/The invisibile cities’, The Sound of the City intends to map the city through a collection of sounds / silence / noises which are typical of specific areas: the suburbs, schools, markets, squares. The project intends to create spatial and functional surveys for the definition of an idea of architecture and space referring to today’s acoustic ecology and sociology. Zafos Xagoraris’ work can be seen both as an architecture and a sculpture in the public space. His sound installation will be presented in the main square of the city Piazza Garibaldi with a transmission of sounds from different port cities. Continue reading

Cheryl L’Hirondelle nikamon ohci askiy (songs because of the land) :: until February 2009 :: Vancouver, B.C.

This project explores the relationship between sound, space and identity as experienced through a cree worldview. By creating a “performative audio map”, L’Hirondelle will negotiate a journey through new territory, developing a nomadic relationship with the land. Her actions/singing will be in direct response to her encounters within the territory - the physical environment she finds herself in and its inhabitants.

During the month of December, the artist will make daily journeys throughout Vancouver and “sing” the landscape she encounters. These encounters will be captured by mobile phone by the artist and whatever other technologies are made available by participating viewers/audience (video, photo, audio). 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

Turbulence Commission: Bronx Rhymes by Claudia Bernett and Maria Ioveva: Bronx Rhymes illuminates the history and significance of Hip Hop in the Bronx by tagging important locations for Hip Hop (1520 Sedgwick, for example) with posters. Each poster describes the historical significance of that location in the form of a rhyme, and invites people walking by to join in a rhyming battle by txt-ing their own rhyme from their mobile phone. The website displays the artists and locations along with all the submitted rhymes elevating the most recent submission. Eventually, visitors to the website will be able to rate existing rhymes, and add their own. Continue reading