After a 10 month hiatus the SoundTransit project is back, hosted by Turbulence.org.

SoundTransit is a collaborative, online community dedicated to field recording and phonography. Phonography is the art of recording sounds from the environment around us, with an emphasis on the unintentional sounds which often go unnoticed in our daily lives. An international community of phonographers collect and share their recordings, with interests ranging from recordings of natural or urban environments to improvised situations or soundwalks, to the resonance of solid objects or the Earth’s atmosphere. Continue reading

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Composer/performer Pamela Z is leading a fun walk in SoHo called Site Reading, that she created for an organization called “Elastic City”. Originally there were four of these walks scheduled; there are still two remaining, so there’s still time to register and join her on one of them.

The remaining walks are scheduled for this coming Monday (September 26, 2011) and Tuesday (September 27, 2011) at 6:30 pm. Walk Starting Point: 60 Spring St., New York, NY

Composer/performer Pamela Z will lead participants on a walk that creates musical scores from the graphic features (micro and macro) of downtown Manhattan. Participants will form a roving experimental sound and performance ensemble that will interpret and play the neighborhood’s building facades, sidewalk hardware, public art and street markings to make a contrapuntal, chance-based chorus.

UrbanRemix is a collaborative and locative sound project developed by Jason Freeman, Carl DiSalvo, Michael Nitsche, and many of our students at Georgia Tech. Our goal in developing UrbanRemix was to design a platform and series of events that would enable participants to develop and express the acoustic identity of their communities, and enable participants to explore and experience the soundscapes of the city in a novel fashion.

The UrbanRemix platform consists of a mobile phone system and web interface for recording, browsing, and mixing audio. It allows users to document and explore the obvious, neglected, private or public, even secret sounds of the urban environment. Continue reading

Tactical Sound Garden [ TSG ] Toolkit ::

Tactical Sound Garden [TSG] from mark shepard on Vimeo.

Given the ubiquity of mobile devices and wireless networks, and their proliferation throughout increasingly diverse and sometimes unexpected urban sites, what opportunities - and dilemmas - emerge for the design of public space in contemporary cities? Continue reading

Hertzian Rain by Mark Shepard :: February 13, 2011; 3:00 - 5:00 pm :: Burchfield Penney Art Center, 1300 Elmwood Avenue, Buffalo, New York.

Live sound from multiple sound makers is streamed from a set of wireless transmitters placed at opposing sides of an urban space. These transmitters broadcast these audio streams locally on the same radio frequency to a group of participants wearing wireless headphones tuned to this frequency. Because the transmitters broadcast on the same local frequency, a zone of interference is created where multiple audio streams compete for signal dominance.

Participants carry umbrellas made of electromagnetic field (EMF) shielding fabric that enable them to actively shape the surrounding environment of radio waves. By orienting the umbrella in different ways, one is able to filter the interfering radio signals and select a single audio stream to listen to. Continue reading

Experiments on the Notation of Shapes by Joao Vasco Paiva :: February 12 - April 4, 2010 :: Opening Reception: February 12; 7:00 - 9:00 pm :: Artist Talk: March 24; 7:00 pm :: Unmeasured Music: March 31; 7.30 pm :: I/O (Input/ Output), 31 Wyndham Street, Central, Hong Kong.

Experiments on the Notation of Shapes by Portuguese artist and Hong Kong resident, Joao Vasco Paiva, is a generative multi-channel video installation where Hong Kong cityscapes are used as coordinates for sound synthesis. Computational translation, footage of urban planning and architectural elements are used as a musical score. In this work, a post-apocalyptic aura consumes the concrete form of the metropolis. Two wall-based projections present Hong Kong cityscapes. The city, its emptiness and its structure are kept in “time images” that solicit contemplation. Continue reading

Posted by Mitchell Whitelaw on Teeming Void: This essay was commissioned by Hordaland Kunstsenter in Bergen, Norway, to coincide with HC Gilje’s solo exhibition blink (video below). It looks at Gilje’s recent work - which spans audiovisual installation, performance, hardware, and networked forms - through the notion of specificity (developed earlier here).

blink (hc gilje 2009) from hc gilje on Vimeo.

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30 Seconds off an Inch: Shared Frequencies with Kabir Carter:: November 22, 2009; 2:00 - 5:00 pm :: The Studio Museum in Harlem, 144 West 125th Street, New York, NY.

As part of the Museum’s current exhibition 30 Seconds off an Inch, come experience the synthetic sounds of Shared Frequencies (2009) performed by artist Kabir Carter. The work moves between sound, performance and installation by converting architecture to sound and vice-versa. Using radio scanners and synthesizers to process an array of street reverberations and noises, Carter creates an electro-acoustic chorus of urbane life and an urban landscape.

Collision Zone Live by Gast Bouschet and Nadine Hilbert w/Otobong Nkanga and Y.E.R.M.O. — Premiere at Philharmonie Luxembourg :: November 29, 2009; 8:00 pm :: Installation at Luxembourg Pavilion Ca’ del Duca, 3052 Corte del Duca Sforza, 30124 San Marco Venice, until November 22, 2009.

Every thing must have a beginning, and that beginning must be linked to something that went before…

Collision Zone Live will mix field recordings of natural and urban sounds with improvised music by Y.E.R.M.O. and intuitive vocals by Otobong Nkanga. The show will include large screen projections of videos recorded at the edge of Europe: satellites, radars and surveillance patrols, brutalist architecture, informal human settlements, geological imagery of mountains and caves, steaming volcanic craters, insect hunters and their prey… Continue reading