…it’s a series of audio recordings by David Foster Wallace, the author of Infinite Jest, which Time included in its All-Time 100 Greatest Novels list.
The collection is here and is broken into four categories:
Archivi categoria: Audio
Gelie
An interesting application for iPhone that links sound and gestures. The sound needs some improvements but the idea is stimulating.
Playing the building
Playing the Building is a sonic project by ex-Talking Head David Byrne that came to London in 2009. You could sit down at an “antique organ” and hit whatever keys or chords your heart desired—but you wouldn’t be producing notes.
You would instead trigger a “series of devices,” as Byrne describes them: hammers and dampers distributed throughout the building in which you sat. Distant windowpanes and metal cross-beams, hooked up to wires, would begin to vibrate, tap, and gong. Imagine someone like this sitting in the darkness beneath Manhattan, causing haunted musics and unexplained knocks inside rooms and abandoned buildings around the city. Now, even urban infrastructure will be musicalized.
LRAD
The LRAD (Long Range Acoustic Device) can emit a tone higher than the normal human threshold of pain. It was used for the first time in the USA in Pittsburgh during the time of G20 summit on September 24-25th, 2009.
https://youtu.be/QSMyY3_dmrM
By the way, a good book about it: Sonic Warfare – Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear by Steve Goodman (MIT Press, see also this review on Rhizome).
Bio Circuit – a wearable soundscape
This video depicts the collaborative wearable technology project of Bio Circuit in action. Bio Circuit was created at Emily Carr University by Industrial Design student Dana Ramler, and MAA student Holly Schmidt.
Bio Circuit is a vest that provides a form of bio feedback using data from the wearer’s heart rate to determine what “sounds” they hear through the speaker embedded in the collar of the garment. The wearer places the heart rate monitor around the ribcage, resting against the skin and close to the heart. An MP3 audio player embedded in the vest plays the audio track related to that specific heart rate. The audio tracks are soundscapes mixed from a range of ambient sounds. If the wearer’s heart rate is low, the soundscape will reflect a quiet natural area with sounds such as water, birds and insects. If the wearer has a high heart rate then they will hear a cacophony of urban sounds such as people talking and traffic.
Bio Circuit stems from our concern for ethical design and the creation of media-based interactions that reveal human interdependence with the environment. With each beat of the heart, Bio Circuit connects the wearer with the inner workings of their body. In this sense the garment functions like other biofeedback devices that use sensors to provide a person with information about their physiological state. With Bio Circuit, we are proposing that these kinds of devices could extend a person’s awareness to include the environment.
visit danaramler.com for more information
From Vimeo
Alien Safe???
Last week the Conservatorium (the public school of music here in Italy) where I work in Trento, bought a new mixer for the electronic music studio. It’s a Mackie 1640i with ADC/DAC included, so you can connect 16 in and 16 out to your computer through a single firewire cable (no more wires, wow!).
Looking at the box, I saw the usual set of icons (this side up, fragile, keep dry, etc), but there was one more. A single icon featuring the Jarod face and saying ALIEN SAFE.
ALIEN SAFE???
Here it is. Click the images to enlarge.
 |
 |
inudge
A better ToneMatrix with a drum, more instruments and melodic lines to play with. Have fun here.
140 chars of music
A twitter. An SMS. That’s the challenge. Writing a piece of electronic digital music using only 140 chars of code.
It started as a curious project, when live coding enthusiast and Toplap member Dan Stowell started tweeting tiny snippets of musical code using SuperCollider. Pleasantly surprised by the reaction, and “not wanting this stuff to vanish into the ether” he has recently collated the best pieces into a special download for The Wire.
Of course, to satisfy such a constraint, you need a very compact programming language and SuperCollider is the best choice (see also here). It is an environment and programming language for real time audio synthesis and algorithmic composition. It provides an interpreted object-oriented language which functions as a network client to a state of the art, realtime sound synthesis server.
SuperCollider was written by James McCartney over a period of many years, and is now an open source (GPL) project maintained and developed by various people. It is used by musicians, scientists and artists working with sound. For some background, see SuperCollider described by Wikipedia.
You can download the code snippets here. Note that many of these pieces are actually generative, so if you have a working SuperCollider environment and re-run the source code you get a new (i.e. slightly different) piece of music.
Some excerpts:
The artists notes are here.
Speaking of Music: Pierre Boulez
February 16, 1986.
Charles Amirkhanian interviews Pierre Boulez and Andrew Gerzso as part of the Speaking of Music series. Boulez discusses the pros and cons of microtonal music, spatial music, as well as delving into the technical details of his latest work, “Répons”.
Symphonies of the Planets 1
In the August and September 1977, two Voyager spacecraft were launched to fly by and explore the great gaseous planets of Jupiter and Saturn.
Voyager I, after successful encounters with the two, was sent out of the plane of the ecliptic to investigate interstellar space.
Voyager II’s charter later came to include not only encounters with Jupiter (1979) and Saturn (1981), but also appointments with Uranus (1986) and Neptune (1989).
The Voyagers are controlled and their data returned through the Deep Space Network, a global spacecraft tracking and communications system operated by the JPL for NASA.
Although space is a virtual vacuum, this does not mean there is no sound in space. Sound does exist as electronic vibrations. The especially designed instruments on board of the Voyagers performed special experiments to pick up and record these vibrations, all within the range of human hearing.
These recordings come from a variety of different sound environments, e.g. the interaction of the solar wind with the planet’s magnetosphere; electromagnetic field noise; radio waves bouncing between the planet and the inner surface of the atmosphere, etc.
In 1993 NASA published excerpts from these recordings in a set of 5 CD (30 minutes each) called Symphonies of the Planets (now out of print).
This is the CD 1.
- Voyager recordings – Symphonies of the Planets 1