102 posts tagged with music and sound.
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Two Great Tastes Processing Signals Together
The Algorithm That Transformed The World - "The Fast Fourier Transform is used everywhere but it has a fascinating origin story that could have ended the nuclear arms race."[1,2,3,4] [more inside]
Please close your eyes
Sam Green’s intimate portrait of composer Annea Lockwood shares with us a glimpse into the enthralling world of sound that she has been exploring and creating for many years. It is a touching and personal story of imagination and love. [more inside]
The Devil's Chord or a Tap on the Shoulder
There is no single continuous “blip” of a monitored heartbeat threatening to end in the stereotypical screaming flat line. It is more a continual fidgeting of sound, a representation of the chaotic systems of a body responding to clinical adjustments in a recursive, non-linear dance toward wellness or death.
After a week of sitting beside an intubated loved one, it becomes like birdsong, a fact of nature in this strange, still, pale glade.
Off the Air ⇔ On the air
[adult swim]'s Off the Air is now on the webtubes and having a 🆓 ②/㊼ 𝕄𝕒𝕣𝕒𝕥𝕙𝟘𝕟‼❣️ They're also hosting all ten seasons of the series' episodes. [previously–ly—...ly]
What Brought Beyoncé, U2, and BTS to Amish Country?
Next door is a building known as the Studio, a fifty-two-thousand-square-foot box sheathed in matte black sheet metal. It stands one hundred feet tall and has four loading docks and a door that a semi can drive through. A grid of steel beams along its ceiling can hold up to one million pounds of chains, motors, bumpers, trusses, lights, speakers, and screens. The Studio is the greatest rehearsal space in the world, used by the biggest acts in the world. [SL Esquire]
And it stoned me
Stones/Water/Time/Breath is a participatory sound art piece composed you can perform anywhere there is a body of water. Composed by experimental musician Dean Rosenthal.
The Boston Public Library 78rpm Collection
Internet Archive: "Following eighteen months of work, more than 50,000 78rpm record 'sides' from the Boston Public Library’s sound archives have now been digitized and made freely available online by the Internet Archive."
Are you tone deaf?
Test your tone-deafness with The Music Lab at Harvard University's department of psychology. [more inside]
The fad that just wouldn’t fade.
Monoskop
Monoskop is a wiki project for collaborative studies of the arts, media and humanities. It includes an archive of out-of-print magazines and books, and much more.
winding graphs around circles
Taonga Pūoro - Singing Treasures
Mr. Sandman, bring me a horrible nightmare
Sound Designer Jeans rose to prominence with his "uncomfortably meaty" rendition of Mr. Sandman. Since then he has gone on to destroy Mr. Sandman in just about enough ways to make a whole album, including an unsettling one, one that bridges the divide between cute and horrifying, an even more unsettling one, a wavy one, an existentialist hellscape, and the version that you hear on a slow train through the afterlife when you die in your sleep.
If you're not into increasingly disturbing renditions of Mr. Sandman, let Jeans take you uptown. Or to the town of Ween. Or to Flavortown.
Centuries of Sound
"Centuries of Sound is an attempt to produce a set of mixes for every year of recorded sound. Starting in 1860, a mix will be posted every month until we catch up with the present day. So far we are still in the very early days, where a very limited selection of recordings are available, but as we get into the 20th century I hope to include the widest possible spread, both in terms of geography and genre. This will mean that experts will be required. If you are interested in putting yourself forward as an expert on Rembetika, early microtonal recordings, French political speeches, Tagore songs or anything else, then please do drop me a line..." [more inside]
Try
Mandy Harvey, who lost her hearing at 18, performs on America's Got Talent, and proceeds to the next round.
Listen to the clouds
Live transmissions from airports around the world set to ambient music. For even more ambiance, combine with Astronaut. [more inside]
Twinkle, Twinkle, Vogel Staar: On Mozart's Feathered Collaborator
If you whistle a tune often enough to a starling, the bird will not only sing it back to you, it will improvise its response and create something new. On May 27, 1784, Mozart whistled a 17 note phrase to a starling in a Viennese shop and to his delight it spat the tune right back — but not without taking some liberties first. So he bought it and brought it home. That bird lived with him for the three most productive years of his life, during which he completed more than 60 compositions, including Eine Kleine Nachtmusik. The piano concerto as we still understand it was built in those rooms. The “Jupiter” Symphony began and Figaro ended. Melodies that two centuries of humans have since whistled could have first been volleyed between a genius and his pet bird.
78rpm records from Africa
You're Letting All the Air Out
Frog Imperial March Instructions (proper keyboard/numpad may be necessary):
- Play this video
- With your cursor focused on the video, type the following: 6 6 6 8 56 8 56, 3 3 3 2 56 8 56 8 56, 2 7 2 3 4343 7 4 6565 87 8 56 8 56 [more inside]
- Play this video
- With your cursor focused on the video, type the following: 6 6 6 8 56 8 56, 3 3 3 2 56 8 56 8 56, 2 7 2 3 4343 7 4 6565 87 8 56 8 56 [more inside]
"I don’t want to be left alone inside myself."
"Cage stated that 4'33" was, in his opinion, his most important work"
Houston, turn that bass up
Microtonal Wall
1,500 speakers, each playing a single microtonal frequency, collectively spanning 4 octaves. [more inside]
The Sounds of Things to Come
Sound of Cinema - British Sci-Fi from the BFI Days of Fear and Wonder - BBC Radio 3 talks to film composer Stephen Price about The Shape of Things to Come, Alien, Gravity, and other science fiction soundtracks.
A keen noise for ambience
myNoise.net uses audio synthesis cleverness and the HTML 5
Web Audio API to give you a
vast array of ambient soundscapes and background noises right in your (recent) browser. Each generator is highly customisable and users can share customisations with each other.
Genius
Walter Kitundu is an artist and MacArthur Fellow (previously). In this video, he gives a lecture at the San Francisco Exploratorium about his bespoke instruments and lighting experiments. At around 16 minutes in, he plays his digital revision of a kora.
Pyro Board
Pyro Board. Or flammable sound waves and music. Danish Fysikshow demonstrates a 2-D Rubens' tube (wiki, demo).
Sølar-pøwered flashlights? But wait, there's møre!
The Nordic Society for Invention & Discovery has brought never-before-seen and totally exclusive technologies into the world, such as the Aaltopuck (an ice hockey puck modeled after Alvar Aalto's Savoy Vase), the Flower Shell (a shotgun shell that shoots seeds into the ground), the Wall of Sound (an 8000-watt iPod dock) and No More Woof (a device that wraps around your dog's head and translates his or her brain waves to computerized speech).
The Audience is Listening (when you're done with the code)
There are many, many random numbers involved in the score for the piece. Every time I ran the C-program, it produced a new "performance".... The one we chose had that conspicuous descending tone that everybody liked. It just happened to end up real loud in that version.James Moorer relates the rather unexpected manner in which he composed one of the one of the world's best known pieces of computer generated music: "Deep Note" from the THX trailer. [more inside]
"We do judge books by their covers."
The sound of silence - Research by Dr. Chia-Jung Tsay published in PNAS suggests that top musicians are judged as much for the visual aspects of their performances, as much as for the aural ones, regardless of the experience level of the listener or judge
Get your hi-hat on.
Real-time MRI study of human beatboxing, with lots of videos. See what snares, kick drum effects, cymbals and more look and sound like as they happen inside the head. Here's a BBC radio segment on the project.
*This* is the science of sound and matter.
Two elements: tempo and volume. Researchers at the Sundance Research Facility have finally discovered how to turn sound into matter.
It's a Different Nick Cave
Nick Cave's Soundsuits: Calling up echoes of wild beasts, Carnival dancers, maskers and shamans, the "soundsuits" made of a wild diversity of materials by visual artist and dancer Nick Cave have life beyond the gallery. They're designed to be used in performances and 'invasions,' creating a sense of mystery, playfulness and joyful moments of community.
Musical Architecture
A wall with large buttons that trigger voices, mellotron-style; An Indonesian gamelan xylophone orchestra played with a arcade game-like control panel; A leslie speaker that amplifies whatever a stethoscope touches. These are just a few of the instruments built into a unique New Orleans musical architecture installation called Dithyrambalina, or simply, The Music Box. [more inside]
The Sound of a Fermi Gamma-ray Burst
A gamma-ray burst, the most energetic explosions in the universe, converted to music. What does the universe look like at high energies? Thanks to the Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT), we can extend our sense of sight to "see" the universe in gamma rays. But humans not only have a sense of sight, we also have a sense of sound. If we could listen to the high-energy universe, what would we hear? What does the universe sound like?
The Lomax Collection -- a 'renewal of the forgotten springs of human creativity.'
NPR: "Folklorist Alan Lomax spent his career documenting folk music traditions from around the world." Now, nearly ten years after his death, thousands of the songs and interviews he recorded are available for free online, many for the first time. "It's part of what Lomax envisioned for [his] collection — long before the age of the Internet." (Mr. Lomax, Previously on MeFi) [more inside]
78 78s
78 78s - In Search Of Lost Time - is a streaming mix of beautiful 78s from around the world, collected and curated by Ian Nagoski. "I started sifting through boxes of junky old 78s that no one else wanted about 15 years ago, and almost right away, I made a rule: Anything that wasn't in English, buy it." [more inside]
The sound of the ages
Years by Bartholomäus Traubek: a record player that plays slices of wood.
Ladies And Gentlemen, The Kronos Quartet
In their 25 year career San Fransisco-based Kronos Quartet might be most famous for creating the go-to dramatic movie trailer music but they've recently courted controversy with their latest album, 9/11, with Steve Reich (NPR First Listen). The album is another in a long line of collaborations with composers such as Phillip Glass, Terry Riley, and Pēteris Vasks. And like any good instrumental ensemble, they've covered Hendrix, Sigur Ros, and Tom Waits. Oh, and they've been on Sesame Street. [more inside]
Snap, Crackle, Rattle and Hum.
What is up with Noises? (SLYT)
What is up with Noises? A fascinating explanation of why we hear sounds and music the way we do. It's a long video, but it's worth it!
Soundworks
The Soundworks Collection gives a behind-the-scenes look into the work of talented sound teams working on feature films, soundtrack scoring, and video games with a compilation of exclusive interviews, awards shows / event panel coverage and sound stage / studio room videos. Vimeo Channel. YouTube Channel. [more inside]
Bizarre scifi movie sounds and the instruments that love them
The bizarre musical instruments behind classic scifi movie sounds. Includes the Waterphone, Theremin and Blaster Beam.
Online Ear Training Games
Theta Music Trainer — Train your ear with fun music games. Sharpen your sense of pitch and tone. Unlock the hidden patterns in music. Strengthen your music theory skills.
Rotten Sounds Hollow is a very strange video
This man really likes eating hamburgers. So much so that the hamburgers felt they had to stage an uprising. Or Olympic games. It all becomes a little confusing. (Music video for Rotten Sound's "Hollow")
The Books, Annotated
The Books is a collaboration between musicians and found sound archivers Nick Zammuto and Paul de Jong. If you're not familiar with their music, allow me to recommend giving their newest album, The Way Out a listen over at NPR (where you can no longer stream the album in its entirety, but individual tracks are still available for your listening pleasure). Two videos are already available—the summer camp hit A Cold Freezin' Night and We Bought The Flood, which was 'directed' by archival image researcher Rich Remsberg. Since The Way Out's release Nick has been proceeding track by track through the album, explaining and annotating the techniques, instruments, and ideas used on each song—and resulting in a collage of thoughts as powerful and varied as The Books' collage of sound. [more inside]
old new music
Acousmata is a unique music blog devoted to "idiosyncratic research in electronic and experimental music, sound and acoustics, mysticism and technology" with special focus on the early history of electronic music.
Tone-Quester Fail.
"Tone-Quester" is generally a musician (more than likely a guitarist) who purchases/modifies amps/pedals/cabinets in search of a certain sound. They fiercely pride themselves on being able to distinquish the differences between pickups, tube amps vs. transistor amps. With this in mind, Wolfe McCloud, a pickup designer, decided to challenge My Les Paul forum members. [more inside]
Music Is the Weapon of the Future.
silent listening: Ice Recordings
Andreas Bick's blog post about "dispersion of sound waves in ice sheets" made the rounds a few days ago. Now he has taken the opportunity "to draw the attention to some other very interesting webpages concerning the sound of ice".