Sound

The music, Sanger writes, is a kind of fictional soundtrack for a landscape of offworld megafarms, where a human skeleton crew has been reporting “auditory hallucinations” amplified by the effects of an artificial atmosphere. Audio scifi.

Radio Garden invites you to explore live radio from around the world.

By bringing distant voices close, radio connects people and places. From its very beginning, radio signals have crossed borders. Radio makers and listeners have imagined both connecting with distant cultures, as well as re-connecting with people from ‘home’ from thousands of miles away.

Tune Into Forests From Around The World. Escape, Relax & Preserve.

David Horvitz made the score ‘When the ocean sounds’ for human voices intended to mimic the sound of the sea.

...Imagine the first life forms, with porous skin or cell walls, through which the sea could freely flow into and out of their small bodies. At a certain moment, however, these life forms evolve. They come out of the sea and develop a different type of skin, one that allows them to keep liquids within their bodies. These liquids are ultimately seawater, and so the creatures – as do we – carry the sea with them, no matter where they go.

1. Leaves Expanded May Be Prevailing Blue Mixed With Yellow Of The Sand
2. I Used To Wonder At The Halo Of Light Around My Shadow And Would Fancy Myself One Of The Elect
3. Fearing That They Would Be Light-headed For Want Of Food And Also Sleep
4. Stirring Them Up As The Keeper Of A Menagerie His Wild Beasts
5. The Finest Qualities Of Our Nature Like The Bloom On Fruits Can Be Preserved
6. Perhaps The Wildest Sound That Is Ever Heard Here Making The Woods Ring Far And Wide
7. I Love To Be Alone
8. A Young Forest Growing Up Under Your Meadows
9. Their Roots Reaching Quite Under The House
10. The Rays Which Stream Through The Shutter Will Be No Longer Remembered When The Shutter Is Wholly Removed
11. After Soaking Two Years And Then Lying High Six Months It Was Perfectly Sound Though Waterlogged Past Drying
12. The Sun Is But A Morning Star
13. A Low And Distant Sound Gradually Swelling And Increasing
14. As If It Would Have A Universal And Memorable Ending
15. A Sullen Rush And Roar

Picture the last time music moved you. Imagine how the sound was amplified. Think about what initially drew you to that album cover or concert poster. How did design shape your experience?

Explore this question with us in Art of Noise. This exhibition is a multi-sensory ode to how design has changed the way we’ve experienced music over the past 100 years.

Gardening, but with emojis and less time.

Copy a text in the text box and click on "analyze". Put the mouse over a word to see its relationship with the others

(The words in red share sounds with which they are compared them, those in green do not share sounds.)

George Rhoads is well known for his large audiokinetic ball sculptures that attract and engage people throughout the world. Balls roll and percussion devices clatter and chime in airports, hospitals, art museums, science museums, shopping centers and other public places. Rhoads has designed over 250 unique pieces, virtually all of which are still in operation.

Sound holds an immense power to elevate any experience—including the most boring of software.

Sound in software isn’t inherently bad. It’s just been really badly designed.

We use sound in every !Boring app, and many have called it out as one of their favorite aspects of our apps. We’ve learned a few things about when to use sound, how to design it, and how to implement it. When done right, sound unlocks a path to much richer software experiences

I have recently been thinking about the idea of: What does the sound say when words fall short? 

Specifically, listening in relation to faith and composing as an act of worship or prayer. This thought process was inspired by a few passages that have been circulating through my mind.

...I gravitate to such writers within this channel as their works are so committed to the art of translating and wading through the depths of music. Music not just a pleasurable or entertaining activity, but music as a lifeline. These quotes remind me of the way sound facilitates itself as a mirror or sifter of sorts, allowing us to work through what language cannot bear. Send me a song and I’ll show you your heart.

I love encountering songs that speak to that texture or tone that I can’t quite put into words. I’m even more so fascinated when the song I encounter is in a language I can’t understand, but when I look up the lyrics it describes exactly what I’m feeling.

The series of audible, metallic clicks made as a key penetrates a lock can now be deciphered by signal processing software to reveal the precise shape of the sequence of ridges on the key's shaft. Knowing this, a working copy of it can then be 3D printed.

I’m sitting at a desk in a sunlit apartment in Los Angeles in March of 2024, listening to American Crows, House Finches, and Dark-eyed Juncos from the window of my friend’s apartment. I’m here visiting for a few weeks. A steady stream of cruising cars builds out the audio landscape, too; I hear the breeze in the trees. The neighbor shaking out a rug, a car door closing, an airplane overhead. How do our experiences of sound influence the way we think and feel about place? Who is it that hears these sounds, and why do we cling to them? While it is enough to be receptive to the beauty of sensory experiences lived best offline, my channel explores which sounds we record, save, and describe in our somewhat futile attempt to capture those ephemeral moments, always fleeting, brought back to life through sound.

All the unimportant details that matter the most—paying attention to these details are precisely what make Bokunatsu, from its backgrounds to the narrative itself, so plainly striking.

The backgrounds are complimented by the soundscapes. These are, in my opinion, the best part of the game.

Of all the characteristics of summer, it may be the sounds which I most associate with the season. I grew up in the rural south, and Bokunatsu manages to capture the droning sounds of summer in a way I’ve never experienced before in media.

At times, I’ve let the game run in the background just to listen to the soundscapes.

Ambient radio for rest, calm, or focus.

DVINA is the first SOMA electro-acoustic instrument.

It was inspired by Hindustani and Persian classical music but European music can be also played with it, of course. A key feature of DVINA and its sound is that there is no pickup inside. Instead, I take the electric signal DIRECTLY from the strings that vibrate in the strong magnetic field of a neodymium magnet, hidden in the neck. Further, a weak signal from the strings is amplified by a custom-made transformer built into the body of Dvina to a standard level. It is very similar to the principle of a ribbon mic. This solution makes Dvina outstandingly resistant to electromagnetic interferences and makes the sound rich and clean. Dvina’s high output is ready to be directly connected to stomp boxes, guitar amps or an audio interface. DVINA has a minimalistic design – no one part can be removed without loosing the functionality of the instrument.

Welcome to the second Tokyo focus track - a series of soundscapes to help you focus on your writing - now taking the famous circular Yamanote Line.

Tokyo, the birthplace of iA, has always provided inspiration for the work we do, and riding its trains a backdrop to focusing on your thoughts. With these soundscapes of journeys across Tokyo, we hope to convey the same feeling of calm and focus with you, as we take you across town.

In today’s software, live video feeds are stuck inside static rectangles that can’t go anywhere. MakeSpace flips all that on its head. Your cursor is your live face, and you can roam free, controlling who and what you want to be close to.

Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit – all these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much of modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them. Note to the artist: when the medium fails conspicuously, and especially if it fails in new ways, the listener believes something is happening beyond its limits.

When I talk about music, it finally comes to people’s minds that I’m talking about sound that doesn’t mean anything, that is not inner, but is just outer. And they, these people who understand that, finally say: “you mean it’s just sounds?” — thinking for something to be just being a sound is to be useless. Whereas I love sounds, just as they are. And I have no need for them to be anything more than what they are. I don’t want them to be psychological, I don’t want sound to pretend it’s a bucket or that it is president or that it is in love with another sound. I just want it to be a sound.

And I’m not so stupid either. There was a German philosopher who is very well known, Immanuel Kant. And he said: there are two things that don’t have to mean anything: one is music and the other is laughter. Don’t have to mean anything, that is, in order to give us very deep pleasure.

The sound experience which I prefer to all others is the experience of silence. And the silence almost everywhere in the world now is traffic. If you listen to Beethoven or to Mozart you see that they’re always the same. But if you listen to traffic you see it’s always different.

Phonaesthetics is the study of beauty and pleasantness associated with the sounds of certain words or parts of words. The term was first used in this sense, perhaps by J. R. R. Tolkien, during the mid-twentieth century and derives from the Greek: φωνή (phōnē, "voice-sound") plus the Greek: αἰσθητική (aisthētikē, "aesthetic").

A key difference between verbal language and the modernist ideal of a visual “language” is the arbitrariness of a verbal sign, which has no natural, inherent relationship to the concept it represents. The sound of the word “horse”, for example, does not innately resemble the concept of a horse. Ferdinand de Saussure called this arbitrariness the fundamental feature of the verbal sign. The meaning of a sign is generated by its relationship to other signs in the language: the sign’s legibility lies in its difference from other signs.

Albums are mixed in order to be reproduced. When that process truly was 100% analog – the last of my own records made that way was Galaxie 500’s second album, in 1989 – the master tape was deliberately mixed with more high end than desired, because it was predictable that some of that would be lost in the reproduction process toward pressed records.

In other words, the original master tape is not how those analog albums were meant to sound. The record is.

Brian Eno is well-represented in iOS. His other apps like Bloom, Trope and Air invite listeners to touch the screen to make their own composition. Reflection ($30.99) is different, there is no interaction for the listener. The interface has three buttons: a pause button, a sleep timer, and AirPlay. Reflection produces endless permutations of Eno’s 2017 album, an hour and five minute long title track. 

“Just calling it an app is akin to saying Falling Water is just a building,” writes one app store reviewer. “I would not call this an app,” agrees another, “Between the music and visuals it’s more like sonic architecture.” The visuals consist of slowly morphing rectangles that only seem to change in the split second you look away from the screen.

“How Lord Northcliffe Heard Two Oceans At the Same Time,” the headline from the October 1917 issue of Electrical Experimenter magazine blared.

Zach Hershey called to my attention a phenomenon about the relationship between speech and writing (and meaning) that I long suspected might well be true, and I even collected plentiful evidence in support of it, but I was never absolutely certain that it was true, namely, that in many cases speakers of Sinitic languages have in mind sounds over characters.

...Maybe this happens more than I know, but I immediately thought that it was fascinating that, in their minds, they like the sound of the name, but haven't put a meaning, much less characters, to the sound yet.

Before you present your poster at the conference, turn on the voice recorder while you are talking through your poster. Give that 3-4 minute summary out loud while you are looking at your poster.

This visualization takes the current New York Times Best Sellers list for combined print and e-book fiction and scales each title according to the demand for its e-book edition at a collection of U.S. public libraries, selected for their size and geographic diversity.

Japanese music is above all a music of reticence, of atmosphere. When recorded, or amplified by a loudspeaker, the greater part of its charm is lost. In conversation, too, we prefer the soft voice, the understatement. Most important of all are the pauses. Yet the phonograph and radio render these moments of silence utterly lifeless. And so we distort the arts themselves to curry favor for them with the machines.

The nocturnal sound is a reminder of human solitude and mortality, and it makes one conscious of the entire slumbering city. Anyone who has become entranced by the sound of dripping water in the darkness of a ruin can attest to the extraordinary capacity of the ear to carve a volume into the void of darkness. The space traced by the ear in the darkness becomes a cavity sculpted directly in the interior of the mind.

The analog-digital debate in audio is a longstanding one, and while it is unlikely to be resolved anytime soon, I thought I might be able to offer some background as a longtime audio professional and musician. Recordings are a beautiful mix of technical and aesthetic concerns, and this post will attempt to tease out how to navigate these two framings of music recording, especially with regard to the often-oversimplified distinction between analog and digital recordings.