An icon on the balustrade instructs participants to adopt a contemplative position - one must lay ones elbows onto the balustrade, cover ones ears, and look at the Old Town. While in this position, they hear the sounds of bombers and explosions, which travel through their arms directly into their inner ears via bone conduction.

People who attempted to block out the noise during the bombing are memorialized by Touched Echo. By striking the very same pose — blocking ones ears — visitors to the installation hear rather than obscure the terrible sounds.

Does hearing via bone conduction produce a more empathic response? Or is it the element of surprise, the lack of audio queues — speakers, headphones, amplifiers — that proves powerful?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHLobipEwBI

Based on the rapidly expanding archive of music/sound experiments to be found on Networked Music Review and the fifteen short works recently commissioned for it, the symposium aims to stimulate critical and far-ranging discussion on emerging music and sound art practice.

To register, email turbulence at turbulence dot org with “Programmable Media II” as the subject.

Symposium Program

Date: April 11, 2008
Venue: The Multipurpose Room, 1 Pace Plaza, Pace University

10:00 am – 10:45 am: Introduction by Helen Thorington and Peter Traub

Thorington and Traub will set the groundwork for the conference by introducing a variety of recent works from Networked Music Review and discussing the history, ideas, tools, and theory behind today’s creative practice.

11:00 am – 1:00 pm: Round-table discussion

Panelists: Dan Trueman, Peter Traub, Zach Layton, Sawako Kato, Jason Freeman (moderator)

Panelists will be given 5-10 minutes to make a basic statement about their work. The discussion will center on the significance of networks and whether they – and the collective behaviors of their machine or human nodes – can form the basis of compelling musical experiences.

1:00 pm – 2:30 pm: LUNCH

2:30 pm – 4:30 pm: Round Table discussion

Panelists: LoVid, Tobias C. Van Veen, Adam Nash, Helen Thorington (moderator)

Panelists will be given 5-10 minutes to make a basic statement about their work. Discussion will continue with emphasis on cross-over works (music w/images, text, video, video games etc.). Nash will speak to the symposium from Second Life, which he calls a “post-convergent medium.”

Short performances by Jason Freeman with Andrew Beck and Mark T. Godfrey and Tobias C. Van Veen will be given during the course of the symposium.

Jérôme Noetinger :: Un Temps 1 :: 4′55″

Since 1987 different concepts have been carried out and performed in festivals, galleries, cinemas and contemporary art spaces, in France, Europe, Canada, USA. Since 1995 they have developed collaborations with other groups or artists like Nachtluft (Switzerland), Kinobits (France), Loophole Cinema (England), Le Cube (France), la Flibuste (France), Voice Crack (Switzerland). Read more >>

Metamkine will perform at Liquid Architecture, Australia’s premier sound-arts festival. “Liquid Architecture is a sense specific festival, as opposed to art form specific. Occurring annually since 2000, Liquid Architecture celebrates the diverse methods of sound making and sound theory. It is our belief that listening is a vital activity, and one that is often overlooked within the dominance of visual media in our environment.” The fesitival takes place in 3 cities, Sydney (June 28-30), Brisbane (July 6-7), and Melbourne (July 11-14).

“I would like to pay my respects to all living creatures who inhabit dark places and who, over the years, have developed the art of echolocation (sounds sent out into an environment returning as messengers with information as to shape, size and substance of the environment and the objects in it). I am envious of the astonishing acuity of such creatures — dolphins, certain species of nocturnal birds, and bats, particularly those of the family Vespertilionidae, the common bat of Europe and North America.

Vespers was composed in 1968 and is performed in darkness. Each performer is supplied with a Sondol (sonar-dolphin), a hand-held echolocation device which emits a fast, sharp, narrow-beamed click whose repetition rate can be varied manually, and is given the task of orienting himself in the dark by means of scanning the environment and monitoring the relationship between the outgoing and returning pulses. When the pulse repetition rate is adjusted so that the returning echo is half-way between the outgoing pulses, an object appears to emit sound, the quality of which depends upon the material of the object itself.

Moving from place to place the performer discovers clear pathways, avoids obstacles and takes slow sound photographs of his surroundings.

This recording was made with the Environ-Ears Recording System, an integrated acoustical labyrinth and microphone assembly which duplicates the localization and noise-reducing functions of the human ear. The system consists of a pair of ears mounted on a tube containing two miniature high quality microphones which record the actual physical positions of sounds in three dimensions.

Both the Sondols and the Environ-Ears System were designed by Listening, Incorporated, Arlington, Massachusetts.”

Alvin Lucier was born in 1931 in Nashua, New Hampshire . He studied music at Yale and Brandeis and spent two years in Rome on a Fulbright scholarship. He was formerly conductor of the Brandeis University Chamber Chorus and now teaches electronic music at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. His recent works include Music for Solo Performer (live brainwaves) 1965, Whistlers (ionospheric disturbances) 1966, Shelter (sounds filtering through walls and floors) 1967, North American Time Capsule (humans talking to aliens) 1967, and Chambers (moving small and large resonant environments) 1968.

The Sonic Arts Union formed in 1966 when Robert Ashley, David Behrman, Alvin Lucier, and Gordon Mumma decided to pool their resources and help one another with the performance and staging of their music. Since that time the group has performed extensively in the United States and has completed three tours of Europe. Thanks to UbuWeb.

The best projects will be eligible for prizes and will be co-developed as physical exhibits at The Tech Museum in conjunction with its upcoming Art, Film and Music exhibition that will open June 4, 2008. Here is a list of all of the projects already underway, and two musical ones:

Wikisonic — by Jon Brouchoud (aka Keystone Bouchard) — consists of a round room, in both the virtual and real museum (see Second Life prototype here). The interior wall contains a musical staff, with rows of notes in the key of C. Each note ‘bulb’ can be turned on or off. A trigger revolves constantly around the space, playing only those notes which have been activated. An identical installation in Second Life mirrors the real installation, such that avatars can also turn notes on and off. The result is a collaborative musical composition, made up of asynchronous decisions made by visitors to the museum. In this way, visitors are engaged as an active and dynamic part of the composition, instead of passive and static, as is most often the case in musical experience. Additionally, if viable, proximity sensors also trigger translucent wall panels, indicating the location of each Wikisonic composer. Visitors both real and virtual will have a visual indication of a presence on ‘the other side’ - further bridging the perceived gap between the real and the virtual.

Wikisonic, Experiment #1 Machinima
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJJSdjyOMDg
Interactive music composition. Architecture Island, November 2007 - Concept by Keystone Bouchard, Scripted by Dirty McLean. Wikitune composed by Bettina Tizzy, Theory Shaw and Keystone Bouchard. Also see Musical Architecture

Music Orbits - by Ron Blechner — will explore how 3-D space can act as a medium for users to interact and create music. This interaction is being prototyped in Second Life using its internal building and scripting system. The musical arrangement will physically take up virtual space; the objects will be arrayed as either a constellation, galaxy, solar system, or atomic compound. Thus, as the user interacts with the objects, it would change their position and relative location within this structure. Not only would the position change the music element, but the positions of elements relative to one another could affect each other. See the wiki pages for this project for daily details. Also, see Ron’s blog for summary updates.

Here’s an introduction to the The Tech Virtual Museum Workshop:

There are a number of events planned, including Intro to Exhibit Building in SL, February 14 at 5 pm.

The Tech Museum of Innovation engages people of all ages and backgrounds in exploring and experiencing the technologies affecting their lives, and aims to inspire the innovator in everyone. An expansive variety of interactive exhibits and unique floor programs showcase not just how technology works, but how it affects who we are and how we live, work, play and learn. The Tech’s 132,000 square feet are divided among themed galleries focused on innovation, the internet, the human body, and exploration. In addition, The Tech also features the Hackworth IMAX Dome Theater (Northern California’s only domed IMAX screen), an educational center for workshops and labs, an up scale cafe, and a retail store featuring books, gifts, and only-in-Silicon Valley items. [Thanks to Michael DiTullio for the tip.]

According to a 2003 report from the BBC, Hospital Raymond Poincare is famous for treating road injury victims. Every year 450 deceased people pass through its morgue, and after 40 years of conducting autopsies and talking to bereaved families, chief pathologist Professor Michel Durigon decided it was time to create a Salle des Departs that did not include the traditional red carpet and lugubrious background sound.

Spalletti’s azure blue Salle des Departs was the catalyst for Scanner’s composition, for he “found himself moved beyond all expectation by the project. His brief was daunting, but Durigon felt that the hospital needed an artist whose sensibility would be a source of sustenance to mourners, help them through their pain and suffering, and fully respect the memory of the deceased.

It was this last thought which triggered a painful series of memories for Scanner. As a teenager, he lost his father in a terrible motorcycle accident. The death was a blow which left his family unable to deal with the magnitude of the loss and of their own suffering. This lack of formal mourning came back to haunt him when he met Michel Durigon. Fate has presented him with a unique opportunity to mourn his own father’s death at last, by using his gift of music to help ease the pain of other bereaved families.”

The RadioLab program is available for audition. Listen to Scanner’s Channel of Flight (18′08”) and David Lang’s Départs (18′14″) [Real Player required].