Sound art continued to fill many of the March blog entries, but of equal importance this month were the sound and light, or sound and video entries. Tunnel Vision and Filling Vessel are two of particular interest. Tunnel Vision is an interactive sound and light sculpture. Created by Dutch art engineer Paul Klotz, and inspired by Nikola Tesla — the famous Serbian inventor, physicist, and electrical engineer — the shape of the installation is based on an abstraction of the 100Hz tone made by electrical generators. You can put your hands inside the sculpture changes the appearance and the sound produced by it. Five meters long, it changes its appearance and the sound produced by it whenever you put your hands inside it.

Filling Vessel is a multi-channel sound and light installation / performance by Paula Matthusen (composition, processing, and programming) and Tom O’Doherty (photography and visuals, technical assistance, and documentation). As an installation, dependent on interaction with audio feedback generated in an installation space itself, it functions in two ways: as an audience-navigable space, in which people can explore the effect they have on the sonic and visual events that take place within it; and as a performance environment, within which musicians use their instruments to interact with and influence the resultant combinations of sound and light.

“The practice of audiovisual performance is intriguing”, as Carrie Gates remarks in Vague Terrain 09: Rise of the VJ. A practice that is not rooted in any one particular mindset, but instead, emerges from a wide range of trajectories currently converging within media based performance art, it seems to address a hunger for immersive sensory experiences where aural and visual elements work together to create a whole that is something well beyond the sum of its parts.

In March, The Mapping Festival, a ten-day festival in Geneva was announced, that is devoted entirely to promoting Vjing. Toby Harris (aka *spark) was the subject of a brief interview. Harris has been building strong live video performances since the turn of the century, exploring his real-time video skills at countless festivals, in sophisticated audiovisual performances and most recently on giant touchscreen plasmas within motor shows. He also founded AVIT, the real world spin-off of vjforums.com that prompted festivals around the world.

Last but not least, March saw the announcement of our upcoming symposium — Programmable Media II: Networked Music – at Pace University in April, and the launch of three Networked_Music_Review commissions. Funded by the New York State Music Fund, they are: John Hudak’s Voices from the Paradise Network - a search for voices of deceased spirits; Haeyoung Kim’s I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On - an interactive art piece inspired by Samuel Beckett’s short novel, “Molloy”; and Zach Layton’s Net Sonification - a program written in java that crawls across the Internet, grabbing as many related URLs as possible and analyzing their contents. Here Layton gives us a range of sonic portraits, from Boing Boing to the New York Times, enabling us to experience them as networked sonic entities rather than discrete visual/semantic pages. You can see and hear all three on the blog.

In the recently launched interview by Peter Traub, Stephen Vitiello, talks about his residency in the World Trade Center and how hearing made him feel “the distance and height of the building more than seeing.”

It’s taken me some time to understand that one of the central and perhaps the most exciting consequences of the emergence of sound art as a prominent practice is the enhancement of our sensorial experience. An inroad into the hegemony of vision is being made. And with it comes a deeper understanding of acoustical perception and how, through non-visual means, elements of environmental space can be revealed.

Several of February’s NMR entries help to keep this in context, by highlighting works by composers Alvin Lucier, Bill Fontana, and Bernhard Leitner whose long histories as sound artists have helped to bring this about.

Vespers (1968) is an early influential works by Alvin Lucier. About it, Lucier wrote “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 … I am envious of the astonishing acuity of such creatures …” Vespers is performed in darkness. Each player has a hand-held echolocation device which emits a fast, sharp, narrow-beamed click. 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, the performer moves from place to place, avoiding obstacles, discovering clear pathways, and thus revealing the elements of environmental space through non-visual means.

Bill Fontana, whose career spans 30 years, and who was interviewed for NMR in November ‘07, takes a different approach. Throughout his 30 year career, Fontana has used the urban environment as a living source of information that he transports to a new sound space, all with the potential of conjuring up visual imagery in the mind of the listener. His recent work, Speeds of Time, a Chelsea College of Art & Design / Tate Britain commission, can be heard on NMR.

Also among the February entries is one on the work of Bernhard Leitner: TonRaumSkulptur / Sound Space Sculpture (1968-1973), showing at the Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin, is a work in which sound creates the space and its special qualities. Or as Cathrin Pichler writes, Leitner’s sculptures “make it possible to experience physical space as an “inner” space… [The] work leads us to a quality of sound (as space) that remains concealed within stimulus streams. It shows the potentials of sensual experience that we are barely conscious of because they are either lost or have remained unknown as possibilities.”

Other, more recent works – such as Spatial Z, a performance work by experimental instrument maker John Bowers, sound artist Ann Rosén and composer Sten-Olof Hellström; and Vertigo, an installation by Daan Brinkmann – explore the spatial experience of sound, raising questions about auditory perception.

In Spatial Z, sound is disseminated through a variety of spaces, some real, some virtual, some miniscule, others large, thereby raising such questions as: What is the connection between music and space? Between instruments and the environments they find themselves in? Between the spaces in which performers interact with their instruments and each other and the audience’s listening space? What is the relationship between the concert (architectural) space and the (imaginary) spaces suggested in the music itself?

In Brinkmann’s Vertigo, a circle of 32 loudspeakers, broadcast sound that revolves around the listener 16 times per second, challenging him or her to explore the boundaries of auditory perception.

In addition to these entries which focus on hearing are the growing number of entries in which the audio and visual are presented together. This suggests that while sound practice may indeed be impacting the hegemony of vision, there is a preference among many of the more recent works for conjunctions between the two rather than for a rejection of either.

Examples include: The beta version of Jason Van Anden’s BubbleBeats.com, which launched at a Dorkbot meeting in early February. Based on technology Van Anden originally invented to enable robots to interact improvisationally, anyone can visit and combine colorful bubbles filled with music (or other sounds) to create new living compositions.

Or, Islands of Consciousness by Oleg Marakov and Mario Klingemann where sounds and images enter a very close relationship in which the randomly arranged musical phrases have a direct influence on the visual outcome. When you look at this piece you have to keep in mind that all the visuals are assembled in real time using photos downloaded from Flickr.com. All the transitions and effects are entirely random and only happen on your screen.

Or, the open-ended group, Metamkine, that includes musicians and fimmakers. Through the magic of mirrors, multiple projectors and highly ingenious live on stage editing, Metamkine researches the relationship between image and sound. Working around a core narrative, they spill forth eddies of impromptu vignettes, accompanied by a live soundtrack of tape fragments and ancient synthesiser sounds.

A final note here: of the two NMR commissions launched in February — Air Detritus by Miya Masaoka, and Flou by Jason Freeman with Andrew Beck, Xiang Cao, Mark Godfrey, Jagadeeswaran Jayaprakash, Al Matthews, Rachel Ponder, Alex Rae, and Sriram Viswanathan — one, Flou, also falls in the category of works that utilize both audio and visual materials, and adds to it the participatory experience of a game. Well, not exactly a game. You do fly a ship through space, but you can’t shoot anything, score points, or win or lose. The focus, rather, is on the soundtrack: as you navigate through a 3D world and zoom through objects in space, you add loops and apply effects to an ever-evolving musical mix.

It seems to me that play has become an ever more significant aspect of networked activities, and while much of this is brought about by the participatory nature of the work, it also exists in work that is “through-composed” or out of the hands of the listener. In the October 2007 Newsletter, I mentioned the performance piece, You Say Potato, I say Potato, a humorous study of the sonic properties of genetically modified potatoes, in which two research groups try to answer the crucial question: GM potatoes, they may be good for our stomachs, but are they good for our ears? That month, we blogged the Tomato Quintet, the sonification of 7 days of tomato ripening into 49 minutes of musical wonder by Chris Chafe (Music), Nikolaos Hanselmann (Visuals) and Greg Niemeyer (Cook). This month, vegetable humor is back again with the Vienna Vegetable Orchestra. In existence since 1998, the orchestra, composed of 11 musicians, a sound engineer and a video artist, performs throughout Europe and Asia on instruments made of fresh vegetables. As an encore, the audience is offered fresh vegetable soup.

And then there’s Vaibhav Bhawsar’s Udder Utter, an instrument that utters syllabic sounds derived from the Devanāgarī alphabet. Its playability is inspired by the gestures involved in milking a cow. And Lucier-in-a-Shower MP3s, an aquatic take on Alvin Lucier’s classic I Am Sitting in a Room Listening, that may not be intentionally humorous, but if you know Alvin, the idea of putting him in a shower has its humorous side.

A little more on the macabre side – and without vegetables, udders or showers – is Diamanda Galas’ upcoming performance on February 14th of the Valentine Day Massacre.

Happy Valentine’s Day to you all.

Networked_Music Review also launched two newly commissioned works, More of the Same by LoVid, a work that loads copies of a single sound sample and explores fissures in the digital veneer as the spoken communication is played back repeatedly. And You’re Not My Father, by Paul Slocum, composed of a sequence of re-enactments of a 10 second scene from the television show Full House, overlaid with sound loops from the scene’s original music.

Finally, an interesting interview by Peter Traub with Golan Levin that focuses on his 2001 project, Dialtones (A Telesymphony), a concert performed through the choreographed dialing and ringing of the audience’s own mobile phones, can be found on the site. Peter and I both agree, it’s nice to see older work get a “second life”.

I had promised myself not to write about sound this month, but find it impossible to resist mention of three works in which sonification of aspects of the environment plays a part: 1) D.J. Spooky’s excursion to Antarctica where he will shoot, edit and score the film Terra Nova: The Antarctica Suite in which every sound will be made from the sound of ice (environmental, geological, magnetic, atmospheric etc); 2) Jeff Talman’s White Sound Down, an installation in which the sound of snow falling is the sole sound source. The work is available to cross-country skiers in the Bavarian Forest, Germany until January 6th; and 3) Akousmaflore by Grégory Lasserre & Anaïs met den Ancxt - a garden made with real musical and interactive plants or flowers in which each plant reacts to the touch of a spectator with a specific sound language.

December also included a number of references to events in which live coding plays a significant role. The first, Test_Lab: Live Coding, took place at the V2 lab in Rotterdam and online on December 13th and focused on the way live coding can be used to provide expressive control over software code during runtime, thus allowing for live (artistic) improvisation by programmers. Test_Lab included debates and presentations on Live Coding, a networked code jamming performance, live coded music, introductions and hands-on experiences in Live Coding programming languages for code improvisation, and a live coded Augmented Reality experience.

The organization, TOPLAP, also described in the December posts, exists to promote the writing and modifying of rules while they are being followed ( including the writing of software while it is being executed) and to allow programmers to improvise music and visuals live before an audience as well as conduct exploratory research with live source code. TOPLAP’s draft manifesto includes the following: “Live coding is not about tools. Algorithms are thoughts. Chainsaws are tools. That’s why algorithms are sometimes harder to notice than chainsaws.” And “The skillful extemporization of algorithm as an expressive / impressive display of mental dexterity.”

A Conversation with Andrew Sorensen, an Australian musician and programmer, and author of the Impromptu live coding reported uses of Impromptu to draw in, and manipulate the code window, hooking the graphics into the musical algorithms. In this conversation (From Scratch - A Conversation with Andrew Sorensen by Mitchell Whitelaw) Sorensen also touches on the live coding scene, performance, craft and virtuosity, code as score, coding without computers and algorithm as thought.

One of the most interesting things to observe, both in the December postings and in the postings throughout the year, is the number of festivals, workshops and other events available to artists in Europe. A quick look at December postings shows:

Performance Time 08 Istanbul :: March 24-30, 2008. Galatala Perform, an artist-run interdisciplinary performance venue in Istanbul, is organizing this event, which will explore new fields and approaches in performance. The aim is to bring together local and foreign artists from a number of disciplines, such as, performance art, experimental theatre, dance, and music.

Club Transmediale.08 – Unpredictable, a festival for adventurous music that will take place between 25 January and 2 February 2008 in Berlin. The festival will investigate artistic concepts that imply the surprising and unforeseeable, accidents, mistakes and coincidences as a means to alter the dynamics of creative processes and to discover new aesthetic forms.

The International Mobile Music Workshop to take place 13-15 May 2008 on Vienna, Austria. It is the 5th in a series of annual international gatherings that explore the creative, critical and commercial potential of mobile music. They are looking for new ideas and ground-breaking projects on sound in mobile contexts. There are more – in Nice, France and Holon, Israel - all supporting artists with interests in new and experimental work.

Finally, let me call your attention to the newly commissioned musical work on NMR – and particularly two works that make use of MySpace: Peter Traub’s Itspace, which features everyday objects from Peter’s house, all of which are friends. A 1-minute piece composed of samples of each object being struck, resonated, and so forth can be heard on the site. And My Space Sound by Sawako Kato, an audio pop-up book about the village called MySpace.

And to the interview with Adam Nash, who works in Second Life - which he calls a “post-convergent medium”, one in which no single media-element (sound, vision, sociality, network, time, etc) takes precedent; rather they all exist equally in a symbiotic relationship, without which none of them could exist.

Happy New Year to you all.

Each month for several months now I’ve talked about the number of NMR blogs that deal with sound art, the wide range of practices – sound sculptures, sound installations, performances, environments, to mention only four - and the increasing use of non-musical sounds. I will do the same again, referencing some of the many sound works that were blogged in November.

Among those dealing with "new" sounds – i.e. sounds beyond human perception that are brought into conscious awareness by the artist’s work – are Fire Organ by Michel Moglia, an instrument that transforms heat from the flame of a fire into sound; and Katie Patterson’s Ice Records. Paterson brought back sounds and water from three melting glaciers in Iceland. The sounds were pressed into three LP records – ice creaking, cracking, hissing. After several months of experimentation, molds were made from them using a very sensitive casting technique – the meltwater from those same glaciers was poured into those molds and frozen, creating ‘ice records’, which were then played on three turntables, playing the sounds of the melting glaciers from whence the water/ice had come – playing out the dissolving landscape.

Other works focused on environmental sound and acoustic ecology, such as Peter Cusack’s Sounds from Dangerous Places, which examines the soundscapes of sites of major environmental damage such as Chernobyl and the Azerbaijan oil fields.

Or Mikro, a series of improvised performances by HC Gilje and Justin Bennett, in which contact microphones and electromagnetic sniffers pick up "unhearable" sounds in the environment to create the live soundtracks.

For those who may find the variety of sound works referenced in the blog confusing – are they music or not? – this month also includes a blog on a new book from MIT Press, Understanding the Art of Sound Organization, by Leigh Landy that tries to make its way through what the author calls "the marshland of terminology" in which sound works are currently bogged down (pun intended). He proposes the first general foundational framework for the study of the art of sound organization, defines terms, discusses relevant forms of music, categorizes works, and sets sound-based music in interdisciplinary contexts.

Finally, the increasing presence of sound in visual arts productions and the proliferation of visual and media practices in which sound is central to the meaning are very much in evidence. The following are a few instances from this month’s blog:

Symphony for 54 Shoes by Ingrid Bachmann, a kinetic sculpture that involves 27 pairs of shoes collected from a variety of second hand and thrift stores, each with a toe and heel tap attached to it that produce the sound of tapping shoes;

Jean-Pierre Aubé’s Nocturne, a work for a lighthouse, two photoelectric cells and eight LEDs that draws you into its quiet beauty;

Flocking Orchestra (aka DT1) by Tatsuo Unemi and Daniel Bisig – an interactive installation that employs flocking algorithms to produce music and visuals;

And Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s The Killing Machine and Other Stories (1995-2007), which features 11 installations that weave together independent but complementary experiences. Each piece moves to its own time and rhythm, uniting sound with moving image in order to produce stories that live side by side in time.

An article, Lost in Translation: Sound in the Discourse of Synaesthesia by Christoph Cox, sheds some light on this ongoing phenomenon and the reevaluation of the senses and their traditional hierarchy that accompanies it.

Finally, the November blog contains our plea for support. If you value the work we are doing – here, on Networked_Performance, or on Turbulence.org – please contribute.

I’ve talked about the number of NMR blogs that deal with sound art works, the wide range of practices – sound sculptures, sound installations, performances, environments, to mention four - and the increasing use of non-musical sounds.

You can observe the same phenomena in October’s blog. There you will find a description of the upcoming exhibition in Lille, France of American composer Don Ritter’s interactive sound installations, Intersection and O Telephone. In Intersection, viewers walk through complete darkness while the sounds of car traffic screech, stop and crash in response to their presence. O Telephone is made up of six modified 1960’s telephones which respond with “om” when answered by viewers. The phones will eventually begin a spontaneous composition if they are not answered by viewers.

And you can read a review by Turbulence’s Jo-Anne Green of Core Sample, Teri Rueb’s recent installation on Spectacle Island in Boston Harbor. An audio walk - with a GPS enabled PDA and headphones that successfully combines the real live sounds of the Island – the lapping of the waves, the overflight of planes from Logan airport, with those Rueb has recorded, creating, “a magical blend” of live and pre-recorded, real and virtual that is sometimes confusing - where is the sound coming from? - and sometimes more musical, like a duet.

The Great Fences of Australia tells about Australian violinist and radio artist Jon Rose and violinist Hollis Taylor, who traveled 25,000 kilometers to play and record the unique sounds of hundreds of fences in every state and territory in Australia. You can hear an excerpt here.

While David McCallum - a Toronto musician and media artist, whose work I have loved since I first discovered You Say Potatoe, I Say Potato (1) - plays audio feedback through the microphone at the top of his MacBook’s screen in his recent performance, I Swallow. Using his mouth, McCallum coaxes the feedback into different frequencies, playing it like an instrument. You can listen here.

And Alberto Gaitán, in a work called dump created for the Found Sound project in Washington, D.C., forages among a growing Internet field of sound files - which his computer chews, ruminates and digests in real-time to bring forth the audio atmosphere inside a re-purposed portable latrine. (A reference, perhaps to Duchamp?)

The human imagination seems never to tire. And let loose in sonic art, it comes up with hundreds and hundreds of new sounds and as many new ways of presenting them.

Sonic art is considered a “new” art form and an unusual one in that it has traditionally been regarded (and with many music people, is still regarded) as “inferior and subservient to other creative forms.” (Gibbs). If you’re interested in learning something more about this, you can check out Tony Gibbs’ recently published The Fundamentals of Sonic Art and Sound Design.

You should also check out Peter Traub’s just launched interview with Bill Fontana, who has been creating musical networks and making “sound sculptures” since the early 1970s. Fontana’s works are usually large in scale and often involve the transmission of sounds from one ‘listening’ location with a network of microphones and/or sensors to another location where the sounds are overlayed onto the local sonic environment. You can read the interview and listen to some of Fontana’s work here.

(1) In You Say Potatoe, I Say Potato two research labs compete in the battle of the century to answer perhaps the most important question in the field of Genetic Engineering: GM Potatoes - they may be safe to put in your stomach, but are they safe to put in your ears?

Once again sound projects have played a major role in the posts. There were numerous sound art festivals such as ctrl_alt_del in Turkey and Audiospace 2007. You can listen to Audiospace’s received submissions, including one performed by Second Life’s Avatar Orchestra at the above URL.

And there were a number of individual sound works, some of them strange and funny such as Tyler Freeman’s wearable drum pants and Calle Rosenqvist’s Beat Dress, a luminous dress that pulses according to the rhythm of the music.

Other projects introduced new sounds and new ways of hearing sounds. EarthSpeaker, a set of outdoor sculptures by Jeff Feddersen, for instance, absorbs solar power and releases amplified VLF sounds from outer space lightening and human generated waves; Harnessing Wild Electricities from Outer Space, an experiment performed by Thomas Ashcroft introduced his audience to the direct conduction and capture of Radio Emissions from Jupiter during an Io-pass; Nox Matter, a joint installation by Franco-italian artist Lorella Abenavoli and Quebec artist-researcher Nicolas Reeves investigates the potential of two unusual materials: darkness and silence; while the terrestrial installation, Sonic Marshmallow - inspired by the early sound mirrors built between the two world wars as early attempts at detecting incoming enemy planes - allows people standing in front of the white cylinders to hear each other’s whispers 60 metres over the pond that separates them.

There were some truly wonderful sound artists whose work was reported on in this month’s NMR, among them Yolanda Harris, whose focus over the last ten years has been on the relations between sound, image and space through technologies of communication and navigation.

But the posts weren’t all about sound. The future of music was an issue as well. Gert Leonard wrote about the decline in CD sales as symptomatic of the technological changes impacting the “sell-sell-sell” music industry. “Web 2.0,” he says, “is a canvas that allows information to be put up, shared, changed, and remixed. It’s about the interaction, the send-and-receive options that make it useful and ’special’. And in music, it’s always been about interaction, about sharing, about engaging … not Sell-Sell-Sell right from the start … Stop the sharing and you kill the music business - it’s that simple.”

More interesting to me, and I hope to others, than the future of what had been a very greedy business, is the future of music itself. There are a growing number of posts where an interest in 3D space is shown to be altering the musical experience, making music / sound a spatial experience generated by its users. In the sound work of Adam Nash in Second Life, for instance: Nash works primarily in networked real-time 3D spaces, exploring them as live audiovisual performance spaces. An avatar literally creates the piece (composition) as he / she walks or flies through its multi-layered space.

Elsewhere too one can see the blurring of boundaries between music and other disciplines, particularly architecture. Mix House is an example. While Mix House, the work of architects Karen Van Lengen and Joel Sanders, and composer / sound artist Ben Rubin, exists only as a design and one animation, which you can see on NMR, it “cohesively incorporates cutting-edge technologies and traditional acoustic principles to create a home that constructs and frames audiovisual scenes, both inside and outside the house, making locations near and far both visible and audible, thereby enhancing the individual’s sensory experience of the domestic landscape. Also see NOX Son-O-House, a public pavilion that allows people to not just hear sound in a musical structure, but also to participate in the composition of the sound.

Leonardo Music Journal has put out a call for articles on the subject; Why Live? Performance in the Age of Digital Reproduction that suggests some uneasiness about changes now occurring. I’m sure we’ll be writing about them in the future.

Finally, this month’s entries also included an interesting interview by NMR blogger, Peter Traub, with Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, whose multimedia pieces combine aspects of sculpture, cinema, sound installation, and Cardiff and Miller talk about their collaborative process - they have been working together since 1990.

Once again sound played a significant role in the month’s entries. From the interview with Max Neuhaus, pioneer of artistic activities with sound and coiner of the now familiar term “sound installation” to Music for Rocks and Water by Cheryl Leonard, where three performers play water and rocks, dripping, drizzling, pouring, rolling, rocking, brushing, rubbing, and stacking them; from Slavek Kwi’s electroacoustic sound paintings created from site-specific recordings to Ken Gregory’s SunSuckers, small machines that are notorious singers, their song a call produced by sensing light conditions and temperature; and Michael Dory’s Concrete Crickets, small devices housed in camouflage appropriate to urban streets — soda cans, cigarette packs, and the like — that also sing, each programmed with a particular voice and sensitive to others of its kind. In addition, there were several calls for sound art — from Bavarian Radio, Artcast, an ongoing series of podcasting programs, Lancaster, England, and a call for field recordings by phone for radio in the U.S.

Audio-visual work also played a prominent role in the month’s entries, with several performances by the artistic duo LoVid: Cross Current Resonance Transducer a performance at Wave Farm, and another at PS1 MoMA; Help Carry a Tune; Transformation 2_ landscape a minimalist video and sound work by Erika Matsunami and Antonis Anissegos based on an interpretation of Samuel Beckett’s poem “Mirlitonnades”. And a generative music visualization, Seelenlose Automaten by Patric Schmidt and Benedikt Groß in which MIDI control messages are sent simultaneously to the sound and image generators. Each mapping to a specific visual or sound effect, these messages are a vocabulary of rules giving structure to the composition. All change can be precisely predicted, and as a result the entire composition is perfectly synchronized. And N. at Siggraph 2007, an evolving composition that is an artistic visualization and sonification of near real-time Arctic data.

There are reminders too of the changes that have taken place or are in the process of taking place – audio wiring for one — the development of the muti-channel sound field that has those of us who grew up with stereo wondering how to save our work and make it available for surround sound technology, and the return — perhaps most visible in Second Life, from music as a private activity, encouraged by technological developments, to music as a social art form.

Finally for this reader/listener, there were two very special works: Tomato Quintet and Life - fluid, invisible, inaudible…. In the first, Chris Chafe, Nikolaos Hanselmann (visuals) and Greg Niemeyer (cook) let 5 cases of different varieties of tomatoes (from Chafe’s garden) ripen to perfection. They recorded the ripening process by tracking the changes in CO2 that the ripening produces, then stored the CO2 changes as a time series, compressing it along the time axis, and translating the changes to a musical scale. The resulting music is a sonification of 7 days of ripening in the course of 49 minutes.

Life - fluid, invisible, inaudible… is a collaboration between world-renowned composer / musician Sakamoto Ryuich and Takatani Shiro (video). An installation, it revisits the resources of sound and vision in their earlier collaboration, “Life, an opera”, for an entirely new deconstruction and evolution of the work. While “Life” was an experiment conducted in opera’s linear form at the end of the 20th Century, Life - fluid, invisible, inaudible… is a non-linear, decentralized flow of audio and visuals which the visitors themselves enter to experience.

From soundscapes to sound sculptures, to a festival of found sound, and works that reproduce the microscopic sounds of plants and trees and the micro-activity of the body, sound played a significant role in this month’s entries.

Digital Art Weeks, Zurich, Switzerland ran a soundscape competition with soundscapes submitted in three categories: the Real World, the Virtual World and Mixed Worlds.
July also saw the opening of Greylock Arts, a new gallery in Adams, MA (USA) with a show of interactive audio sculptures by Gregory Shakar called Mood Vectors, where participants may encounter melodic bolts of lightning, giant sonorous metronomes, and enormous undulating pixels.

Robin Rimbaud (aka Skanner) produced a new sound installation for TONSPUR in Vienna that explores an idea of the ensemble voice and makes significant use of breath and pauses. And Adam Nash has created an interactive audio-visual sculpture called A Rose Heard at Dusk for Second Life that is played by avatars walking, flying and jumping through the space in the gallery below the Opera House, on Big Pond’s Ponderosa Island. You will need free Second Life software to enjoy it.

The two works that make use of microscopic sound are Jen Boyd’s recordings of plants and animals, and Jacob Kirkegaard’s Labyrinthitis. Working with contact microphones and a flash recorder, Boyd constructs stereo soundscapes to give depth to the delicate sounds of trees and plants. In Labyrinthitis, which will premiere at the Art and Biomedicine: Beyond the Body conference in Copenhagen in September, Kirkegaard has turned his listening ear inwards–to his own ear–and by using specially developed listening equipment, has captured the micro-activity which the hair cells of the ear broadcasts.

For New Yorkers, there will be Public Sounds, a Festival of Sound Art presented by Roulette that will take place throughout downtown Manhattan from August 11-19. It will include artists Kabir Carter, Jessica Feldman, Kaffe Matthews, Leslie Ross and Stephen Vitiello.

Otherness (CD & Booklet) is now available. This is the ninth implementation of the series curated by the Sonic Arts Network, a British organization dedicated to studying, spreading and pondering non-conventional sound experiences. It is curated by David Cotner.

Finally, this month’s entries also included a long and intriguing interview with Scot Gresham-Lancaster, a member of the historic computer network group, the Hub; and a composer, performer, and instrument builder dedicated to research and performance using the expanding capabilities of computer networks for musical and cross-disciplinary expression.

This month’s blog was filled with entries about audio-visual work; from Harvestworks’ Crackle, Noise & Light, an evening of electronic sound and video performances that included interactive sound-art and live cinema by NoiseFold (David Stout and Cory Metcalf), as part of the New York Electronic Arts Festival, to performances by LoVid and Zach Layton at Roulette in NYC.

From Cut Chemist (aka Lucas MacFadden ), who presented a video-scratching performance in which he grabbed a digital camera, pointed it at the audience and proceeded to scratch the live footage in sync with the music rhythm, to FEED (Kurt Hentschlager), an audio-visual composition in which audio and video activate one-another; and Audio Kinematics (Jost Muxfeldt), a virtual audio sculpture where sound is visualized and a speeding diagram set to sound - both part of SONAR 2007 in Spain.

The Musicians (Julia Burns, with Ardrian Hardjono and Balint Seeber), drawing on the work of David Rokeby, is an interactive artwork that makes use of cinematography and sound. The user can direct two musicians as they jam filmically and impact the artwork by their movements.

And then there’s Sound Economy, an audio/video approach to economics that uses the Philippines Gross Domestic Product as a source to manipulate sounds and video.

Even Joseph Nechvatal’s viral symphOny, in which custom-created computer viruses were given audio manifestations - beautiful ones at that - by Andrew Deutsch and Matthew Underwood.

There are several locative works, among them: Audio Nomad (Nick Mariette), part of a 3-year research project that will trace the now-absent Berlin Wall through Berlin-Mitte, overlaying the space with a complex two-dimensional soundscape generated on a mobile device; and Always Something Somewhere Else (Duncan Speakman) which touches on issues of climate change and globalization.

Among my other favorites: Vatnajokull, a project that invites you to phone a glacier in Iceland and listen to its melting through a submerged microphone. While the sound of melting ice is actually very beautiful to listen to, the artist reminds us in her invitation that what we will be listening to by far, is Undercover by Dana Gordon, a blanket with 24 wireless speakers that provides a very special physical/sound experience for the user.

There were many new instruments and sound controllers, a number of them presented at NIME 2007 in NYC. Among them were two controllers that make use of eye movements - Oculog, a new system for performing electronic music where a video-based eye movement system is used to control the sound. And, EyeMusic v1.0., presented in performance, that demonstrates how the eyes can be used to directly perform a musical composition.

For those interested in non-traditional instruments that provide amateurs with meaningful performance experiences, check out Experimental Music Instruments, a group of engineers, composers and sound artists who can hack almost anything and turn it into a musical instrument.

There is a short interview with Amit Pitaru and a longer one with Miya Masaoka, a composer and musician known for her koto, laser interfaces, and work with the sound and movement of insects, the physiological responses of plants, the human brain, and her own body.