The Olympics are not simply a matter of fun and games. They are a multi-national media spectacle that–as we’ve seen in recent protests–can arouse and galvanize political action. The event’s organizers pitch it as a zone outside of politics, but of course issues of national identity, human rights, autonomy, economic might, and foreign policy all coalesce around the Olympics. While much of the current attention to these matters is directed at Beijing, groups in Montreal and London are already forming to address the impact that the arrival of the famous torch (ceremoniously relayed in a model invented by the Nazis to promote a strong image of the Third Reich around the 1936 Berlin games) will have upon local communities. Continue reading

Rust Belt / Bayou by Julia Christensen [Needs Flash Player and Speakers] - Rust Belt / Bayou is an aural exploration of two cities: Cleveland, Ohio, and New Orleans, Louisiana. For the past several years, Christensen’s artistic practice has been based in extensive travel throughout the United States, surveying the ways in which communities are changing in the shadow of corporate real estate development.

During these travels, she has often been struck by the similarities between Cleveland, a city of the Rust Belt, and New Orleans, a city of the bayou. Both cities dwell on the shores of bodies of water with global reach: Cleveland on Lake Erie, New Orleans on the Mississippi River. Continue reading

Soundpockets is a series of intimate sound interventions in public spaces. By using FM radiowaves, soundbeams and miniature speakers to create local pockets of sound, the different projects create private listening rooms, change the soundtracks of locations, and/or displace time and space.

Soundpocket 1 — created for Urban Interface, Oslo (2007) — was installed in a narrow passageway connecting two parts of the city. The soundbeam, which can be as narrow as 50 cm in diameter, was mounted on a pan/tilt head which made it possible to place the sounds very precisely in the passageway. Continue reading

Sound Walks explores some of the possibilities of Stanza’s Soundcities. It uses the Soundcities database through the openly distributed XML-file. Choose the city you want to visit: Amsterdam, Barcelona, Bergen, Bilbao, Bristol, Cork, Dresden, Ljubljana, London, Los Angeles, Napoli, Paris, Rotterdam, Salzburg, San Francisco, Sao Paulo, Shanghai, or Tokyo.

Soundcities is an online open source database of city sounds from around the world, that can be listened to, used in performances on laptops, or played on mobiles via wireless networks. Initially all of the sounds were by Stanza, but you can now contribute your own found sounds. This is was the first online open source found sound database. First version 2003.

Metal Door Tones - contact microphones on a metal door - with Patrick McGinley, Hitoshi Kojo, Fantomas (08:44) Continue reading

Quiet American is the manipulation of sounds Aaron Ximm hears and records. The project began as he grappled with what it meant to be a tourist in another culture. It continues as he grapples with what it means to be a tourist in his own. The opportunity, the thrill, and the risk of travel is being present to the world. Ximm’s goal with Quiet American is to sketch in sound the experience of being in an unfamiliar place.

Ximm made his first work from field recordings in the fall of 1998. While traveling in Vietnam, he recorded musicians, trains, moving water, crickets, monks, markets, metalwork, tired animals, and drunken tourists. Continue reading

White Sound Down - Jeff Talman is a sound and installation artist based in New York City. His work is a sensory meditation on the elementary sound of space. In his installations, he amplifies the background resonance of an environment by extracting and strategically redirecting ambient sound back into its place of origin. In so doing, he heightens the occupant’s aural perception of the surrounding area.

His most recent project, entitled White Sound Down, is a temporary multi-channel sound field installation in a remote section of the Bavarian Forest. White Sound Down is only accessible by cross country ski trails, and will be up until January 6, 2008. Continue reading

Sonic Fragments: Narrative and Mediation in Sound Art :: Princeton University, Princeton, NJ :: March 28-29, 2008 :: Call for Works: Deadline: February 15, 2008

We hear while we are in the womb, long before we see. For the rest of our lives, hearing essentially precedes the rest of the sensorium, as we move through a world of sonic fragments which affect us phenomenally and emotionally but of which we are often unaware. These fragments are mediated by our environment, our bodies, our individual and collective memories, and the technologies that pervade contemporary life: from books to radio to television to iPods. Continue reading

“”The focus on this project was to explore the sounds of different locations, as well as the musical ideas, sensibilities and techniques of the artists who recorded the sounds, most of whom are residents of these areas.”

Chain Tape Collective is nothing short of brilliant, and also a sign of our times, as distances and locations no longer are obstacles on the way to diffusion of the arts. Continue reading