Transition Soundings — an interactive public sound art sculpture by David Birchfield, David Lorig, Kelly Phillips, and Assegid Kidané — is a free standing, fully self contained outdoor installation. Located at a bus stop in Tempe, Arizona, the structure has the appearance of a large transit map with hubs and paths connecting locations across its surface. However, this stylized ‘map’ is actually a large network of sensors and speakers that trace paths in sound across the surface of the wall. As users move and gesture in front of the piece, a network of proximity sensors initiates sonic events that wash across the surface in a fashion that references ripples across the surface of water. Sound events propagate through the network in a way that mimics movement of traffic, ideas, currents, and connections in the networks of our lives. Continue reading

Welcome to the April 08 Issue of Furthernoise.org (Roger Mills, Editor). Along with a host of new reviews, we bring you news of upcoming events and performances as well as an audio player stacked with all the best tracks of the issue.

David Tagg - Waist Deep Seas of Milk (review) New York musician, David Tagg, has seen The Future of Modern Guitar. And this sonic seer’s astral projections are sumptuously spread across the ambient expanses of Waist Deep Seas of Milk, though all trace of twang, pluck and strum is dissolved in FX haze and spun out in endless echo returns. Review by Alan Lockett. Continue reading

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

Sonic Fragments: Narrative and Mediation in Sound Art - A two-day festival and symposium :: March 28-29, 2008 :: Princeton University, Princeton, NJ :: Free and open to the public.

Please join us as we host an international group of scholars and practitioners who are gathering to explore the roles of narrative and mediation in art practices that engage sound as a material. The symposium will consist of three panel discussions as well as an exhibition of audio-works for portable music players made expressly for the geography, architecture, and social spaces of the Princeton University campus. Continue reading

Stephen Vitiello creates sound installations that often feature pristine recordings of natural environments and phenomena – the Amazon rain forest or flapping moth wings for example– sonically magnified to expose their internal detail and beauty. His installation work also focuses heavily on the use and implications of space as a compositional parameter. Vitiello has released several CDs and his work has been performed at The Tate Modern, The Whitney Museum of American Art, and The Kitchen, NYC. His work was also featured in the 2006 Biennale of Sydney and the 2002 Whitney Biennial. He is currently Assistant Professor of Kinetic Imaging at Virginia Commonwealth University.

On September 21, 2007, Vitiello visited the University of Virginia. We sat and discussed his work for an hour in the university’s Jefferson Rotunda. The recording and transcript of that interview is presented below. 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

[Image: Icon attached to the railing] Touched Echo, a performative installation by Markus Kison, can be experienced at Brühlsche Terrasse, Dresden until October 31, 2008. The installation takes visitors back to the night of February 13, 1945 when Dresden’s Old Town was almost completely destroyed.

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. Continue reading

Sound Device :: March 5–22, 2008 :: Opening Reception and Performances by Katrina Lamb, Jeff Ray, Rafael Canedo :: March 8, 2008; 7–10 pm :: Root Division, 3175 17th Street, San Francisco, CA.

Root Division is pleased to showcase a selection of contemporary sound art devices created by artists, musicians, and technologists. This international survey includes site-specific installations, interactive devices, performances, and quiet evocations. Of particular note are: Paul Slocum’s compositions for a modified dot-matrix printer (Dot Matrix Synth); Paris Mancini’s video of singer Nina Petrochko mimicking ambient sounds from the city and countryside (Sustaining Notes for Ground); Rafael Canedo’s Punchcard Symphony; and PB8’s Collective Instrument #1. Continue reading

Tuned City - Between Sound and Space Speculation is a comprehensive exhibition and conference project planned for July 2008. The project searches for a new evaluation of architectural spaces from the perspective of the acoustic through the facilitation of dialog between the discourses of sound art, architecture and urban planning as well as the commissioning and exhibition of several site-specific works in various locations around the city of Berlin.

Tuned City presents artistic work and theoretical approaches derived from a critical preoccupation with sound in the context of urban and architectonic situations and their socio-political implications. Continue reading

The musical Sea Organ (2005), by Nikola Bašić, is located on the shores of Zadar, Croatia, and is the world’s first second musical pipe organ played by the sea. Simple and elegant steps, carved in white stone, were built on the quayside. Underneath, there are 35 musically tuned tubes with whistle openings on the sidewalk. The movement of the sea pushes air through, and – depending on the size and velocity of the wave – musical chords are played. The waves create random harmonic sounds.

Continue reading