“The Last Quiet Places“, new podcast by On Being featuring Gordon Hempton.

Gordon Hempton says that silence is an endangered species. He defines real quiet as presence — not an absence of sound, but an absence of noise. The Earth, as he knows it, is a “solar-powered jukebox.” Quiet is a “think tank of the soul.” We take in the world through his ears.

Listen

Fantastic project by Sound and Music.

Minute of Listening is a creative learning project through which Sound and Music hopes to enable every child in the country to gain access to a huge diversity of music and sound and, for sixty seconds each day, to focus on the richness and enjoyment of the act of listening.

Via musicofsound

Bernie Krause has recently released a new book, called The Great Animal Orchestra. There’s also a fantastic lecture with the same name, given by him at California Academy of Sciences. Almost one hour of a fantastic presentation about sound and nature.

About the lecture:

Dr. Bernie Krause, creator of Wild Sanctuary, demonstrates that every living organism produces sound. This presentation focuses on the symbiotic ways in which the sounds of one organism affect and interrelate with other organisms, local and regional, within a given habitat.

Learn about unusual soundscapes and their relevance to preserving natural sounds worldwide. Biophony–the notion that all sounds in undisturbed natural habitats fit into unique niches–will be used to illustrate the ways in which animals taught humans to dance and sing.

Dr. Bernie Krause: The Great Animal Orchestra from California Academy of Sciences on FORA.tv

About the book:

Musician and naturalist Bernie Krause is one of the world’s leading experts in natural sound, and he’s spent his life discovering and recording nature’s rich chorus. Searching far beyond our modern world’s honking horns and buzzing machinery, he has sought out the truly wild places that remain, where natural soundscapes exist virtually unchanged from when the earliest humans first inhabited the earth.

Krause shares fascinating insight into how deeply animals rely on their aural habitat to survive and the damaging effects of extraneous noise on the delicate balance between predator and prey. But natural soundscapes aren’t vital only to the animal kingdom; Krause explores how the myriad voices and rhythms of the natural world formed a basis from which our own musical expression emerged.

From snapping shrimp, popping viruses, and the songs of humpback whales-whose voices, if unimpeded, could circle the earth in hours-to cracking glaciers, bubbling streams, and the roar of intense storms; from melody-singing birds to the organlike drone of wind blowing over reeds, the sounds Krause has experienced and describes are like no others. And from recording jaguars at night in the Amazon rain forest to encountering mountain gorillas in Africa’s Virunga Mountains, Krause offers an intense and intensely personal narrative of the planet’s deep and connected natural sounds and rhythm.

The Great Animal Orchestra is the story of one man’s pursuit of natural music in its purest form, and an impassioned case for the conservation of one of our most overlooked natural resources-the music of the wild.

More info/Buy: NY Times | Amazon | Hachette

Audio interview with Chris Watson talking about noise pollution and education.

There was a lot of interesting discussion during this interview about the nature of noise pollution and the considerable threat it poses to our quality of life. Worrying still, it appears that our noisy modern world is drowning out the natural soundscape and interfering with species of wildlife that rely on sound for communication.

What seems to be most alarming is that we’re largely ignoring this problem – our world certainly isn’t getting any quieter – and with more of us living in urbanised environments, noise pollution is fast becoming a significant health problem.

Via onthenatureofthings

Fantastic post by Tim Prebble about a field recording trip he had at PNG (Papua New Guinea).

Well it was a field recording trip that was equals parts inspiring & exhausting! By the end of the week I had recorded total data of:

744 24 bit 96kHz 4 channel audio = 70.74GB
722 24 bit 96kH 2 channel audio = 30.5GB
Canon 7D photos = 833MB
Canon s95 video & stills = 11.44GB

But please bear in mind most of the recordings from the trip I cannot post due to them being specific to the film I’m working on – the sounds I have posted below were recorded in my own free time….
To hear the remainder, you’ll just have to wait until the film is released!

Read/Listen at musicofsound

“Suoni dal confine” a new project curated by Leandro Pisano wants to describe those transformations and transitions that traditional soundscape has gone through in the last years. In order to do that we merge together different level of arts (live performances, installations, talks and conference) and we move away from a simplistic and nostalgic interpretation of the soundscape itself. By reading the boundaries of a territory, we focus more on its acoustic symbology, considering it not anymore as a de-limited element but rather as an interaction and a system of relationships among ever shifting part: “border areas are spaces of dynamism, of conflict, of contradiction and mediation in which the apparent incoherence and extraneousness of certain sounds become the peculiar novelty” (Enrico Coniglio).

“Suoni dal confine” comes into being with an event at Spazio Thetis (Fondazione Thetis) in Venezia, on 20th of May 2011, featuring Enrico Coniglio and Yasuhiro Morinaga. An Ufficio Bifolco production. This movie was produced during 2011 by Ufficio Bifolco (ufficiobifolco.it). Film editing, camera work and postproduction: Antonello Carbone. Subtitles ENG/ITA: Anna Palmer

First: a BIG thank you to all the contributors, this wouldn’t have been possible without the sounds!

Considering these sounds were recorded at the end of the year and the result is a mash up of these sounds, I think it would be best to make these the Sounds of December.

How did this work?

The Max/MSP patch works by playing random files in a random sequence and from random points within the files. If left by itself it can play these files back in this random order to create a never-ending soundscape. Although, there are a few controls to help design the way it sounds:

• Play length of each file (Eg.: If it’s set at 4000ms, it would play back a sound for 4000ms and then crossfade into the next sound)
• Fade length – crossfade length (from 0ms to 1ms less than the play length)
• Speed/pitch: Vari-speed playback control
• Reverse
• Random type: Urn (random without repeats), Drunk (Randomised but ‘drunken’), Random (random with unpredictable repeats), Counter (sequential playback)

The outputs were connected to a channel strip type interface, from which the signal was sent (parallel) to a reverb and delay plugin.

What you hear below are sounds that were contributed (thank you again!) and then generated and ‘performed’ using the above mentioned controls with a MIDI controller. I recorded a few takes and this was the one I preferred the most. I’ve also included a screengrab of the patch at work, for the curious.

Have a great sounding year ahead!

Thanks to:
Eckhard Kuchenbecker
Echo Collective
Hrishikesh Dani
Chris Nealy
Angel Perez Grandi
Jaydea Lopez
Ana Roman
Péter Terner
Anna Papaioannou

Year End Sonic-Mash on Soundcloud

Year End Sonic-Mash on Vimeo.

Fantastic broadcast from BBC Radio 4, featuring Chris Watson’s recordings in Antarctica.

What strikes most people when they first arrive in Antarctica is the quiet . “It’s so quiet; its the only place in the world that you can actually hear Geology happening; all these processes that you’re schooled to think take thousands and thousands of years, the movement of glaciers and the shifting of rocks … And that’s an amazing experience that process of the landscape changing” says Jeff Wilson, a Director on the BBC series Frozen Planet. And the sounds of ‘geology happening’ are captured in the first of a new series of NATURE by wildlife sound recordist Chris Watson. The sounds of the ice are astonishing; from the huge, powerful grinding and creaking sounds as glaciers calve or ice sheets buckle under pressure, to the delicate sounds of water lapping under thin sheets of sea ice or the tinkling sounds produced when fine needle-like ice crystals move in a breeze of volcanic gases inside an ice cave at the base of Erebus, Antarctica’s most active volcano.

With contributions from some the team who worked on the BBC series, Frozen Planet, NATURE presents a journey in sound across this frozen landscape. Whilst above the ice, the landscape is quiet, below the ice the underwater world is full of sound; for example, Orcas (killer whales) use pulses of sound to navigate rather like bats and produce and squeaks and whistles to communicate with one another over vast distances, whilst Weddell seals produce the most hauntingly beautiful ascending and descending tones. Antarctica – frozen landscape, and surprising, mesmerizing, powerful and haunting soundscape.

Listen

Related: Touch Radio 49

Via: JrF – in place

I’ve been developing a generative sound-scape app in Max/MSP – drop in a bunch of files, specify a few values and it will spit out a sound scape which can run for……ever…..

Since it is that time of the year when most people are going to be celebrating/holidaying/having-a-good-time in some form or the other, I thought it would a good idea if we could create a sonic-mash of these sounds by getting everyone to contribute.

How? Record anything – voices, ambience, fireworks, bottle opening, shouts of joy, sounds of calm, carols, the local pub, a fireplace – anything that you might experience from now till the 5th of January. It could be recordings off a mobile phone, handheld recorder or the new microphone you gifted yourself for Christmas/end of the year. I will close all upload channels on January 5th and on the 9th I’ll post a few of these generative soundscapes made up off all the sound we’ve recorded.

Restrictions

Minimum Duration: 4 seconds
Maximum Duration: 10 seconds
Format: WAV/AIFF
Sample Rate: 48/44.1KHz (nothing higher is possible, I don’t want to fry my RAM!)

Where to upload?

I’ve created a SoundCloud group which you can access here. Please make sure the files are downloadable.

Or by FTP:
FTP Username: sonicmash@re-sounding.com
FTP Server: ftp.re-sounding.com
FTP Server Port: 21
SFTP Server Port: 2222
Password: sound123

Or you can email me: varun[at]designingsound.org

This should be fun!

Meanwhile, have a good Christmas/New Year/Season’s Greetings/just-a-good-time!

Fantastic lecture by Francisco López at Red Bull Music Academy 2011.

Internationally recognized as one of the major figures of the sound art and experimental music scene, Francisco Lopez has developed an astonishing sonic universe over the past 30 years. Having realized hundreds of concerts, field recording projects, workshops and sound installations in over 60 countries, his extensive catalog of sound pieces have been released by over 250 record labels worldwide. Watch him in conversation with Resident Advisor’s Todd L. Burns at the Red Bull Music Academy 2011 in Madrid.