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

will montgomery speaks about Heygate, sound and field recording with the London Consortium.

via winds measure

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

How loud is a slithering snail and what’s the footfall of a centipede? Jem Stansfield takes an assortment of creepy crawlies and sound recordist Chris Watson to a very very quiet room to find out. Shhh!

Sound Recordist Dave Ruddick goes through his set-up and explains how he records surround sound in the field. This clip was shot at Tongass National Forest where Ruddick was handling sound for the film Fortress of the Bears.

Fortress of the Bears

Via Colin Hunter’s Audio Lounge

 A short interview with Joel Chadabe, composer, founder Ear to the Earth, President of EMF (Electronic Music Foundation)

Ear to the Earth

Frank Bry, known as The Recordist, has published a fantastic post on his blog talking about snowstorms, including sounds, videos, and some great tips.

The third week of January 2012 proved to be a goldmine for snow sound effects here on the ranch. The typical North Idaho winter finally arrived bringing with it lots of snow, wind and freezing temperatures.

The week started with a bunch of snow falling along with some very cold temperatures. As the winter storm progressed and the weather systems above were battling it out for supremacy, the wind came. Not a soft blowing winter wind but some strong sustained blizzard like winds with gusts up to 65 MPH.

The Recordist

“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

While preparing in Lisbon the work Penumbra, commissioned by Serralves Foundation, and that sadly became the lost great album of Grzinich and Raposo, one sunny and windy afternoon we climbed the metal stairs to the roof and prepared a small set-up of piezos and wires. this is a short and quick video edit.

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.