Hearing Voices from NPR®:
021 Tony Schwartz— Documenting Life in Sound
Host— Barrett Golding & Kitchen Sisters of Hearing Voices
Airdates— 7/23/2008 - 7/30/2008

Tony Schwartz, media pioneer, audio documentarian, and the most famous radio person you probably never heard of, died June 2008. We hear The Kitchen Sisters’ Lost & Found Sound-portrait, “Tony Schwartz, 30,000 Recordings Later,” and the Tony Schwartz-inspired verite documentary of the town he lived in and loved, “New York City: 24 Hours in Public Places” (thanks to Transom.org).

Audio of program will be posted here 7/30/2008.

Tony Schwartz died Sunday (NY Times obit | Wikipedia | Tony’s site). In 1945 Tony Schwartz began documenting life in sound. He recorded New York City cab drivers, French folk songs, kids’ street games — tens of thousands of field recordings made all over the world. His work, now collected at the Library of Congress, is an aural history the way we sound.

In 1999 the Kitchen Sisters did this exquisite sound-portrait, “Tony Schwartz: 30,000 Recordings Later” (20:38 mp3):

The above is from the KS’s CD Best of NPR’s Lost and Found Sound Vol. 1.

Tony also worked in the ad industry, and co-created this classic 1964 LBJ (vs Goldwater) “Daisy ad”:

Soundwaves on fire, now if they could just turn it into a sound editor; a classic physics experiment, the “Ruben’s Tube:”

NPR has changed. As evidence I offer this early 80s promo produced by Jesse Boogs for NPR. This imagistic radio dramatic audio artistic style said NPR then. Now, not so much; “Morning Edition promo” (1:00 mp3):

“Advanced Beauty is an ongoing exploration of digital artworks born and influenced by sound…is an ever-growing collaboration between programmers, artists, animators and architects. The first release will be a collection of Audio-Visual Sound Sculptures, on High Definition DVD and 5:1 Surround Sound. “

And, if you happen to be in Sheffield England in early May, you can attend a premier of these sound sculptures at the Showroom Cinema.

I’ve included a preview of the sound sculptures below:

Concord Monitor photojournalist Preston Gannaway won a Pulitzer for her shots in a series of articles which “chronicle the death of Carolynne St. Pierre, a Concord NH woman who wanted to leave her children with a record of her final months.” The online version is this beautiful photo-audio slideshow called “Remember Me.”

via Bill Slammon- WVEW

The latest PRX podcast has an environment/media mix, first whispered then shouted, Amy Conger’s “Secret and Noise” (4:12 mp3):

Turns out that a French recording from 1860 may be the oldest known recorded human voice, “Au Clair de la Lune” (mp3):

Here’s the New York Times article on the First Sounds project.