UPDATE: The NPR Road Trip site owner tells us NPR now has their own station-trip tool: NPR: Station Finder.
Found this on the NPR site: NPR Road Trip. It’s a nifty gadget that maps your route and the NPR stations along the way. Mouse over the radio tower icon and you’re presented with call letters, frequency and the approximate broadcast range.
Useful for those who are prone to wandering…
We done did it, we joined the Facebook phenom to find Fans:
So please Fan our Friends and Friend our Fans and Find our Friends Fans, or whatever it is we socially netted folk do.
Now we’re feeling all SocialWebNet2.0MediaConnected. Maybe a hot shower can wash it off.
At this summer’s World Science Festival, Bobby McFerrin plays with the pentatonic scale and audience participation during the session “Notes & Neurons: In Search of the Common Chorus”:
World Science Festival 2009: Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale from World Science Festival on Vimeo.
For more Bobby McFerrin and the science behind the participatory pentatonic predictions, see the full “Notes & Neurons” event.
via Monkey See Blog : NPR via boingboing.
Right Here, Right Now is an evening with sound-artist Aaron Ximm (aka, quiet american), Oct 29 at the Headlands Center for the Arts (Sausalito, CA):
2009 AIR Aaron Ximm creates intimate, site-specific sound installations that translate fleeting moments captured by field recordings into present experiences.
He’ll also present 24 channels of sound Oct 18 at Headlands Fall Open House.
As paredes têm ouvidos (“The walls are listening”) Aaron Ximm’s 2007 site-specific sound installation, Lisbon, Portugal
“As Parades Tem Ouvidos – Nature (Collage C)” recordings made within the walls of Nodar, on the theme of nature sounds (6:17 mp3):
REAPER is a small filesize (4M win, 7M mac) multi-track audio DAW, “a complete multitrack audio and MIDI recording, editing, processing, mixing, and mastering environment.” Free trial; if you use it,tell us how it’s working for you.
The Knight Digital Media Center (UC-Berk J Skool) offers a suite of Tutorials. Among them: Macintosh OS X—Getting Started, FTP Made Simple, and lots more in their Audio category.
Just got the new Funny Car flyer from
Drag Racing Underground. Reminded me of their musical side, the band Big Stick. Their tunes are audio auto crashups, fusing dragster sounds, race track announcers, race engine specs, driver intervus, and full throttle rock n’ roll.
Their 1895 sonic salute to summer, “Drag Racing,” went top ten in the U.K.. The tune was one of the select singles in John Peel’s Record Box. And its lyrics are a single line of pure poetry: “In the summer I wear my tube top, and Eddie takes me to the drag strip.”
The cut was re-released on their 2004 Hot from the Strip!. (Also check WFMU’s Blog “Summer Necessities” (w/ mp3).
Another Big Stick classic— “Jesus Was Born on an Indian Reservation” (2:33 mp3):
Big Stick: tube | space | site | DRU
Suppose they gave a Town Hall, and a Tea Party showed up. Excerpts for 2009 health care collective chaos…
Town Halls 2009
Note: While HV may not agree with the sentiments expressed, we do love lively freedom of expression.
Audio/Video Production: Barrett Golding
Music: Jeff Arntsen
Audio mix: Robin Wise
Video clips: ABC World News, WGNO- New Orleans, David William Hedrick, The Young Turks, Hot Air Pundit Kathy Castor, Hill Newspaper, YouTube. See playlist- Town Halls 2009 (videos).
“Gary’s Social Media Count” stats, sources and script from Personalize Media, via Gravity Medium.
Hearing Voices from NPR®
072 Predator: Hunter and Hunted
Host: Larry Massett of Hearing Voices
Airs week of: 2011-09-14 (Originally: 2009-10-14)
“Predator” (52:00 mp3):
For the opening of hunting season:
A teenage babysitter convinces his younger siblings he’s a werewolf… who’s going to kill them, produced by Hillary Frank (author of I Can’t Tell You) for This American Life.
Beatrice is a white toy poodle, a neighbor, and “the most evil entity, force, energy known to man. Death to humans is a mere plop of a pebble in the ocean that is the evil that you are Beatrice. Evil Beatrice the white poodle.”
Grizzly Bear 0:00-0:17
Harbor Seal 0:17-0:33
Dall’s Sheep 0:33-0:44
Timber Wolf 0:44-0:51
Moose 0:51-1:22
Cougar/Mountain Lion 1:22-1:26
Sea Lion 1:26-1:51
Porcupine 1:51-1:58
Bison 1:58-3:26
Ringtail/Rodent 3:26-3:41
Musk Ox 3:41-4:11
Columbia Black Tail Deer 4:11-4:37
Caribou 4:37-5:06
Coyote 5:06-5:25
Mountain Goat 5:25-5:48
Peccary 5:48-6:26
Mule Deer 6:26-6:58
From Sonic Scenery, an exhibit I worked on at the natural history museum in Los Angeles a couple years ago. Composers were invited to record music specifically to be heard in wings of the museum. The visitor wears a headset, which plays the compositions when triggered by remote signals in the galleries. Experimental duo Matmos took it all the way by making audio environments for each of the seventeen dioramas in the North American Mammals hall. The timechart (above) was intended to cue the visitor to move from one window to the next, but you can read along for a similar effect.
Artist statement:
In general, our work starts by taking an object, making sounds with that object, and working outward from those sounds in a free-associative manner, without a preconceived result or specifically targeted genre in mind.
In this case, we have had to reverse this process and have tried to think about the precise specifics of the North American Mammals hall and work to gather sounds that will evoke both the natural locale and the specific behaviors of the animals in the room. We decided to anchor our piece around the sounds of animals eating, breathing, and sniffing their environment, and to locate these noises of animal life against a backdrop of plateaulike drones generated with musical instruments associated with “Americana”: pedal steel, acoustic guitar, banjo, harmonica, and autoharp. Feeding peanut butter to a friend’s dog, we built up a basic library of mammalian lip-smacking, huffing, barking, whining, sniffling, and breathing noises, and combined this with a percussive battery of antler noises made by smacking deer antlers against each other and some softer rustling textures harvested by stroking and rubbing the pelt of a wolf.
The work is divided into miniature ‘cells,’ which stand in for the seventeen distinct dioramas/environments and animal species represented in the room, and this is split down the middle by a central section that corresponds to the large bison display at the far end of the room. Our work is intended to be a sound map of a walk through this room and is paced to coincide with a five-to-seven-minute counterclockwise walk through its contents
–Matmos
via futurechimp
“17 Species of North American Mammals” (2:22 excerpt) Matmos
LA’s The Natural History Museum commissioned original music compositions to accompany their 2006 exhibit Sonic Scenery: Music for Collections. Matmos’ music used the vocal sounds of North American mammals.
One of America’s oldest roadside attractions is the Linesville Spillway in northwest Pennsylvania. Tourists toss bread; carp amass at the spillway’s edges: The fish are so thick that mallard ducks hop, skip and jump on the fish’s backs to compete for a slice of bread. Original music by Tim Fite, part of LHP’s song/story series.
More music from the LHP story.
Writer (Amazon), hunter, angler, outdoorsman, Norman Strung demonstrates the shrill sound and thrill found in calling for elk. (Miss ya, Norm: “Labradors [are] lousy watchdogs. They usually bark when there is a stranger about, but it is an expression of unmitigated joy at the chance to meet somebody new, not a warning.” –Norman Strung)
Father Rupe LaRock and son Joe provide a hunter’s perspective of the annual deer breeding cycle. “You can just smell the heat and smell the rut right in the air.” Another of the Deer Stories , produced with Gregory Sharrow at the Vermont Folk Life Center.
Guns, guitars, guts, and wild game. Hunting wildlife and the wild life in the mountains of Payette National Forest. From the Chadwick’s Conservation Sound series. Audio by Micheal Scweppe.
A road trip along historic route 66 in New Mexico, exploring America’s past and present. Tour includes a Santa Fe cooking class, a hot air balloon ride above Albuquerque, Acoma tribal traditions, a mining museum in Grants and a historic hotel in Gallup. Aired on NPR All Things Considered; by producer Jake Warga, “Route 66 Postcard” (8:20 mp3):
Another CollegeHumor original vid, which came “First”:
Aviary’s Myna is a new web tool for editing-layering-mixing audio, all via their website; ie, you don’t need an application, you just need a web browser. Fellow radio producer Brad Linder reviews it at Download Squad:
Aviary launched an online audio editing application called Myna, and its all kinds of awesome. Dont get me wrong, its not exactly Pro Tools or Adobe Audition and it doesnt come with all the audio effects you would expect from those applications. But heres what it does and does well: It lets you create and edit multitrack audio recordings using a Flash-based web interface thats so natural to use you would swear it was a desktop application.
—“Aviary Myna: The best web-based audio editor yet”
Write plump checks asap — or perish — payable to The Social Media Guru:
“I bore of your analog attitude.” Vid by Markham Nolan using the new Xtranormal | Text-to-Movie tool.
via DigiDave.
For the next few weeks, Amazon and Mojo Nixon are offering MP3 downloads of the the entire Mojo catalog for FREEEeee. Don’t know why, but do know it’s time to d/l some Mojo.
Your collection just ain’t complete w/o at least “Jesus at McDonalds” and “Elvis is Everywhere.”
via Boing Boing.
Edward Tufte’s praise and crit of iPhone rez, w/ phrases like: “computer administrative debris”, “chartoon”, “content/information is interface”, “in a land of cluncky cellphone interfaces”. Had to transcribe this GUI gem:
“To clarify, add detail. Clutter and overload are not an attribute of information, they are failures of design. If the information is in chaos, don’t start throwing out information; instead, fix the design.”
iPhone Resolution by Edward Tufte
His improved weather visualizations at end of vid are exceptional; see discussion at The 404 Blog Getting Tough on Tufte. More E.T. at: iPhone interface design.
Edward Tufte: site | tube | sparklines | wavefields
David Brynes likes bikes, and has a new book about it, Bicycle Diaires.
His music tour travels with a few folding bikes, and the crew pedals around the world’s towns where they’re playing. Here’s the NPR interview, and book excerpt, “David Byrne’s Wild Wild (Biking) Life” (9:31 mp3):
Multi-D infographics potential from the Edward Tufte (statistician, sculptor, designer) podcast…
Edward Tufte: Wavefields
Ask E.T. “Wavefields: intense animated data graphics”:
“Wavefields” are data graphics that draw on and completely fill the entire display surface, using every pixel on the data plane to show high-resolution, complex, multiple, animated statistical data-flows. Wavefields extend my work on sparklines.…
As the metaphor for sparklines is the resolution of typography, the metaphor for wavefields is the HD video, which records approximately 1 gigabyte per minute, a data throughput that might finally make our statistical graphics worthy of the powers of the human eye-brain system.
—
[Note that E.T. leaves out “ear” from the “human eye-brain system” — his audio reflects his sonic neglect.]
More on Infographics:
Cool Infographics blog
Flickr Info Graphics Pool
Smashing Magazine Data Visualization and Infographics
Edward Tufte: site | tube
Q (at dawn): Why was my dog backing like crazy early this morn?
A (after sunrise): Bear in backyard, prints all over neighborhood&heliip;
Just found out about the Lucky Dragons: sound-tech-music-visual collage artists. Lotsa listening and downloads of LD trax at the Free Music Archive and their site: Lukey Dargons (LD = Luke Fischbeck and Sarah Rara).
Here’s some scales off the Lucky Dragons…
A nice string thing, “Home” (0:58 mp3):
Street sounds with sweet vocals, the first track off the Dark Falcon album, “heartbreaker” (2:06 mp3):
One of their “audio reconstructions and rearrangements of field recordings from 4 anti-war protests” on hawks and sparrows, “track 7” (3:00 mp3):
And this Fader TV report, on an LD audio-invention, starts slow but gets good, so stick with:
LD links: site | space | shop/ | tube | blog | fma
via Some Velvet Blog.