Among the great oddio-viz coming out of Maker’s Quest is The Corner: 23rd and Union, stories, photos, and phone call-ins about one street intersection “near the geographical center of Seattle.”
KUOW’s Jenny Asarnow directs the project. One of the many fine Corner interviews at the site is with “Aaron Dixon: The Checkmate” (mp3):
The LATimes profiled Western Soundscape Archive field-recordist, database-director (and HV Producer) Jeff Rice, in “Recording the sounds of the West.” Also check their audio slideshow and photo gallery.
“The 4 ways sound affects us,” a Julian Treasure TED Talk:
Julian Treasure runs the sound-branding firm Sound Agency, and is author of the a blog. His TED vid above also has an audio marketing vers:
“Sound Affects” (10:23 mp3):
via Hear 2.0.
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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.
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”
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.
Welcome to Soundville, a Sony audio performance project:
In March 2009 a small town in Iceland was filled with speakers. The Seydisfjordur village was turned into an extraordinary sound-system for a week. Sounds by Richard Fearless ( Death in Vegas ) Mum, Bob Dylan, Toumani Diabate, Roberto Goyeneche, Murcof, Federico Cabral, Guillemots, etc.
This film by Juan Cabral of London’s Fallon agency documents the town-turned-into-tunes:
“Sony Soundville”
More Soundville at: Sony | uTube.
via SoundRich and Creativity.
Reading One Art, a huge collection of poet Elizabeth Bishop’s letters. I notice this, written
from Key West in l938:
“I have a little Victor record player that attaches to the radio. It is quite good; and a lot of records I got from Sears, Roebuck… the Negro ones are the best: “That Bonus Done Gone Through,” “Riding to Your Funeral in a Ford V-8″… but it is almost impossible to find anything about who is composing them. (They appear all over the South within three days of any major news event, it seems.)”
Sounds like an early version of twitter. I’ve never heard of this before, have you?
Listen : John Cage – in love with sound / silence -01
Transcript of the interview with John Cage in the film “Ecoute” (Listen) by Miroslav Sebestik:
[part 1]
When I hear what we call music, it seems to me that someone is talking, and talking about his feelings, or about his ideas of relationships. But when I hear traffic, the sound of traffic, here on 6th avenue for instance, I don’t have the feeling that anyone is talking. I have the feeling that sound is acting. And I love the activity of sound. What it does is it gets louder and quieter, and it gets higher and lower, and it gets longer and shorter. It does all those things.I am completely satisfied with that. I don’t need sound to talk to me. We don’t see much difference between time and space. We don’t know where one begins and the other stops. So that most of the arts we think of as being in time, and most of the arts we think of being in space. More…
The amazing, authoritative, and all-around hombre bueno, Jeff Towne, has compiled Portable Digital Recorder Comparison charts over at Transom Tools. He’s also writ revus of the new Tascam DR-Series Flash Recorders.
Our “Oddio Art” automated hyperactive audio-art generator features Martin Luther King Jr, Maya Angelou, and Ted Kennedy, with music by Joe Bass and Flash-yness from Eli 5 Stone.
Collin Cunningham of Make Magazine sonically induces some strange behaviors in puddles of water and a non-newtonian fluid. The rippling waves in his DIY cymatic (study of visible sound and vibration) experiments are kewl. But do stay tuned for the wild cornstarch rave, and the recipe for creating your own “pet cymatic blob.”
Collin’s Lab Notes: DIY Cymatics
via sound Rich.
[Rob Rosenthal, host of the SALTcast, and Radio instructor at the SALT Institute for Doc Studies, begins each semester with a talk about…]
The Power of Sound
In the womb, our first connection to the outside world is through sound. Heartbeats. Voices.
When we’re born, our first impulse is to make sound.
Some creation myths say, in so many words, in the beginning there was sound.
Our voice starts deep within us and moves out into the world and into another person. Touch at a distance someone once said. And yes, sound enters us — all the time. We can’t help but hear. We don’t have earlids, as producer Jay Allison likes to say.
Our voice is a mixture of the air and our thoughts. They mingle together.
And this is a new thought to me. I’m still working on it. But, humans make sound. Think about it. We don’t make light. We don’t make taste. We don’t make touch, per se. Okay, I suppose you could aruge we make smells but that’s not something we fully control. But sound…we can create sound. We talk. We sing. We’re able to make noise with our bodies and because of our bodies — that’s how we’re constructed. That’s unique among the senses.
Have I gone off the deep end yet? No? Well try this.
Radio taps into something ancient. Something primal. Long before the printed word. Long before pictures and film. Waaay before Facebook, we communicated in sound. It’s all we had. We’ve been passing along information and telling stories sonically for about a bazillion years. At this point, it’s just how we’re wired. Radio plugs right into that.
With radio, the listener is a co-author. Radio engages the mind like a good book and we paint our own pictures. Television, which I know is an easy target, but for comparison, television tells you everything you need to know with its combination of pictures and sound. Radio lets you think.
Radios are inexpensive and ubiquitous — most homes have a good half dozen. You can be illiterate and ‘get’ radio.
There’s something magical about the radio. How the hell does sound get into that little box? If you talk to old school radio engineers, they’ll tell you the “M” in “F. M.” Stands for magic. I’ll let you guess what the “F” stands for. In fact, when radio was first discovered, it was thought that we tapped into a mysterious atmospheric element, the ether. I actually like to believe that’s true. More…
Fren o’ HV, Justin G, is co-directing The Megapolis Festival, “a weekend-long celebration of the craft of DIY audio creation. Artists, documentarians, musicians, and fans come together to share secrets on producing and presenting challenging audio works online, on-air, and on the stage.” April 24-26 2008, Boston.
Among the featured: Gregory Whitehead, a bicycle-powered 8-track player, and HV’s own AnnKara (festival schedule).
“We lost thrust in both engines… We’re going to be in the Hudson.”
–pilot Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger
The FAA released audio recordings related to the successful river landing of US Airways Flight 1549. Communications are between pilots and air traffic controllers at LaGuardia tower, Teterboro tower, and the New York Tracon (Terminal Radar Approach Control).
Map, transcripts, audio edits at NPR: “FAA Releases Audio From US Airways Crash”
FAA Air Traffic Control: USAirways 1549 (AWE1549), January 15, 2009
The Boston Phoenix extracted juicy bit’s from Obama’s audiobook, Dreams From My Father, where the Big Man quote his childhood chum, Ray. Lines we wish we heard in this week’s press conf, like, on the economy:
“This shit’s getting way too complicated for me.” (0:03 mp3):
Or his opinion of Sarah Palin (0:01 mp3):
:
MP3s posted the Phoenix and at WFMU.
One in 8 Million is a new online NYTimes series photo-sound portraits: “A collection of stories from the legions of characters who call New York’s five boroughs home. A new story will be added weekly.”
“Chorus Of Refuge” is new sound installation by (HV producers) Ann Heppermann, Kara Oehler, and composer Jason Cady. It’s free at Union Docs in Brooklyn (322 Union Ave), December 13th 7-9p.m; part of their Documentary Bodega series.
“Chorus of Refuge is a sound installation that transmits the stories of six refugees,living in different cities across the U.S. to six radios. The voices of the refugees are superimposed and coordinated in both rhythm and tonality to unite their narratives of struggle, survival and triumph.”
Just in time for Chanukah (Dec 21-29), Seattle’s Captain Smartypants yodel and line-dance their Brokeback Dreidel, aka, “Kislev Cowboys” by Eric Lane Barnes, sung by Captain Smartypants with the Seattle Men’s Chorus:
Recorded by Tom Speer of the Seattle Channel. Listen for the audio of this song in our upcoming “Christmas Mashup” HV hour.
via Kalish.