"The Sound Recordings catalog comprises over 17,400 digital audio files, beginning with Lomax’s first recordings onto (newly invented) tape in 1946 and tracing his career into the 1990s.... Alan Lomax was a musicologist, writer and producer who spent his life capturing in sound, photographs, video and research what today is termed our 'intangible heritage.'"

"A record player that plays slices of wood. Year ring data is translated into music, 2011." Bartholomäus Traubeck.

"The radical, syndicated program 'Radiolab' creates striking sound effects to communicate big ideas. List to excerpts in this sonic gallery."

"The iPod has changed the way we listen to music. And the way we respond to it." The following essay is excerpted from the latest issue of n+1 magazine. From Slate.

Oxford's festival of sound art and contemporary music

"Reynell includes both improvised and composed music in this grouping and suggests in a note that 'the dividing line...has become progressively fuzzier.'"

new sounds uncovered

"A Shepard tone, named after Roger Shepard, is a sound consisting of a superposition of sine waves separated by octaves. When played with the base pitch of the tone moving upwards or downwards, it is referred to as the Shepard scale. This creates the auditory illusion of a tone that continually ascends or descends in pitch, yet which ultimately seems to get no higher or lower." from Wikipedia.

"Archaeoacoustics is the discipline that explores acoustic phenomena encoded in ancient artifacts. For instance, theoretically a pot or vase could be 'read' like a gramophone record or phonograph cylinder for messages from the past." from Wikipedia.

"Field Studies 2010 is a four-day field-recording workshop led by three acclaimed sound artists and composers. It aims to explore recording as a creative and practical tool for artists, architects and urbanists, and the possibilities of working with sound as a means to engage with places and people."

Solar system music box.

"At the Olympics, the blink of an eye can be all that separates the gold medalist from the 10th-place finisher. In some events, this is obvious. But in others, with athletes racing one by one, the closeness of the race is harder to perceive. Listen to the differences below." from NYT.

Are you a sound parent? from Psychology Today.

"The sounds were made by converting the accelerometer data to WAV file and then finally to mp3. These vibrations are extremely low frequency, much lower than the human ear can hear. In order to hear these vibrations, engineers have sped them up about 1,000 times, much like playing a tape in fast forward on an old tape recorder."

the world of acoustic pest detection.

Acoustic ecology studies were established in the 1960s by naturalist R. Murray Schafer and his colleagues at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia as an attempt to define the relationship between humans and their environment, as mediated through sound. With a focus that spans both science and art, the continuum of acoustic ecology often attracts individuals who are part researcher, part composer, and part adventurer. from seed.

Sound Sculptures & Installations

a microtonally fluid piano. from The Guardian.

First Sounds is an informal collaborative of audio historians, recording engineers, sound archivists, scientists, other individuals, and organizations who aim to make mankind's earliest sound recordings available to all people for all time.

Sound sound™. Hand-crafted sound systems for iPod.

The Fragmented Orchestra is a huge distributed musical structure modelled on the firing of the human brain's neurons. Twenty-four sites around the UK are connected to each other to form a “neural” network. The sonic information captured at these sites is transmitted over the internet, causing other sites to “fire”.

Wild Sanctuary is home to the largest private archive of natural sound.

moonbell transforms the topography of the moon into sound.

A new series called “Dithering.” The subject is the sound quality of recorded music—analog, digital, or any combination thereof. from the new yorker.

21.08.09 - Rehearsal Tapes – 16:44 - 196 kpbs [VBR]

Inspired by the historic coastline of Aldeburgh and its surrounding area including Aldeburgh Music's Snape Proms and its history, Touch will create a new audio-visual symphony from scratch, using only locally sourced sounds and images.

Wildlife sound recordist Chris Watson investigates the man-made noise pollution which is becoming increasingly invasive in our lives and in our environment, affecting both humans and wildlife.

interview.

Giuseppe Ielasi: The Wire, July 2009.

Bacterial Orchestra (2006) is a self-organizing evolutionary musical organism. The installation consists of several audio cells. Every cell listens to its surroundings and picks up sounds, trying to play together in a musical way. The musical material comes from the background noise, people talking or sounds played by other cells.

from new scientist

using sound as a metric to look at ecosystem dynamics. from wired.

50 records of the year plus specialist charts.

guide to recordings. from wire.

biophony and anthrophony.

converting the first 10,000 digits of pi into a musical sequence.

and the workings of the human brain.

increasingly varied harmonic systems and the sonic context of the instrument.