"The study of synesthesia has helped shift the way scientists think about the brain. In the past, they have focused on matching different areas with specific functions; now, the entire organ is viewed as a tapestry of interwoven connections.

"The whole system is a giant network," Eagleman says. "It's no longer sufficient to think about single areas in isolation."

Like synesthesia, many neurological disorders — such as schizophrenia, autism,Alzheimer's disease, depression and epilepsy — have been linked to abnormal communication between brain regions. The hope is that as neuroscientists learn about how the connections in the synesthetic brain differ from those in normal brains, they will also gain insight into how these differences develop — and how they sometimes manifest as harmful disorders."

"Audio extra: Test yourself, can you taste the sounds?

Oxford University psychologist Charles Spence studies human senses and how they interact. In recent studies, he had people smell wines and sample chocolate, and then match the different aromas and flavors to different musical sounds.

He found that people tend to associate sweet tastes with high-pitched notes and the sounds of a piano. People match bitter flavors with low notes and brass instruments.

Spence wondered if he could put this finding to use. Could he use music to influence what people smell or taste?"

"This is Chanter. It began its humble life as one of those free prayer boxes you can get free from the Buddhist Temple in LA. My friend the wonderfully bizarre Negativland co-conspirator Tim Maloney (Naked Rabbit) gave it to me to see what I could do to it. Here's his comment on the modification: "No matter the motivations, you are still offending a world religion."<br />
<br />
Well. I was able to do much to it, as you can see.<br />
<br />
I added a 500K pot for fairly wide pitch down control, 2 optical resistors (under the glass blobs), an LED snakelite that is hooked up to the audio output so it can optically play itself, and an amazing noise bank of 9 switches (8 toggles and one momentary pushbutton). Each group of "additions" can be switched on independently, together, or left off for "normal" mode. "

"An underwater microphone lead into Jökulsárlón lagoon - an outlet glacial lagoon of Vatnajökull, filled with icebergs - connected to an amplifier, and a mobile-phone, which created a live phone line to the glacier. The number +44(0)7757001122 could be called from any telephone in the world, the listener put through to Vatnajökull. A white neon sign of the phone number hung in the gallery space."

"Sound recordings from three glaciers in Iceland, pressed into three records, cast, and frozen with the meltwater from each of these glaciers, and played on three turntables until they completely melt. The records were played once and now exist as three digital films. The turntables begin playing together, and for the first ten minutes as the needles trace their way around, the sounds from each glacier merge in and out with the sounds the ice itself creates. The needle catches on the last loop, and the records play for nearly two hours, until completely melted."

"In this hour of Radiolab, we examine the line between language and music.<br />
<br />
What is music? Why does it move us? How does the brain process sound, and why are some people better at it than others?<br />
<br />
We re-imagine the disastrous debut of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring in 1913 through the lens of modern neurology, and we meet a composer who uses computers to capture the musical DNA of dead composers in order to create new work." [Rediscovered through: http://kottke.org/10/08/language-between-thought-and-music]

""Semantic satiation (also semantic saturation) is a cognitive neuroscience phenomenon in which repetition causes a word or phrase to temporarily lose meaning for the listener, who can only process the speech as repeated meaningless sounds."

"Sound effects are used to emphasize artistic or other content of films, television shows, live performance, animation, video games, music, or other media. These trick of sound are mostly achieved by combining technology, ingenuity and creativity. Sound effects are important for digital media because an appropriate sound effect can easily resemble a real occurrence for a situation.

"Noise pollution is a serious problem in many cities. NoiseTube is a research project about a new participative approach for monitoring noise pollution involving the general public. Our goal is to extend the current usage of mobile phones by turning them into noise sensors enabling each citizen to measure his own exposure in his everyday environment. Furthermore each user could also participate to the creation of a collective map of noise pollution by sharing automatically his geolocalized measures with the community.

"Explore 44,500 selected recordings of music, spoken word, and human and natural environments: accents and dialects; arts, literature and performance; classical music; environment and nature; jazz and popular music; oral history; sound recording history; world and traditional music"

"Hello and welcome to CitySounds.fm! Here you can listen to the latest music from your favorite cities around the world.

"Emma Clarke the voice of the London Underground has just been fired for recording and posting some spoofs on her own website. "Mind the gap" no more."

"phonography/field recording; contextual and decontextualized sound activity"

"World Livestock Auctioneer Championship"

"Search for Animal Recordings"

"a free site where you can search the Web for sound effects and musical instrument samples"

"Search for music by singing or humming part of a song. All you need is a microphone"

"Ambient Addition is a Walkman with binaural microphones. A tiny Digital Signal Processing (DSP) chip analyzes the microphone's sound and superimposes a layer of harmony and rhythm on top of the listener's world. In the new context, some surprising behavi

"Birds living in cities are performing a type of "avian rap" while their rural counterparts are sticking to more traditional sounds, a study shows."

"The Freesound Project aims to create a huge collaborative database of audio snippets, samples, recordings, bleeps, ... released under the Creative Commons Sampling Plus License."

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