Sound Clip: Sounds From Nature by Caesar Michel and Trae Washburn (12th Grade Sound Class)

Sound Clips: I Know How to Pray and Words to Live By, both clips and art by Mark Steven Brooks

Both sampled from religious pod casts.

Sound Clip: NX004-01 Automatic by Miquel Parera Jaques

Miquel writes, “After much time listening to jazz, jazz-rock, rock, Beethoven and contemporary music, I grew tired. I no longer listen to music. But one day came to my ears Morton Feldman, Messiaen and Cage. I became revived and I realized that I needed to get back to the minimum as an exercise. My solution was to divide the computer sound to the classic way. Purely electronic sounds created with Puredata and acousmatic sounds created with Supercollider. Next, I use a simple Pythonscript which creates a semi-deterministic score (qlist) for 4 simple puredata generators.”

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Sound Clips: Todioo Hee Hee, Hombellebaa Hombelle Lee Lee Lee, and Gebberesk by Heug.

Heug is a duo from the Netherlands with slightly odd instrumentation (mainly harps, loops, slide trumpets and strange vocals and whatever we take with us.) The duo consists of loop-orientated live musician Jan Schellink and jew’s harp player, vocalist Danibal. The project is about listening, anticipation and very playful. Music can vary from soundscapes with folky elements and loosely improvised pop-music. Heug is situated somewhere between improvised cabaret/comedy and sound performance.

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Sound Clip: Arborea Sardinia Under Water by Michael Peters

The city of Arborea on the island of Sardinia, Italy, lies where a large swamp used to be. In the early 1920s, Italian dictator Mussolini ordered it to be drained, so drainage channels and pump works were built. Where the swamp used to be, residents built an artificial city with rectangular numbered streets that used to be called Mussolinia, and is now called Arborea. A mile north of Arborea lies a warm lagoon and a beautiful (although fascist) Bauhaus style drainage pump work, called Idrovora di Sassu. A road goes by, with a bridge crossing the end of a drainage channel at the edge of the lagoon. A hydrophone was placed into the water, not far from a group of flamingos. You can hear the occasional rumble of cars passing over the bridge, and most prominently, the beautiful sounds of what I think are underwater insects.

More on the pump works

Location of recording

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Sound Clip: Automated Matrix Mixer by Yaktronix

This mixer automates feedback loops. This clip is from a live performance by Yaktronix.

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Sound Clip: Pipistrelle Bat by Ian Rawes of The London Sound Survey

This is a recording of the sonar of a Common Pipistrelle bat (Pipistrellus Pipistrellus) made on the 14th of October, 2009. A heterodyne bat detector set at 45kHz was in used in conjunction with a pocket digital recorder. A longer version of this recording appears on the London Sound Survey website.

Sound Clip: Urban Sound Pollution by Ray Benito and Jeremy Sheahan (12th Grade Sound Class).

We are bombarded by an overwhelming amount of sound pollution every day. We want to raise awareness by painting a sound picture of an urban city which transitions to the countryside over time. Our research shows that people who live in the city have higher levels of stress compared to people that live in the rural areas.

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Sound Clip: Not An Animal by Michael Peters

This is a slowed down recording of a thermos bottle of hot tea that released tiny amounts of steam from its not-completely-closed lid. There are addition al dubbed in recordings of birds. This recording was made in southern Germany in a quiet hotel room.

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Sound Clip: Massage Chair by Matthias Ebbinghaus

Recording made in the year 2000 and sped up by 100% into an octave higher.

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Sound Clip: The Bloop by NOAA Ocean Explorer

Photo above is a spectrogram of an unidentified sound, referred to as “Bloop.” The recorded signal has been sped up 16 times. This “Bloop” was repeatedly recorded during the summer of 1997 on the Equatorial Pacific Ocean autonomous hydrophone array. The sound rises rapidly in frequency over about one minute and was of sufficient amplitude to be heard on multiple sensors, at a range of over 5,000 km. It yields a general location near 50oS; 100oW (far off the west coast of southern South America). The origin of the sound is unknown.

The photo below explains some of NOAA underwater recording techniques.

This map shows the location of the submarine cable off the central California coast that was being used for the Sound in the Sea Acoustic Monitoring Project. This cable stretched approximately 100 km, from Pillar Point Air Force Station to the underwater seamount known as Pioneer Seamount. A passive underwater hydrophone was installed on the seaward end of the cable. Data on recorded sounds was relayed via the cable for processing at a station on land.

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Sound Clip: Ten Canisters of Pressurized Tetrafluoroethane Over Three Weeks by Roc Jiménez de Cisneros

‘Ten canisters of pressurized tetrafluoroethane over three weeks’ is a 7″ record by the Barcelona-based computer music project EVOL. This is their 100% first acoustic release, and it features 2 pieces for hand-held gas horns realized at the Music Research Centre, University of York, November 2008. Recorded using two Neumann U87 microphones and a Shure SM58 on custom-rigged pendulum. The record is made of red vinyl, just like the horns.

More info on this project

Sound Clip: RnBn Energy by David Ceballos and Daniel Ludwig (12th Grade Sound Class).

Sound Clip: Live At The Op Shop by Chicago Phonography

Chicago group of field recordists and sound artists known as Chicago Phonography. The group works together to capture sounds from around the city and then improvise their playback live without processing.

Photo (left to right): Greg O’Drobinak, Chad Clark, Todd Carter, Eric Leonardson, Chris Hammes

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Sound Clip: The Rabbit Hole by Chris Vaisvil.

A drone from one hit on a large carbon steel barge piece. The music uses a program called Paul’s Extreme Sound Stretch which will take a wav or mp3 or ogg, and stretch it to extreme lengths using a fast Fourier transform manipulation of the source. In this case, stretched a 7 second strike of a bell like object and stretched it to almost 8 minutes – or about a factor of 66 increase in length. When one does this unexpected things happen such as bringing out the harmonics which may normally pass too quickly to notice. So while in a way this sounds complex – it is really a trivially thing to do – the real complexity is in the audio processing. Do note that since the source is a bell-like object the sound is microtonal. The bell like object is the largest “hairpin” in the photo – the length in real life was about a foot – weight 5 or 10 pounds – made of solid steel. It was part of a system that allowed barges to be tied to a dock or to each other.

Program used for time-stretching

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