As Japanese musician Masami Akita (aka Merzbow) performs live in Taipei in 2013, one concertgoer demonstrates that enjoying noise music does not preclude you from practicing good dental hygiene. Full clip below.
Noah Wall, the artist and musician responsible for the highly-recommended Grotesque Tables II (and who has collaborated with David Byrne, St. Vincent, David Lynch, Maya Lin, and many others) wrote to tell us about his most recent project, an EP entitled Alloys.
Like so many, I’ve been inside my apartment for almost a month, handling anything from outside with newfound prudence. But recently I was in the open, manipulating and resonating foreign objects with hands and mallets and microphones. The result is a new project called Alloys.
Each of the ten songs is an audio portrait of an everyday public structure in New York. Made entirely of sounds derived from these structures, my subjects include bridges, an outdoor gymnasium, parks, playgrounds, piers, statues, an abandoned fairground, and a library bench.
I recorded with high-definition contact microphones that capture sound waves moving through solid material (as opposed to through air which is how most microphones work). In addition to my own interventions, many structures were resonating due to environmental factors like being ridden over, leaned on, rained on, and generally blown about.
Edited and arranged into ten compositions, Alloys is a rezoning of sound from public to private structures. All proceeds go to the NYC Low-Income Artist/Freelancer Relief Fund whose mission is to “provide support for low-income, BIPOC, trans/GNC/NB/Queer artists and freelancers whose livelihoods are being affected by this pandemic in NYC.”
You can listen to and buy the digital album on Bandcamp.
Image: Album cover art Read the rest
“It’s kind of like trying to answer a question in a noisy bar and after repeated attempts to be heard, you just give the shortest answer possible,” Bailey said. “Dolphins simplified their calls to counter the masking effects of vessel noise.”
Dolphins are highly social animals and use their calls to stay together as a group, talk as they feed, and call out their names when they meet new members of their species. Each animal has a distinctive whistle, which typically uses complex sound patterns with variations in pitch and frequency.
photo: US Navy Read the rest
The foghorn at Sumburgh in the Shetland Islands of Scotland is powered by more than one 44hp Kelvin K-Series diesel engines, powering the Alley and MacLellan compressors which blow the horn itself.
"Just so's you know," writes JJ Jamieson, who posted this footage to YouTube, "the horn was originally much louder at the end, but YouTube's audio algorithm turned the volume down. I tried several versions but it wasn't having it." Read the rest
Aeroacoustics expert Nigel Peake of Cambridge University leads a group of engineers mimicking owl wing feathers to reduce noise on wind turbines. Read the rest
[Video Link, via LAist]
Los Angeles area radio station KPCC produced this lovely video portrait of designer, educator, and media artist Alex Braidwood. His work "explores methods for transforming the relationship between people and the noise in their environment." In the video, you'll see Alex wearing what I believe may be his Noisolation Headphones, "an invention for mechanically transforming the relationship between a person and the noise that immediately surrounds them." His video about that project is below.
