. media culture . sound art
book . sound art

edited by Luís Costa & Rui Costa, 
Three Years in Nodar: Context-Specific Art Practices in Rural Portugal

tre_anos_in_nodar.jpg 
book+2CD
, Edições Nodar, 
315 pages
, Nodar 003, 
ISBN 978-9899720503
This thick book, coming with two CDs, is the outcome of a three-year program of international sound art residencies made by twin brothers who have here focused on their Portuguese hometown - Nodar. Forty sound artists were involved in reading, watching and listening to the documentation of the respective projects. In the several hundred color pages of the catalogue the reader can be temporary  ... [ Continue ]


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art . music . robot . sound art

Versus, sounding dialogues

David Letellier, neural, chiara ciociola, versus_David_Letellier.jpg Versus is a kinetic sound installation by David Letellier. Its functioning is characterized by an interactive dialogic mechanism. There are two kinetic sculptures that are interdependent and they have to be face to face to make sense. Each sculpture is made out of 12 triangular panels, joining at the center in a flower-like shape with actuators to allow slow movement. In the center of this singular "corolla" there's  ... [ Continue ]


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music . sound art

A Piano Listening To Itself, inducing Chopin in chords

A Piano Listening To Itself, Chopin Chord, Gordon Monahan, piano_listening_to_itself.jpg Moving across two and a half decades from the windy north Atlantic coast of Canada to the center of Warsaw, the large-scale Aeolian instruments of Gordon Monahan form a temporal bridge between the Fluxus-propelled experimental music of the sixties and seventies and contemporary sound art production. Taking the former’s deconstruction of musical heritage and combining it with an approach  ... [ Continue ]


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art . music . sound art

Urban Audio, composing with traffic

Florian Tuercke, Urban Audio, Matteo Marangoni, urban_audio.jpg When R. Murray Shafer conducted the International Sound Preference Survey a few decades ago, traffic noise was categorized as one of the least appreciated sounds in the world, together with dentist drills and chalk squeaking on blackboard. Sound artist Florian Tuercke has been spending the last few years  ... [ Continue ]


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media . psychogeography . sound art

Lawrence English, Site-Listening: Brisbane

Lawrence English,  Site-Listening: Brisbane, ROOM 40, Book + 3 ROOM 40, Book + 3" CD, Dec 2010, RMBK001, ISBN-13: 978-0980814903
Collaborative sound mapping, random field recording, sonic memory and live transmission from specific sites are various approaches that have been explored and used in the recent past, especially in connection with enormous potential of active audience contribution of recordings and networked microphones. Lawrence English here uses a different approach, making use of his own substantial  ... [ Continue ]


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music . sound art

Brandon LaBelle - The Sonic Body: Figures 1-12

Brandon LaBelle, The Sonic Body: Figures 1-12, Errant Bodies, ebr_06, cd + booklet, the_sonic_body_brandon_labelle.jpg Errant Bodies, ebr_06, cd + booklet
Are there limits to the sounds that can be packed as a product (i.e. a label release)? Noise, field recordings, silence, disturbing or pure frequencies, sounds from objects or machines have always been welcome in the ample soundscape of experimental music, especially when produced in a conceptually worthy style. The Sonic Body pushes another limit. It records dance movements; the sounds of  ... [ Continue ]


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interactive . music . sound art

Disc.o, optical loop temple

Disc.o, muk, Andreas Haider, chiara ciociola, disc-o_ muk.jpg Disc.o is a plastic representation of the unit length of repetitive contemporary music: the Loop. The author, Andreas Haider (aka muk), is explicitly referencing the SuperPiano of Emerick Spielmann, invented in 1929 as the first photoelectric sound synthesizer. The installation consists of two parallel circular planes positioned at head height and connected to the ceiling. The lower disc consists of  ... [ Continue ]


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CD . art . media . music . sound art

Tristan Perich, 1-Bit Symphony

Tristan Perich, 1-Bit Symphony, Cantaloupe Music, microchip in cd case, Ca21042, 2009-2010, tristan_perich_1bit_symphony.jpg Cantaloupe Music, microchip in cd case, Ca21042, 2009-2010
Coming a few years after the first Perich's 1-Bit Music "circuit album", this 1-Bit Symphony never ceases to amaze. The first problem is: how to define such a musical product (electronics in a transparent jewelry box which "executes" music)? The only reference that quickly comes to mind is the Buddha Machine, but that was made on top of something already used for other purposes. Despite its familiar  ... [ Continue ]


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art . music . performance . sound art

Soplarte, enchanting glass orchestra

Soplarte, Charlotte Van Wouwe, soplarte.jpg Soplarte is a performance by an orchestra of wind instruments built using the technique of glass blowing. Recently performed at the EMAF festival 2011 in Osnabrueck, this unique ensemble was born out of the passion of Charlotte Van Wouwe (the artist who created the work) for wind instruments and glass. All the instruments used have a conical shape but with different levels of curvature, which  ... [ Continue ]


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art . music . sound art

Lotto Beats, betting the rhythm

Arturas Bumsteinas, Lotto Beats, lotto_beats.jpg Deciding which lottery numbers to play is always a difficult choice. Generally the categories of thought are two: one is trusting in coincidence (when for example people obtain numbers from dreams or the events of everyday life), the other is probability theory using mathematical systems of varying complexity. Through the work Lotto Beats, Arturas Bumsteinas proposes a  ... [ Continue ]


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art . music . robot . sound art

The Army of Darkness: Embodied algorithms for artificial mindlessness

The Army of Darkness, Gullibloon, Gullibloon_army_of_darkness.jpg In algorithmic composition one frequent problem that programmers are faced with is how to make computers less predictable. The clue to the matter is that there are infinitely more variables in the physical world than in virtual environments. Searching for an audiovisual implementation of this principle and tapping into the culture of hobby robotics, sound-art collective Gullibloon has  ... [ Continue ]


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art . music . sound art . visual

Quintetto, sounding goldfishes

Quintetto, Quiet Ensamble, quintetto_quiet_ensamble.jpg Neural issue # 37 came with a booklet on Zachary Lieberman's workshop at Fabrica. Here Lieberman asks the question: "How can we use code to create real-time animation that is lifelike and organic?" Back in 1986 Craig Reynolds gave one answer to this question. His “Boids” algorithm,  ... [ Continue ]


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art . music . sound art . visual

SoLu, correspondence between audio and visual spectrum

André Rangel,SoLu, Andre_Rangel_solu.jpg Associating music and color as a concept can be traced back to the 16th century painter Arcimboldo, even if the most quoted modern example is the "Sarabet", a sort of "color organ" invented in 1918 by pianist Mary Hallock-Greenewalt. Nevertheless objective correspondences between color and sound are rare. André Rangel' "SoLu" is an installation which converts "the exponential spacing of the intervals  ... [ Continue ]


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book . sound art

Edited by Brandon LaBelle, Manual for the construction of a sound as a device to elaborate social connection

Edited by Brandon LaBelle, Manual for the construction of a sound as a device to elaborate social connection, Errant Bodies Press: Surface Tension Supplement No. 4, ISBN: 978-0-9772594-8-9, 104 page + CD, manual_for_the_construction_of_a_sound.jpg Errant Bodies Press: Surface Tension Supplement No. 4, ISBN: 978-0-9772594-8-9, 104 page + CD
As sound art is a mostly conceptual process, it can be easily set in the autonomous ecosystem of social public spaces. Sound art practices can be easily grafted into transportation systems or other crowded places without losing their aura. The "Manual" project, which was staged in Oslo, gave six experimental media artists from around Europe the opportunity to work on different projects in the city space. Parts  ... [ Continue ]


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art . media . performance . sound art

Coded Sensation, audio skin

Martin Rille, Coded Sensation, coded_sensation.jpg All that happens in Coded Sensation is generated by touch. Hands sinuously caress bodies and objects that are completely covered by a shiny and iridescent black cloth, from which sounds emanate. The special fabric is created by applying a thin sheet of chromium oxide (the same used in cassette tapes) onto a simple  ... [ Continue ]


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art . dvd . sound art . visual

Luis Felipe Ortega, Israel Martinez - Triptych

Luis Felipe Ortega, Israel Martinez, Triptych, Aagoo Rec., dvd, 2011, ACO026, tryptich.jpg Aagoo Rec., dvd, 2011, ACO026
The symbiosis between a video artist and a musician can lead to unexpectedly effective synergies when both of them take on a shared territory to investigate. This is what happened to Luis Felipe Ortega and Israel Martinez who have produced intriguing audio-visual art about what they define as "the sculpted character of the landscape." Their joint multi-sensorial explorations have some peculiar traits. In fact,  ... [ Continue ]


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art . cd-rom . code . sound art . visual

Theo Burt, 
Colour Projections

Theo Burt, 
Colour Projections, CD-ROM
, Entr'acte
, E80, colour_projection.jpg CD-ROM
 Entr'acte
 E80
If the field of audiovisual production has two different poles (the sonified visual and the visualized sound) this work can be placed exactly in the middle. Colour Projections is software created by Theo Burt that calculates audio and minimal geometrical video conceived as single tracks of an album. Although the work has a technical web structure (it's viewed in a browser, starting from an  ... [ Continue ]


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art . book . sound art

Seth Kim-Cohen - 
In the Blink of an Ear: Toward a Non-Cochlear Sonic Art


In the Blink of an Ear: Toward a Non-Cochlear Sonic Art, Continuum Pub Group, 296 pages, 2009, English, ISBN-13: 978-0826429711, In_the_blink_of_an_ear.jpg Continuum Pub Group, 296 pages, 2009, English, ISBN-13: 978-0826429711
The title of this book is a good start. In fact it starts where Marcel Duchamp’s famous definition of a "non-retinal" visual art left off. Duchamp’s point was to reject judgments about beauty in art, while here the author takes on a similar attitude in order to reject the confining of sound art into either its own practice or a small controversial sub-domain of music. In a similar strategy to what has already been experienced by advocates  ... [ Continue ]


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art . music . sound . sound art

Enphonic Graphomania, the visual sound of mania

Enphonic Graphomania, (EG),Patrick Harrop, Enphonic_Graphomania.jpg In the First Surrealist Manifesto (1924) surrealism was defined in terms of automatism: "pure psychic automatism, by which an attempt is made to express, either verbally, in writing or in any other manner, the true functioning of thought". One of the drawing techniques adopted to reveal the unconscious was Entopic Graphomania in which a dot is made at the site of each impurity or difference in colour in a blank sheet of paper, and then  ... [ Continue ]


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music . sound . sound art

"Beethoven piano Sonata, no. 1 - no. 14 ", stripped sonata

Beethoven piano Sonata, Samson Young, no. 1 - no. 14, beethoven_piano_sonata.jpg Stripping the work of Ludwig van Beethoven of its musical components and performing only its tempo: this is the conceptual operation at the root of "Beethoven's Piano Sonata, no. 1 - no. 14" by Samson Young, a classically trained musician who is strongly oriented to electronica and installation art. In this case, the installation is made from 47 electronic devices, arranged symmetrically in a grid, each of which flashes and performs a  ... [ Continue ]


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art . sound art

Fabricmachine, sound tissues

fabricmachine, Kathrin Stumreich, fabric_machine.jpg Fabric is often measured by touch. When sliding textiles through fingers, the thickness of the yarn and the distance between the plot and the horde cause various sensations; the heaviness of soft wool or the lightness of smooth silk, for example. In Kathrin Stumreich's fabricmachine , two strips of fabric run on rollers in two separate cycles, driven by  ... [ Continue ]


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music . software . sound art

The Secret Sounds of Spores, the sound of the almost invisible

Yann Seznec, Patrick Hickey, the secret sounds of spores, Vito Campanelli, secret_sounds_of_spores.jpg The Secret Sounds of Spores is an installation created by Yann Seznec and mushrooms expert Patrick Hickey. As the title suggests, Seznec's intention was to translate the movement of spores into sound. The phenomenon is largely confined to the undergrowth and - as such – is usually out of the reach  ... [ Continue ]


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music . robot . sound art

Another Soundscape, cable car-like sequencing

Chung-Kun Wang, Digital Art Center Taipei, another soundscape, Matteo Marangoni, another_soundscapes.jpg Sound installations frequently dispense with linear musical time by means of spatial arrangements. In the work “another soundscape” by Chung-Kun Wang, linear time is reintroduced and represented spatially following the model of western musical notation. Exhibited at the Digital Art Center di Taipei, what the  ... [ Continue ]


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music . sound art

Open Reel Ensemble, rethinking reel to reel

Open Reel Ensemble, Wada Ei, Matteo Marangoni, reel_time_sampling.jpg Reel to reel tape machines are dinosaurs compared to the digital audio workstations we use today and old timers are usually grateful not to have to resort to scissors when an edit is required in the modern sound studio. For people like Wada Ei who were born after the personal computer however old tape machines still carry a mysterious fascination. His Open Reel Ensemble has  ... [ Continue ]


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art . music . sound art

Electromagnetic soundscapes, revealing the hidden environment

Wire Less, Yann Leguay, Wire_Less_Yann_Leguay.jpg All around us the air is filled with silent signals. Our bodies bathe daily in streams of electromagnetic waves connecting hundreds of networks in the growing family of wireless media. Yann Leguay has been working with The GhostLab to establish a protocol for capturing radio frequencies spanning from VLF to UHF, including  ... [ Continue ]


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art . music . sound . sound art

RHFID Speakers, a different directional sound

RHFID_speakers.jpg Speakers are neutral. They carry the sound from its decoded source to our ears, but they are firm, static and impartial. They can be adjusted to create a better listening experience, or multiplied and singularly managed to enhance it even more, but they are meant to stay where you placed them the first time they were used. RHFID Speakers by Ulrik Andersen Hogrebe, Filippo Cuttica and  ... [ Continue ]


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Sonic Genoma
Suoni Futuri Digitali
Wicked Style
nordiC (Dissonanze)
Tecnologie di Liberazione (2001)
Virtual Light (1995)
Internet Underground Guide (1995)
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editor in chief:
Alessandro Ludovico

assistant editor:
Aurelio Cianciotta Mendizza

contributors:
Josephine Bosma
Vito Campanelli
Jonah Brucker Cohen
Valentina Culatti
Michael Dieter
Daphne Dragona
Vicente Gutierrez
Matteo Marangoni
Paolo Pedercini

production and promotion:
Chiara Ciociola

infrastructure design
and consulting:

Paolo Cirio

translations:
Roberto Orsini

technical consulting:
Paolo Mangraviti
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