Digital Developments, artist development weekends, will begin at the Digital Media Centre, South Hill Park, Bracknell at the end of October. The season runs from “Found Sound Stories” led by sound artist and composer, Janek Schaefer, through “Using Sensors for Performance & Installation”, “Experimental Digital Printmaking”, and ends with “Circuit Bending: Atari Punk Console” at the end of November.

24/25 October :: Found Sound Stories :: Janek Schaefer, award winning composer and sound artist, introduces a weekend of field recording, performance and the physical manipulation of found sounds using an array of recording devices, turntables and Minidisc. A laptop-free zone in which to record and imagine an active audio narrative, leading to improvised performance. Results of the weekend will be recorded and may become part of a broadcast on Resonance FM. Continue reading

Music-Editing Phone: The design firm Pilotfish has shown a concept for a music phone which “will enable good quality recording of three separate sound tracks and allow editing of the music by physically twisting and bending the phone… The phone’s main touch-screen, which is similar to today’s folder phones, consists of three ‘sticks’ that can be removed and separately clipped onto a musical instrument or a person to capture live sound,” reports Reuters. The phone won’t be on the market for at least a few years, and considering the pace of innovation probably won’t make it at all—but some of the concepts are likely to make it into the market via various handsets.

Thanks to James Quintana Pearce and mocoNews.net.

Bicycle Built for Two Thousand from Aaron on Vimeo.

Bicycle Built For Two Thousand is comprised of 2,088 voice recordings collected via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk web service. Workers were prompted to listen to a short sound clip, then record themselves imitating what they heard. MTurk official website here. More by Aaron Koblin >>

Under Voices: Les Voix de la Tour Eiffel — by China Blue — is a CD compilation of sound pieces based on actual vibrations and binaural recordings of the Eiffel Tower. In addition to 8 songs, there is a limited and signed edition thumb drive that includes 23 sound files for you to play with. You can make something and submit it for possible inclusion on the next CD. The thumb drive is presented in a cool steel box that can also hold 5 CDs. You can listen to samples here.

The organization in charge of running the Tower gave us access to the monument to document it’s ambient acoustics and vibrations – the intrinsic sounds of 7300 tons of 2,500,000 rivets and 18,038 pieces of steel moving in the wind and in response to environmental changes, as well as the sonic environment of the 30,000 people who visit it daily as they move from the ground to the pinnacle. Continue reading

Petit Mal’s Crisis In The Credit System is the first (and only) great pop song about the financial crisis. Combining an elegiac-compulsive piano riff, twanging synths and waves of spooked electronics with sparse, melancholy vocals this is a unique and addictive electro anthem for the end of capitalism as we know it. Emusic, iTunes, Myspace.

Petit Mal, AKA Ben Seymour and Melanie Gilligan, fuse ’80s synth pop and ’00s electronica to create emotional, intelligent and irresistible new music. Poetic, oblique and compelling, Crisis in the Credit System collides a Pet Shop Boys-style pop drama with autistic vocal repetition a la Lora Logic and ends up somewhere completely unique and contemporary. Continue reading

Jacob Kirkegaard – Labyrinthitis :: Touch # Tone 35 :: CD – 1 track – 38:10 :: Special wallet limited edition :: Commissioned by Medical Museion in Copenhagen, Summer 2007.

Jacob Kirkegaard has turned his ears inwards: His new work LABYRINTHITIS is an interactive sound piece that consists entirely of sounds generated in the artist’s auditory organs – and will cause audible responses in those of the audience. LABYRINTHITIS relies on a principle employed both in medical science and musical practice: When two frequencies at a certain ratio are played into the ear, additional vibrations in the inner ear will produce a third frequency. This frequency is generated by the ear itself: a so-called “distortion product otoacoustic emission” (DPOAE), also referred to in musicology as “Tartini tone”. Continue reading

Voices of America is looking for new sound work employing samples of coverage of the US election as reported on Voice of America (VOA) radio, the US government broadcasting service intended for an international audience. Here’s how it works:

RECORD audio of election coverage on a Voice of America station — UPLOAD your recordings to http://thevoa.net and tag them according to language and content — DOWNLOAD from the searchable pool of available recordings — REMIX the broadcasts and UPLOAD them back to the website.

A curated playlist of compositions and remixes will be broadcast from The Sea and Space Gallery in Los Angeles in a special event on November 4 – US election day – as part of the Audacity of Desperation exhibition. Upload from August 25 – November 4 to be included in the live event! Continue reading

Budhaditya Chattopadhyay’s Listening to places is a series of place-based soundscapes, incorporating field recordings, electro-acoustics and digital media. Landscape in Metamorphoses is the second album of this series.

“Budhaditya Chattopadhyay is drawing attention to the rapid social and geocultural transformation of his native India on his latest album. Landscape in Metamorphoses, a 26-minute collection of field recordings on German label Gruenrekorder, documents the stormy environmental changes taking place in Tumbani, ‘one of the busiest industrial belts at the Bengal-Bihar border’. Recorded between February and April of last year with little more than a simple MD recorder and a binaural microphone, ‘Landscape in Metamorphoses’ aims at delivering both a vivid sonic snapshot and a strong political statement.” – Tobias Fisher at Tokafi.

Diapason gallery for sound and intermedia presents Dead Violets (Jeff Surak, Bethany Moore, Thomas Ekelund) and dub/ber/vie, a voice & multichannel composition / concert performance by Jennifer Walshe & Bernhard Gal :: September 26, 2008; 8:00 pm :: 882 Third Avenue, 10th floor, Brooklyn (Sunset Park).

dub/ber/vie explores different points of intersection between the voice and the space in which it exists. Using two sets of binaural headphones, a series of four-channel recordings were made by Jennifer Walshe and Bernhard Gal within a variety of spaces – a pet shop, the Turkish market in Kreuzberg, a farm for children, a supermarket and an apartment. Continue reading

Radio Free Banff presents Kelly Andres’ Songbike :: September 20, 2008; 10 am – 7 pm :: Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff New Media Institute, Canada.

Become a tour guide and take artist Kelly Andres on a one-hour bicycle ride of your Banff. Andres will accompany you with her mobile sound lab, Songbike, transforming your narrated ride into a unique soundscape composition broadcast live to the world on www.radio90.fm.

In August 2006, Songbike was presented as a concept for the Interactive Screen 06 competitive pitch session at the Banff New Media Institute. It was awarded a co-production residency to develop the project. Continue reading