Posts tagged noise

Music is sound, which is sufficient in itself.
—Roland Kayn

how to make a cat

“Everyone has observed the sonic phenomena of a political crowd of dozens or hundreds of thousands of people. The human river shouts a slogan in a uniform rhythm. Then another slogan springs from the head of the demonstration; it spreads towards the tail replacing the first. A wave of transition thus passes from the head to the tail. The clamour fills the city, and the inhibiting force of voice and rhythm reaches a climax. It is an event of great power and beauty in its ferocity. Then the impact between the demonstrators and the enemy occurs. The perfect rhythm of the last slogan breaks up in a huge cluster of chaotic shouts, which also spreads to the tail. Imagine, in addition the reports of dozens of machine guns and the whistle of bullets adding their punctuations to this total disorder. The crowd is then rapidly dispersed, and after sonic and visual hell follows a detonating calm, full of despair, dust and death. The statistical laws of these events, separated from their political or moral context… are the laws of the passage from complete order to total disorder in a continuous or explosive manner. They are stochastic laws.”

–Iannis Xenakis

“The white noise that beats within the white darkness is the rhythm of life; it is that pulse which never truly left the stage.”

–Ergo Proxy

194 earplugs, 96 weeks later (2020)

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otomo yoshihide - Tokyo Experimental Performance Archive

These noises sound strange, unnatural, and even mechanical because most of us have absolutely no idea what the vast majority of animals sound like. Here, for example, are some lynx that (starting about 40 seconds in) wail like drunk banshees.

via https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/01/sound-haunted-diplomats-cuba-crickets/579637/

She starts with a clip that’s been digitally altered to sound like jibberish. On first listen, to my ears, it was entirely meaningless. Next, Das plays the original, unaltered clip: a woman’s voice saying, “The Constitution Center is at the next stop.” Then we hear the jibberish clip again, and woven inside what had sounded like nonsense, we hear “The Constitution Center is at the next stop.” The point is: When our brains know what to expect to hear, they do, even if, in reality, it is impossible. Not one person could decipher that clip without knowing what they were hearing, but with the prompt, it’s impossible not to hear the message in the jibberish. This is a wonderful audio illusion.

via https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/sounds-you-cant-unhear/373036/

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Random acts - an unnatural history of the world
made by weirdcore and Jack Chapman
music by Russell Haswell
presented by Eric Wareheim

Farmers Manual – Mobile FM (AM)

“Done with the utmost of improvised, joyous spirit the two pieces seem to be restrained by absolutely nothing. This total freedom results in something that becomes completely and deeply compelling, a true joy to behold.”

“Employing a greater deal of noise and chaos, Farmers Manual ratchet up the tension to unfathomable degrees while layers veer right into pure cacophony. Distortion layers on top of itself, resulting in an ornate series of patterns. By the latter half Farmers Manual only lets the distortion and noise take over, with any trace of humanity fully scrubbed out.”

http://www.beachsloth.com/farmers-manual-mobile-fm-am.html

Farmers Manual – Sonderzeichenmassaker

“Always ready for a spot of fun, Farmers Manual ensures that they destroy everything in their path. The tension they employ throughout results in a surprisingly great deal of joy, the way they allow everything to burst forth in a tremendous almost flowering of sound. Very much in the noise realm of things, they make sure that the song’s unpredictability allows for a few jump scares, while they increase the volume into uncomfortable degrees. Outright amazing, they prove exactly how to allow sound to completely lose it while documenting the results.“

“Something particularly unique to Farmers Manual, they never make a grand entrance. Their emphasis relies on a steady patience, one that allows a stream of consciousness approach to songwriting, or textural exploration. It feels quite natural what they do, allowing their sound to speak for itself. Over the course of the piece this proves to be true for they take a light touch the sound, only gently nudging it when absolutely necessary. For the most part, it is the sound that does most of the work, growing with an unrealized kind of potential. About halfway through the piece the pulsing rhythm starts to truly assert itself, allowing for a great deal of madness right on the periphery to gain considerable clout. When the piece becomes unruly, it truly becomes all-encompassing, offering no escape from the onslaught.”

http://www.beachsloth.com/farmers-manual-sonderzeichenmassaker.html

Farmers Manual – Stat = Conjecture Pirayune Snart

“Is Farmers Manual, after years of relaxing at art exhibits, finally about to become normal? Considering this particular piece’s main description is“farmersmanual dropped some bluish green squares on the floor” the answer is thankfully no. One of the more unique and sorely missed groups of extreme computer musicians, there is something quite intense about what they do. Rhythms are mangled, textures warped, and any discernible reference point to actual genres a mere accident.”

“Jagged little edges and crackles introduce the piece. From there the tiny textures have a near-funk like element to them. Noise emerges until it virtually collapses upon itself.“

“With “Stat = Conjecture Pirayune Snart ” Farmers Manual prove they are the oddity of all oddities, a group that remains committed to the most abnormal of sonic explorations.”

http://www.beachsloth.com/farmers-manual-stat-conjecture-pirayune-snart.html

First things first, there are currently six Dots. In the beginning they were nine, but four withdrew. Recently, a new, sixth ” . “ has joined them. Each individual Dot’s official name is indeed ” . “, all six of them. You may also call an individual Dot “. chan”. For the sake of making them more individually relatable to mortal people, they are also given rotating nicknames. More on that later. Another important concept ЯЯ shared with me: It’s a common human fallacy to think to yourself “I can’t see . chan’s true face because she wears sunglasses.” But I learned that this is not a correct perception. The truth is that the sunglasses make it possible for us to be able to observe the manifestation of “. chan”. In other words, the glasses they wear allow them to appear in human form as idols. My friend explained it with the following bit of cryptic lore: ・. human (a state called an idol wearing sunglasses) → symbols / shapes → characters / words → vibration → thing (Odor · taste · inorganic matter · clothing · vehicle etc.) → gas / liquid → two dimensions → (fictional) character → light, sound, voice → human. All of these morphological changes are merely various shapes of ・, and there is no superiority or inferiority. It is not that idol changes into various shapes, but ・ is observed as various shapes, phenomena and that one form is idol. In Dots’ expression, smell, taste, vibration, updating Twitter and video, etc. are as important as the show.

via http://www.homicidols.com/how-much-would-you-like-to-know-about-dots/

Vainio’s influence on ambient and industrial electronic music was somewhat unspoken in his lifetime. He was not a figurehead of a scene, but pretty much all booming palettes of mechanical sound being made today nod in some way to Vainio and his work with Pan Sonic […] Vainio’s beats weren’t beats at all, they were the sound and feeling of a black hole opening up in the centre of your chest.[…] like “flares, vapour trails, LEDs, neon tubes close to death, heart murmurs, apertures opening and closing in cement walls, tiny mechanised guillotines snipping the heads from tin soldiers, sheets of led unfurling in underground car parks”.

via https://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2017/apr/18/mika-vainios-quiet-influence-on-electronic-music-was-deafening

During the noisiest time in history — when the age of the automobile butts up against the era of electronics and gets smashed into dense urban populations — hearing loss is only a portion of what’s at stake. The field of “acoustic ecology” aims to reverse the noise pollution of today’s technology-driven world, but more importantly, to consciously create living environments that actually sound beautiful. The father of acoustic ecology is a composer and pedagogue named Murray Schafer. His 1977 book, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World, shaped a new dialogue around reducing and protecting certain sounds. He asked two big questions: What is the relationship between man and the sounds of his environment and what happens when those sounds change? And which sounds do we want to preserve, encourage, multiply?

via https://timeline.com/acoustic-ecology-e0386f57dfa6

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NoiseFunge is an experimental music live-coding environment based on the befunge family of languages.

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rjzimmerman:

Trailer for a new documentary entitled, “Sonic Sea,” produced by the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC), and which will premiere on the Discovery Channel on May 19. Description of the documentary from NRDC:

Beneath the surface of our oceans lies a finely balanced, living world of sound, most of which we never hear topside. But to whales, dolphins, and other marine life, sound is survival, the key to how they navigate, find mates, hunt for food, communicate over vast distances, and protect themselves against predators in waters dark and deep.

Our oceans, though, have become vast junkyards of industrial noise — often louder than a rock concert — from commercial shipping, military sonar, and seismic blasts that test for oil and gas. The seas have become so loud, in places, that these great animals are drowning in noise that threatens their health, their future, and their very lives.

On May 19, the Discovery Channel will premiere an important new NRDC film that documents this shattering underwater peril. Sonic Sea calls on us to turn down the volume before it’s too late.

To the future of marine life worldwide, deafening noise is hardly the only threat. It is compounding the stress ocean life faces a growing litany of environmental ills.

Because of the nature of onomatopoeia, there are many words which show a similar pronunciation in the languages of the world.

via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-linguistic_onomatopoeias

Silence is a peculiar starting point for a marketing campaign. After all, you can’t weigh, record, or export it. You can’t eat it, collect it, or give it away. The Finland campaign raises the question of just what the tangible effects of silence really are. Science has begun to pipe up on the subject. In recent years researchers have highlighted the peculiar power of silence to calm our bodies, turn up the volume on our inner thoughts, and attune our connection to the world. Their findings begin where we might expect: with noise.

http://nautil.us/issue/16/nothingness/this-is-your-brain-on-silence

From the vantage point of our own auditory world, with its jets, jackhammers, HVAC systems, truck traffic, cellphones, horns, decibel-bloated restaurants and gyms on acoustical steroids, Schopenhauer’s mid-19th century complaints sound almost quaint. His biggest gripe of all was the “infernal cracking” of coachmen’s whips. (If you think a snapping line of rawhide’s a problem, buddy, try the Rumbler Siren.) But if noise did shatter thought in the past, has more noise in more places further diffused our cognitive activity?

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/25/opinion/sunday/im-thinking-please-be-quiet.html?pagewanted=2&_r=5&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20130825&pagewanted=all&

Using telemetry data which are transmitted by most of the aircrafts allows to calculate their trajectories. The data is send in the Automatic Dependent Surveillance (ADS) format

http://metafly.info/en/model_overview.html

Of all the noises that my children will not understand, the one that is nearest to my heart is not from a song or a television show or a jingle. It’s the sound of a modem connecting with another modem across the repurposed telephone infrastructure. It was the noise of being part of the beginning of the Internet.

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/06/the-mechanics-and-meaning-of-that-ol-dial-up-modem-sound/257816/