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In his 1915 Book of Wonders, popular science writer Rudolph Bodmer suggested that the association followed from the symbolic power of shells: “The sounds we hear when we hold a sea shell to the ear are not really the sound of the sea waves. We have come to imagine that they are because they sound like the waves of the sea, and knowledge that the shell originally came from the sea helps us to this conclusion very easily.”2 But the likeness, he urged, had a technical explanation—though one in which similitude still figured. Both sea and seashell sounds were generated by waves: “The sounds we hear in the sea shell are really air waves”—waves, that is, of concentrated, resonant noise from the listener’s surroundings.
That explanation sought to supplant superstition with science, trading sublime enchantment for fascinating fact. The account in Bodmer’s book rested on a century of empirical and theoretical investigation in which sound had come to be understood as vibration, and not, as earlier, more numinously, on the model of music or voice, exampling what Jonathan Sterne names as a “shift from models of sound reproduction based on imitations of the mouth to models based on imitations of the ear.”3
Stefan Helmreich(via CABINET // Seashell Sound)
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(via @RichardDevine)
Multi-channel field recording of 12,000 Italian bees at Buckeye Creek Farm Cherokee GA.
The setup consisted of four wooden packages of bee’s containing 3000 bees each stacked on top of each other creating a wall of swarming noise.
Captured with the Neumann RSM 191-A/S and DPA SMK 4060 omnidirectional miniature stereo microphones. Everything was recorded at 24-bit 96khz with the Sound Devices 744T and Mixpre-D. Free Download
https://soundcloud.com/richarddevine/multi-channel-field-recording
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(via @duaneking) Amazing Water & Sound Experiment #2
(Source: youtube.com)
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Fragile Territories by Robert Henke
laser and sound installation at
Le Lieu Unique, Nantes, France
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The Ceiling Janus
(Source: vimeo.com)
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@bombtune:
Everyone has a musical bone. Sound on intuition.
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.@markweaver has been making great animated vines (can we call them that now?) of Lego. They’re great, and this one has especially great sound.
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![Tree Receivers on BLDGBLOG
Way back in 1919, in their July 14th issue, Scientific American published an article on the discovery that trees can act “as nature’s own wireless towers and antenna combined.”General George Owen Squire, the U.S. Army’s Chief Signal Officer, made his “strange discovery,” as SciAmphrases it, while sitting in “a little portable house erected in thick woods near the edge of the District of Columbia,” listening to signals “received through an oak tree for an antenna.” This realization, that “trees—all trees, of all kinds and all heights, growing anywhere—are nature’s own wireless towers and antenna combined.” He called this “talking through the trees.” Indeed, subsequent tests proved that, “[w]ith the remarkably sensitive amplifiers now available, it was not only possible to receive signals from all the principle [sic] European stations through a tree, but it has developed beyond a theory and to a fact that a tree is as good as any man-made aerial, regardless of the size or extent of the latter, and better in the respect that it brings to the operator’s ears far less static interference.”](http://25.media.tumblr.com/7f0b1c15660230055003886bb4388b7e/tumblr_mfz25cCSZQ1qbi2nyo1_500.jpg "Tree Receivers on BLDGBLOG
Way back in 1919, in their July 14th issue, Scientific American published an article on the discovery that trees can act “as nature’s own wireless towers and antenna combined.”General George Owen Squire, the U.S. Army’s Chief Signal Officer, made his “strange discovery,” as SciAmphrases it, while sitting in “a little portable house erected in thick woods near the edge of the District of Columbia,” listening to signals “received through an oak tree for an antenna.” This realization, that “trees—all trees, of all kinds and all heights, growing anywhere—are nature’s own wireless towers and antenna combined.” He called this “talking through the trees.” Indeed, subsequent tests proved that, “[w]ith the remarkably sensitive amplifiers now available, it was not only possible to receive signals from all the principle [sic] European stations through a tree, but it has developed beyond a theory and to a fact that a tree is as good as any man-made aerial, regardless of the size or extent of the latter, and better in the respect that it brings to the operator’s ears far less static interference.”")
Tree Receivers on BLDGBLOG
Way back in 1919, in their July 14th issue, Scientific American published an article on the discovery that trees can act “as nature’s own wireless towers and antenna combined.”
General George Owen Squire, the U.S. Army’s Chief Signal Officer, made his “strange discovery,” as SciAmphrases it, while sitting in “a little portable house erected in thick woods near the edge of the District of Columbia,” listening to signals “received through an oak tree for an antenna.” This realization, that “trees—all trees, of all kinds and all heights, growing anywhere—are nature’s own wireless towers and antenna combined.”
He called this “talking through the trees.” Indeed, subsequent tests proved that, “[w]ith the remarkably sensitive amplifiers now available, it was not only possible to receive signals from all the principle [sic] European stations through a tree, but it has developed beyond a theory and to a fact that a tree is as good as any man-made aerial, regardless of the size or extent of the latter, and better in the respect that it brings to the operator’s ears far less static interference.”
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Kim Asendorf - Binary Call (APX877 2011)
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10 minutes of Totoro in the rain (via @lizgre)
(Source: youtube.com)
Field Mic
A sound art and music blog.
Submissions welcomed.
