DOMUS magazine's "sounds of cities" mixtapes

From DOMUS magazine
So far they have:
Mexico City (Daniel Hernández)
Harlem (DJ Rupture with Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts)
Buenos Aires (Leandro Erlich w/ n-ron)

Sonidos de ciudades: México DF, Harlem y Buenos Aires

La venganza del picó...

En una imprevista guerra sonora entre Carlos Vives y un equipo de sonido no nombrado en pleno Carnaval de Barranquilla, la fusionada nostalgia folklórica de Vives pierde un punto ante la estrepitosa y desmedida exuberancia popular:

De El Tiempo:

Carlos Vives tuvo que terminar antes su concierto por ruido callejero

Por: BARRANQUILLA | 3:34 a.m. |

El alto volumen de los equipos de los carros impidió que el artista continuara su show.

Nadie pudo controlar a los dueños de los vehículos parqueados a las afueras del Hotel del Prado; el artista llevaba hora y media de show, pero no pudo continuar debido al ruido callejero.

Todavía con los cables del monitoreo enganchados en el cuerpo, luego de hora y media de show, regresaron al camerino todos y cada uno de los integrantes de La Provincia, incluido el mismo Carlos Vives, quienes por culpa de los ensordecedores ruidos de los equipos de sonido de los vehículos que se parquearon a las afueras del Hotel del Prado, en Barranquilla, no pudieron concluir el concierto de este viernes (Vea acá más noticias relacionadas con el Carnaval de Barranquilla).

El regguetón y los ritmos electrónicos provenientes de la calle zumbaban cada vez que el samario intentaba dirigirse, entre canción y canción, a las cerca de tres mil personas que pagaron la boleta para verlo en la apertura del Carnaval 2011.

A las 10:35 de la noche las notas de la canción 'Sí, sí, sí' prendieron la fiesta así como por más de 11 temas coreados por el público y que contaron con una entrega total del artista.

La paciencia se colmó después de la canción 'Canté', alusiva al Carnaval y a distintas fiestas colombianas. "Hey vamos a decirle al man del picó de afuera que por lo menos se ponga en el mismo tono de nosotros pa' aprovéchalo", dijo el cantante para quejarse de la falta de garantías para seguir presentándose.

Luego de varios minutos, mientras Andrés Castro y Carlos Huertas, de La Provincia, intentaban mantener la atención con improvisadas notas de guitarra, la agrupación se bajó de la tarima sin siquiera poder despedirse de los asistentes que observaban el concierto, incluido el mismo alcalde de Barranquilla, Alejandro Char Chaljub.

"Es algo que nunca nos había pasado en los más de 60 países que hemos recorrido en estos años", dijo el acordeonero Egidio Cuadrado.

Vives, por su parte, aseguró que seguía contento de haber podido estar en el Carnaval, pero vuelve a irse de Barranquilla con un mal sabor de boca como en 2006 cuando le criticaron en Barranquilla luego de su presentación en una carroza en la Batalla de Flores de aquel entonces. Se dijo que los atrasos del desfile corrieron por cuenta de su montaje desmedido.

"Sigo creyendo en Barranquilla, porque al menos pude estar aquí y a pesar de lo sucedido la gente estuvo conmigo. Para mí la ciudad es muy importante", declaró minutos después de abandonar la tarima.

"Faltaba al menos media hora de show", agregó su esposa Claudia Elena Vásquez. A la 1:30 a.m. la cartelera del Hotel del Prado continuó con la agrupación de Los Betos y todavía faltaban Sensación Orquesta, Elvis Crespo, Tito Nieves, Iván Villazón y Jorge Celedón.

Sobre la aglomeración de la gente a las afueras del hotel, a lo que popularmente se le conoce como el 'Carnaval del Pradito', se le había preguntado el pasado el lunes en rueda de prensa al empresario responsable del evento, Ludwing Landazabal, y este respondió que sería controlada por las autoridades porque en 2010 la situación por poco deja una pared desplomada.

Sin embargo, control sobre los que ponen a todo volumen la música de los vehículos y se parquean en sitios públicos fue lo que más faltó.

El público, que pagó cada entrada a 190 mil pesos, se quejó también de que en la boleta se anunció que las orquestas iniciaban a las 6 de la tarde, pero la primera presentación fue la de Carlvos Vives, con varias horas de retardo a lo prometido.

Este, sin duda, pasará a la historia del cantante como uno de los más desastrosos de su carrera incluido el de sus inicios en Santa Marta luego de protagonizar la serie Escalona.

Aquella vez fue telonero de Chayanne y solo hasta las 4 de la madrugada pudo presentarse en el estadio Eduardo Santos con unos tantos en el público. Este viernes, en Barranquilla, ni 'La gota fría', ni 'La tierra del olvido' fueron escuchadas.

BARRANQUILLA

NY Times: 104 years in mash-ups

From Charles Ives and Pierre Scaeffer to Remix.vg, DJ Hero, and Girl Talk.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/01/09/magazine/mashup-timeline.html?ref=magazine

also: a history (and brief manifesto) on the headphone:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/09/magazine/09FOB-medium-t.html?ref=magazine

Ambience in the Humanities: Translating New Surroundings into New Poetics

Full disclosure: I will be reading a paper for this one (via Skype, which I've never done before...)

Ambience in the Humanities: Translating New Surroundings into New Poetics November 19-20, 2010 20 Cooper Square, 5th Floor The Humanities Initiative conference, organized by former Graduate Student Fellows Elena Bellinaand John Melillo Sounds, voices, musics, images, written codes of all sorts – in today’s media-saturated environment, humans lend their ears and eyes to an abundant and seemingly free-floating worlds of social and sensory information. The intensity of this information calls for different models of poetics that figure the artist not as a lone fabricator constructing and reconstructing a singular tradition but rather as an antenna, receiving and rebroadcasting atmospheres of experience. The affects, concepts, and materials that create particular ambiences do not merely condition the work, as in the classic divide of text and context, but literally inform it, giving both material and shape to the poetic process. From everyday life to extreme conditions of constraint, from suburbia to the warzone, how does the sensing self record—consciously or unconsciously—the ambience of these zones and spaces? In this conference, we propose to organize a series of roundtable discussions with writers, composers, performers, and critics that will consider not the influence of a particular tradition or canon but rather the influence of particular material surroundings. What does New York—as a crowded, built-up urban environment—mean for punk rock musicians in the early 1970s? How do the sounds of warfare affect soldiers and civilians in past and contemporary war zones? How do the symbols and images of pop culture get rearranged as signs of political allegiance? How do all the arts reflect the conditions of their production—not only in a political economic sense but also in the sense of sensing itself—the social materiality of exterior information? For more information, including a conference program, please visit ambienceconference.wordpress.com.

Sound Politics

Sound Politics – American Comparative Literature Association conference

American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) conference
Vancouver, Canada
March 31-April 3

Deadline for paper proposals: November 12

Please note: ACLA seminars involve up to 12 participants and meet over the course of 3 days. Paper proposals must be submitted via the conference website. Go to http://www.acla.org/acla2011/, click on ‘Propose a Paper or Seminar,’ and follow instructions. Be sure to select Sound Politics from the list of seminars.


Sound Politics
This seminar aims to draw out several methodological and theoretical issues involving sound and its relation to the political realm. How might a focus on aural practices and the auditory sense lead us to rethink presuppositions about political agency and critique? How have ideas about sound and certain aural practices shaped particular political ideologies, or even the category of ideology itself? Is it possible to theorize acoustics as an arena of contestation? How do technological media become racialized and gendered? Is there such a thing as ‘hearing’ class? Our goal is to bring together scholars from a range of disciplines and theoretical perspectives and to explore (dis)junctures of sound and the political in a wide array of geographical contexts and historical periods.

Questions? Feel free to contact either or both of the seminar organizers:
Sarah J. Townsend sjtownsend@berkeley.edu
Tom McEnaney mcenaney@berkeley.edu

LIVE from the NYPL: TACTILE SOUND & THE PURSUIT OF SILENCE IN A NOISY WORLD

Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, Celeste Bartos Forum (Map and directions)
April 9, 2010 7:00 PM EDT
$25 General Admission, $15 library donors, seniors + students with valid ID
GET TICKETS
ASL interpretation, Realtime (CART) captioning, and assistive listening devices will be provided.

PART I. ON THE PURSUIT OF SILENCE IN A NOISY WORLD

GEORGE PROCHNIK in conversation with Paul Holdengräber
Through his book, In Pursuit of Silence : Listening for Meaning in a World of Noise, George Prochnik explores the benefits of decluttering our sonic world. Speaking with doctors, neuroscientists, acoustical engineers, monks, activists, educators, marketers, and citizens, Prochnik examines what gets lost when we can no longer find quiet. Some of the characters he's encountered on the road include:
• An architect pioneering a new kind of silent architecture in collaboration with the Deaf community at Gallaudet University.
• A special operations soldier in Afghanistan (and former guitarist for Nirvana) who places silence at the heart of survival in war.
• A sound engineer for shopping malls who ensures that the stores we visit never stop their auditory seductions.
• A group of commuters who successfully revolted against piped-in music at Grand Central Station.

PART II. SOUND EXCITEMENT: ARTISTS & SCIENTISTS ON THE HEARD & UNHEARD
Artist
• Wendy Jacob presents Waves and Signs, a performative structure designed to carry low-frequency vibrations that are played through the floor. By sitting, standing, or lying on the stucture, all audience members will be able to experience tactile sound through their bodies- for example: the vibrations produced by spiny shrimp, and, the vibrations communicated between elephants through the ground.

Scientists
• Sheila Patek probes the physical experience of sound in water with Sound Sensations in the Sea.
• Robert Sirvage examines the everyday experience of the visual and tactile world with Deaf Space.
• Caitlin O’Connell Rodwell presents the mechanisms used by elephants to communicate sound with Elephant Rumbles: Communication through the Vibrotactile Sense.
• Hansel Bauman discusses the Deaf Space Project at Gallaudet University.

This evening is funded, in part, by the Council for the Arts at MIT.
ABOUT GEORGE PROCHNIK
George Prochnik is the author of Putnam Camp: Sigmund Freud, James Jackson Putnam & The Purpose of American Psychology and In Pursuit of Silence: Listening for Meaning in a World of Noise.

ABOUT PAUL HOLDENGRABER
Paul Holdengräber is the Director of Public Programs - LIVE from the NYPL- for The Research Libraries of The New York Public Library.

ABOUT WENDY JACOB
Wendy Jacob is an artist, lecturer and Research Scientist in the Program in Art, Culture and Technology at MIT.

ABOUT SHEILA PATEK
Sheila Patek is a biologist who probes the physical experience of sound in water, the hearing mechanisms of spiny lobsters, mantis shrimp, and other acoustic organisms thought to be lacking “true” ears. Sheila is Assistant Professor in the Biology Department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

ABOUT ROBERT SIRVAGE
Robert Sirvage is a designer and researcher at Gallaudet University. Sirvage examines the social and physical rhythms of everyday experience within the context of the highly visual and tactile world of deaf space.

ABOUT CAITLIN O'CONNELL RODWELL
Expert on elephant communication, Caitlin O’Connell-Rodwell studies the mechanisms that elephants employ to communicate over long distances, both in the air and in the ground. Caitlin is a biologist on the faculty at Stanford University School of Medicine, Department of Otolaryngology, Head & Neck Surgery.

ABOUT HANSEL BAUMAN
Hansel Bauman is an architect, and the director of Deaf Space Project at Gallaudet University.

This event is located in the Celeste Bartos Forum of The New York Public Library. Enter on 42nd Street near 5th Avenue and proceed to Celeste Bartos Forum.

Box office opens at 5:00pm, Doors open at 6:15pm, Program begins at 7:00pm. Arrive early for seats!

LRAD - noise weapon - in Honduras

According to The Field,

Narco News and its team of technical engineers and counter-surveillance consultants has identified the apparatus as the LRAD-X Remote Long Range Acoustic Device, manufactured by the American Technologies Corporation.

The instrument is an offensive weapon, used on US Navy warships and by other nations, which can emit sounds that, “Through the use of powerful voice commands and deterrent tones, large safety zones can be created while determining the intent and influencing the behavior of an intruder.”

The LRAD-X machine can shoot sounds of up to 151 decibels. According to the US National Institute on Deafness and Other Communications Disorders sounds less loud than those it produces can cause Noise Induced Hearing Loss (NIHL): “Sources of noise that can cause NIHL include motorcycles, firecrackers, and small firearms, all emitting sounds from 120 to 150 decibels. Long or repeated exposure to sounds at or above 85 decibels can cause hearing loss. The louder the sound, the shorter the time period before NIHL can occur.”

The front of the device looks like this:

And this is the back of the device:

In other words, the LRAD-X is the source of the high-pitched and pain-inducing sounds that have been fired both at those inside the Brazilian Embassy and turned around when anti-coup demonstrators have tried to come close to it. As such, it interferes with the Vienna protected inviolability of the Embassy and its free communications.

Under international law, this violation already serves as sufficient justification for intervention by UN Peacekeeping Forces of the multinational kind that the country of Brazil has led in Haiti.

LRAD sound cannon - sonority, pain, and control

This from NYU ethnomusicologist Ben Taussig's Wierd Vibrations blog, stolen word for word.

In the wake of the first domestic use of sound cannons, against protesters at the recent, sparsely-picketed G20 summit in Pittsburgh, which comes just a few weeks after the same technology was used to suppress protesters at a factory in Bangkok, I want to discuss sound as an absolute phenomenon – that is, at the point where a human listener experiences acute physical harm through exposure, where sound stops being musical or aesthetic and becomes quite literally indistinguishable from a blunt object or explosive device.

First, for the uninitiated, sound cannons (or LRADs) are a new type of crowd control device that riot control officers can shoot at people like a gun. Rather than discrete projectiles, it sends waves of howlingly loud noise, potentially including shrill, siren-like tones or direct verbal messages (”move back” and the like). This video gives a sense of how it works, and especially how loud it can be (fair warning: cover your ears!):

Like teargas, the sound cannon is attractive for use in crowd control because it is non-lethal but immediately effective. Governments can manage discontented people in an absolute fashion without creating martyrs or accruing liability. This is something of a loophole in the ethical treatment of protesters – the human body cannot tolerate sound in excess, but exposure leaves no (visible) scars. Perhaps in a wiser moment, we’ll take stock of the emotional distress such conditions can produce, of the long-term hearing loss that can occur with misuse of the machines, of potentially dangerous levels of stress, and of the disturbing political asymmetry such technology facilitates between a government and its citizens. But for now, sound cannons are perfectly legal.

LRADs operate in the threshold between normal listening, where vibration is mild enough that we experience sound as essentially immaterial, and where we can readily pay attention to communicative and aesthetic content (music, language, texture), and extreme sonic exposure, where vibration is felt as a force throughout the body. The sound cannon is far enough along this spectrum that we react involuntarily to its painful volume, but not so far along that we lose life or limb. It’s pretty brilliant, in a mad scientist kind of way.

In any case, it’s fascinating/macabre to consider what various sound levels can to us physically. The hardware manufacturer makeitlouder.com has a whole chart.

(Decibels measure the intensity of a sound wave. They do not measure frequency, so for example knowing that a conversation occurs around 50 dbs does not tell us whether the voices are high or low.)

Here are some choice selections:

13 – Ordinary light bulb hum
30 – Totally quiet nighttime in desert – impossible near city
40 – A whisper
60 – Normal conversation
100 – House or car stereo at maximum volume
116 – Human body begins to perceive vibration at low frequencies (imagine standing in front of a speaker at a concert, for example)
125 – Drum at the moment of being hit
127 – Tinnitus sets in
128 – Human hair will begin to vibrate perceptibly
132 – Eardrum flex becomes noticeable
133 – Gunshot at ear level
135 – The air begins to cool from expansion
137 – The entire human body vibrates
140 – Extreme damage to hearing no matter how short the exposure (this, by the way, is how loud the LRAD can be set)
141 – The human body experiences nausea
142 – Chest pounding is intense
143 – Human body feels as if “someone just football tackled your chest”
145 – Human vision begins to vibrate
153 – Human throat vibrates so hard it is almost impossible to swallow
163 – Minimum glassbreaking level
172 – Fog is created
175 – Equivalent to a quarter stick of dynamite
180 – Damage to structures is catastrophic
186.1 – Equivalent to a pound of TNT at a distance of 10 feet
202 – Immediate human death
220 – Equivalent to the largest bomb used in WWII
257 – Equivalent to 1 megaton nuclear bomb

etc.

Sonic Trademarks: The Case of the Wacky Quackers

From The Times:

At issue is a “sound mark,” the auditory equivalent of a trademark, which Ride the Ducks says it holds on a quack created by a yellow bill-shaped kazoo (called a Wacky Quacker) and which it says Bay Quackers has violated by using a similar kazoo that creates an identical quack.... such sound marks (are) fairly uncommon, with only about 150 registered, a short list that includes the Ride the Ducks quack, the MGM lion’s roar and NBC’s signature chimes.

More on "sound trademarks" here, with audio samples (including more quacking), here.

Rsearchers find 1860 sound recording, 20 years before Edison

From the N.Y. Times
Picture printed in NY Times, Courtesy of David Giovannoni

Apparently, this contraption, invented by the Parisian Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, represented sound visually, rather than being designed for playback, which Jonathon Sterne has interesting things to say about in the article. It has links to the playback, too, you can here a French song from 1860, which is just frickin bananas!

Murió Stockhausen is dead

In tribute to the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, who died on Wednesday, a nice lecture and a kinda dorky interview.

En homenaje al compositor Karlheinz Stockhausen, muerto el miércoles, coloqué una charla académica y una entrevista. Ambos son en inglés, pero la entrevista (el segundo video) tiene unos sonidos e imágenes de la obra de Stockhausen, como el cuarteto para cuerdas y helicópteros.

Some news

• Crazy Brits celebrate the 3rd Annual No Music Day, in which “iPods will be left at home,” “rock bands will not rock,” “choirboys will shut their mouths,” “jingles will not jangle” to reclaim a "polluted" soundscape. Link
  
• University have fewer tenured and tenure-track positions and it sucks (for students as much as adjuncts.) Link (so finish that dissertation!)
• Bloated, out-of-touch MTV to fund edgy, smart, obnoxious Vice Magazine's A/V content as a way to see what this whole internet thing is all about. Link
  

New Orleans second-line musicians prosecuted for disturbing the peace

These people are crazy too!
Link

How to catch a leopard with a cell phone

AHMEDABAD, India (Reuters) - Forest guards in western India are using cell phones with ringtones of cows mooing, goats bleating and roosters crowing to attract leopards that have wandered into human settlements, officials said on Monday.
Link

Sinfonía policial/Cop Symphony

Enlace

Shantytown technology/Tecnología del gueto

El viejísimo teclado sampling de 1987, el Casio SK-5 ha tenido una segunda vida en la costa caribeña colombiana, al lado de los drum pad DD de Yamaha, como vemos en este video de un picó colombiano, El Escorpión, si no estoy mal.

Back from the technological Stone Age, the venerable Casio SK-5 (c. 1987) has come to live a second life in champeta music played by picó sound systems from the Colombian Caribbean coast, alongside Yamaha's redoubtable DD series of drumpads.

Música urbana ghanaiana/Ghanaian urban music

Los ghanaianos parecen tener un talento para hacer música de los objetos cotidianos, como en la famosa grabación de trabajadores del correo ghanaiano ritmicamente cancelando estampillas (aquí). En este nuevo CD, con viejos pitos de carros, cajas, partes metálicas, y sus voces, los miembros del sindicato de choferes de bus de Accra hacen música para celebrar los funerales de sus miembros. Una grabación bastante interesante que borra las líneas entre la modernidad y la tradición, la ciudad y el campo, la tristeza y la alegría. Grabada por el importantísimo etnomusicólogo Steven Feld. Se recomiendan en particular las canciones Por Por Akwaaba y Kpanlogo Por Por Medley. Halucinante.

We all know that Ghanaian postal workers can get down (if you don't, check this out.) With old car horns, boxes, metal parts, and their own voices, the members of Accra's bus driver's union make music at the funeralas of the their members. This is some crazy stuff and musically fascinating. Recorded by good old Steve Feld, who I see has been immortalized in Wikipedia. I like Kpanlogo Por Por Medley in particular, and Por Por Akwaaba gives a pretty good idea of the horn sound.

reactable

The reactable, is a multi-user electronic music instrument with a tabletop tangible user interface. Several simultaneous performers share ... all » complete control over the instrument by moving physical objects on a luminous table surface. By moving and relating these objects, representing components of a classic modular synthesizer, users can create complex and dynamic sonic topologies, with generators, filters and modulators, in a kind of tangible modular synthesizer or graspable flow-controlled programming language. This instrument is being developed by a team of digital luthiers (Sergi Jordà, Martin Kaltenbrunner, Günter Geiger and Marcos Alonso), at the Music Technology Group within the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain.

Link

El reactable es un instrumento musical electrónico multiusos con un interface tablero. Varios ejecutantes simultáneos comparte todo el control completo sobre el instrumento moviendo objetos físicos en una superficie luminosa de la tabla. Moviendo y relacionando estos objetos, que representan los componentes de un sintetizador modular clásico, usuarios pueden crear topologías sonoras complejas y dinámicas, con los generadores, filtros y moduladores, en una clase de sintetizador modular tangible o de lenguaje de programación de corriente regulada aprehendible. Este instrumento está siendo desarrollado por un equipo de los luthiers digitales (Sergi Jordà, Martin Kaltenbrunner, Günter Geiger y Marcos Alonso), en el grupo de la tecnología de la música dentro del Universitat Pompeu Fabra en Barcelona, España.

Enlace

"Sound in the Era of Mechanical Reproduction"

"Sound in the Era of Mechanical Reproduction"

November 2-3, 2007

Hagley Library, Wilmington, Delaware

For the conference, "Sound in the Era of Mechanical Reproduction,"
the Center for the History of Business, Technology and Society
invites proposals for empirically based historical papers that
analyze sound in commercial, technological, and legal environments
since the late 19th century. The conference will take place November
2-3, 2007 at the Hagley Library in Wilmington, Delaware. Our
principal interest is in papers that explore the integration of sound
with the commercial practices of music, radio, film, and television,
and the commercial engineering of sound in social environments such
as shopping and the workplace. Proposals can consider the legal and
cultural implications of innovations in technology and business
practices, such as the impact on the political economy of sound and
notions of sound and sound-based products as property. We also
encourage papers that explore sources of innovation in sound and
music (especially from communities and/or business enterprises
defined by ethnicity, race, or region), as well as those focusing on
the transnational circulation of sound-related technologies and
business practices.

Proposals should be no more than 500 words and accompanied by a short
cv. Deadline for submissions is March 31, 2007. The program committee
includes David Suisman, Susan Strasser, Philip Scranton and Roger
Horowitz. Travel support is available for those presenting papers at
the conference. To submit a proposal or to obtain more information,
contact Carol Lockman, Hagley Museum and Library, PO Box 3630,
Wilmington DE 19807, 302-658-2400, ext. 243; 302-655-3188 (fax);
clockman@Hagley.org.

Carol Ressler Lockman
Hagley Museum & Library
PO Box 3630
Wilmington DE 19807
Email: clockman@hagley.org
Visit the website at http://www.hagley.org

Las propiedades científicas del si-bemol / The scientific properties of B-flat

B-flat scares crocodiles, haunts stairwells and is sub-sonically hummed
by black holes. Or so they say. Link


¿Quién habría pensado que el si-bemol asusta a los caimanes, atormenta las escaleras y es canturreado sub-sonicamente por los agujeros negros? Eso dicen. Enlace (traducido)