This track was submitted to The Quiet American One Minute Vacation series. It is of general market sounds captured from my apartment window, with what I assume to be a preacher spreading the word via a vehicle mounted PA system.

With the release of Custom Search Engines at Google Co-op comes the possibility of building a search engine limited to a community-maintained list of sites directly related to Acoustic Ecology and Soundscape Studies.  The benfit of this is that search results will be more relevant as they will only include sites that the Acoustic Ecology community deems to have direct relevance.  The downside is that there will be a loss in randomness that lends to those unitended discoveries, like when you find a book in the elibrary that is sitting on a desk that happens to be interesting but you never would have found otherwise.  This project is to monitor progress of this endeavour.  To kick-start this, I'll be setting up a CSE to include the sites I've collated in my tasks database from the last three or four years of web trawling.

This project is multi-layered, but in essence is an excuse to do some audio work within a limited compositional domain. Brian Eno and David Byrne collaborated with a large number of electronic and fusion based music stalwarts to produce what is still a remarkable album. Its techniques and sound have proven influential to this day. And yes, it is highly repetitive.  In conjunction with the reissue, they have opened all the base material of two tracks for public domain remixing.  The remix site can be found here. I'm not a well seasoned veteran when it comes to Talking Heads admiration, but the general spirit of the contest is captivating. Also, I did actually enjoy the album when I heard it for the first time, even if it did get subsumed during a time of new-music inundation. Seems like a perfect opportunity to rediscover the material. They are claiming that this is a first of a kind in opening full mastertrack material for remix on the internet and it's great to see such a high profile artist as Eno embracing the Creative Commons licensing scheme. At first I recalled the David Bowie remix/mashup competition held in 2004 as possible prior art, but this was nowhere near as open, and retained content ownership of all remixes/mashups submitted.  Also, no original mastertrack material was released. Regardless, the opportunity to work in a collaborative way with material from what is considered an electronic/world-music/fusion classic is too enticing to pass up. 

in DeLanda we find a hint that circulation of raw materials is a primary force in the shaping of modern urban geographies. For instance, "in the 1800s the intense circulation of coal energy gave rise to a far greater number of new (mining and factory) towns, most of which grew spontaneously, not to say chaotically" (and quoting Hohenberg and Lees) "by a kind of regional implosion, whereby a rural milieu crystallized into a densely urban one". (75) Furthering his genral thesis of material evolution, he turns later to "the "sonic matter" of a given language". He claims such matter,

This somewhat unconsciously applied metaphor for the harmony of the spheres from Brian Greene:

Early scientific study focused on the kinds of things one might see or experience in everyday life.  Galileo dropped weights from a leaning tower (or so legend has it) and watched balls rolling down inclined surfaces; Newton studied falling apples (or so legend has it) and the orbit of the moon.   The goal of these investigations was to attune the nascent scientific ear to nature's harmonies.  To be sure, physical reality was the stuff of experience, but the challenge was to hear the rhyme and reason behind the rhythm and regularity.  Many sung and unsung heroes contributed to the rapid and impressive progress that was made, but Newton stole the show.  With a handful of mathematical equations, he synthesized everything known about motion on earth and in the heavens, and in so doing, composed the score for what has come to be known as classical physics. (7)

This is a folder to temporarily contain all entries relevant to the WFAE presentation project.

2005.12.03 @ 01:33

to reiterate the thesis.

the object of art is best represented and executed via the network. the object of sonic art is best represented and executed via a loop network. the sonic artist researcher operating within the academy works within place-world constraints that modulate the aspects/nodes/elements of the loop network and the way they interact (sucking the emphasis to observation, dictating the methods of circulation, tuning the effect of feedback into critical response (noise -vs- music). this is true of any placement of the artist. my goal is not to prove this thesis with theory and rhetoric, but to demonstrate it and describe it in action. this means, construction of a network in tandem with description of the field within which this network operates.

the academic is concerned with that beyond the everyday, of being in the loop to know the loop and potentially, escape from it. the artist researcher is particularly well placed to engender and inform social revolution. to comment upon the everyday using the medium of the everyday, in a way that the feedback this provides can be consumed in the activities of the everyday rather than the activities of the super-habitual realm of academic observation. the artist revolutionises the role of academia and research in general by repositioning research in terms of the everyday.

music is a theory of how the world could sound if it were harmonious. noise art is a techno realism, a realisation that we are better off working with what we have than dreaming about that which might never be. phonography is the compromise, whereby the music of sounds is teased out via the arts of suggestion, juxtaposition, association.