[ August 17, 2010 / bookmark ]
This is the fifth occurrence of a relatively new little Disquiet.com project, called “Sketches of Sound”: inviting illustrators to sketch something sound-related. I post the drawing as the background of my Twitter account, twitter.com/disquiet, and then share a bit of information about the illustrator back on Disquiet.com. Call it “curating Twitter.” The above drawing was [...]
[ July 24, 2010 / bookmark ]
It’s Comic-Con this week, down in San Diego. Once upon a time, Comic-Con was a mix of professional business conference and geek art fair for fans of serial storytelling told in cheap pamphlets and sold in several thousand mom’n’pop stores around the U.S. These days it’s primarily an opportunity for Hollywood to pitch its wares [...]
[ July 18, 2010 / bookmark ]
Happy World Listening Day. According to the folks over at worldlisteningproject.org, the purpose of the day is threefold: • to celebrate the practice of listening as it relates to the world around us, environmental awareness, and acoustic ecology • to raise awareness about issues related to the World Soundscape Project, World Listening Project, World Forum [...]
[ June 14, 2010 / bookmark ]
Recommended reading, news, and so forth elsewhere: To Tape or Not to Tape: In a nytimes.com review of the June in Buffalo Festival (as in Buffalo, New York), Allan Kozinn comments on an ensemble, Signal, that opts to perform Steve Reich‘s “Double Sextet” with 12 instruments, rather than as six instruments played against a prerecorded [...]
[ May 2, 2010 / bookmark ]
The software named Squiggle is an iPad audio-tool-in-progress. You draw lines, using the touch interface, and then with a slight tip of the device, the new instrument becomes playable: Brief video of Squiggle in action: Developed by Henry Chu of the Hong Kong design group pillandpillow.com. Via creativeapplications.net and twitter.com/zachlieberman.
[ April 28, 2010 / bookmark ]
“Drone” is not the correct term for the work of Zimoun, the Bern, Switzerland-based artist and musician. But if his rough noises don’t count as drones, what are they? Zimoun’s primary instruments are entirely of his own making, each a large-scale installation of small mechanical devices — tables lined with whipping little bits of [...]
[ April 11, 2010 / bookmark ]
The musical instruments created by Arius Blaze, and his partner Ben Houston, are retro-futurism at its best. This isn’t solely decorative — it’s not cyberpunk window-dressing, or the musical equivalent of computer case-modding. As exemplified by the Feedback Harmonizer, created by Blaze and shown here, their work mixes homespun materials (old guitar parts, burnished wood [...]