Audio Examples / Podcasts

Photographer Robert Burley takes pictures of the end of Analog for his book The disappearance of darkness. Christine Frohnert explains how conservators must care for Art with a Plug. Curator Christiane Paul tells us how the Whitney Museum of American Art restored the digital artwork "The world's first collaborative sentence" by Douglas Davis. And TOE's Washington D.C. corespondent 'Chris' tells us the truth about Edward Snowden and Snapchat. 

Artifacts (1 of 2)

Nathan Jurgenson wants us to understand what is truly revolutionary about ephemeral photographs and platforms like Snapchat, Fred Ritchin says we are going to get our minds blown "After Photography" and Finn Bruntun explains why we need to preserve this transition from Analog to Digital. 

Artifacts (2 of 2)

This week we examine the legacy of The Work of Art in the Age of Technological Reproducibility by Walter Benjamin.  Media Theorist and Benjamin scholar (and translator) Thomas Levin explains why this essay resonates today and what Benjamin has to tell us about the utopian power of new media. Also Russell Meyer tells us about the Wu-Tang clan's plan to release a sole copy of their new album and why he has turned to Kickstarter so he can buy it and release it to the world. And your host shares an imaginary story about Hitler and Goebbels encountering Benjamin's essay during their final days in the bunker.

A Better Tomorrow

The best knock-offs in the world are in China. There are plenty of fake designer handbags and Rolexes but China's knock-offs go way beyond fashion. There are knock-off Apple stores that look so much like the real thing, some employees believe they are working in real Apple stores.  And then there are entire knock-off cities.

99% Invisible-125- Duplitecture

PAY NO ATTENTION TO THAT MAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN by Sarah Boothroyd
2006
Stereo
5 minutes 55 seconds
------------------------------
This collage mixes printing press rhythms and spoken word with interview scraps that would usually be edited out of a journalistic radio segment, including material that draws attention to the technical and interpersonal machinations of reporting. It's a behind-the-scenes view of journalism, which is a process of editing and selecting, rather than transmitting a complete record to the public.

Thumbnail image credit: Status Frustration

www.sarahboothroyd.com

Copyright: All Rights Reserved

Pay No Attention to that Man Behind the Curtain

A tiny radio show about design, architecture & the 99% invisible activity that shapes our world.

99% Invisible-01- 99% Noise

99% Invisible-10- 99% Sound and Feel

99% Invisible-15- Sounds of the Artificial World

99% Invisible-19X- RJDJ Reactive Music

This week on 99% Invisible, we have two stories about the early days of broadcasting and home sound recording, produced by Radio Diaries and the Kitchen Sisters.

The sounds that came out Frank Conrad's Garage in 1919 and 1920 are gone. There were no recordings made, and everyone who participated in his audio experiments have died. In this piece, Radio Diaries uncovers what might have happened in Frank Conrad’s garage, where some people say modern broadcasting began.

The first portable audio recorder was made in 1945 by a man named Tony Schwartz. He moved the VU meter from inside of the unit to the top, so he could see the recording volume. And, he put a strap on it so that he could hang the device over his shoulder. Armed with his recorder (and sometimes a secret microphone attached to his wrist), Schwartz chronicled every sound in his Manhattan neighborhood.  He recorded children singing songs in the park, street festival music, jukeboxes in restaurants, vendors peddling vegetables, and more than 700 conversations with cab drivers, just to name a few examples. The Kitchen Sisters have his story.

99% Invisible-167- Voices In The Wire

People who make horror movies know: if you want to scare someone, use scary music.

Some of the most creative use of music and sound to evoke fear and anxiety is on the TV show Hannibal.

Hrishikesh Hirway of Song Exploder spoke with evolutionary biologist Dan Blumstein, Hannibal executive producer David Slade, and composer Brian Reitzell. 

Bonus: To celebrate the addition of Song Exploder to Radiotopia, we're playing Roman's favorite episode of the program, featuring John Roderick of The Long Winters "exploding" his masterpiece "The Commander Thinks Aloud."

99% Invisible-168- All In Your Head

http://www.liquidarchitecture.org.au/program/listeningtotheanthropocene/

Mapping out a range of eco-acoustic practices from field recordings to data and geo-sonifications, the talk explores imaginations of the natural world at a time of accelerating global environmental crisis.

Listening to the Anthropocene: Sound and ecological crisis
14 Dec 2015
Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne

This talk explores imaginations of the natural world at a time of accelerating global environmental crisis; in an era currently being defined as the Anthropocene, a geophysical term “which recognises that human intrusion on the planet’s surface and into the atmosphere has been so extreme as to qualify our time on earth as a specific geological epoch”. It does so through mediums and methods of sound being used by artists, bio-acousticians and scientists to make sense of, and communicate, earth system changes. Mapping out a range of eco-acoustic practices from field recordings to data and geo-sonifications, the talk investigates how such practices seek to delineate, highlight, and/ or overcome, distinctions between natural and social, urban and rural, exceptional and everyday.
http://transversalgeographies.org/

Anja Kanngieser is Vice Chancellors Fellow at the Australian Centre for Cultural Environmental Research, with a background in geography and communication studies. Her work focuses on the intersections of political economy and ecology, sound and social movements. She is interested in the ways in which people strategise, antagonise and collaborate to create the living and working conditions they desire. Bringing into dialogue political economic theory with audio practices, she is engaged in the experimentation and invention of sound based methods in the social sciences. 
http://anjakanngieser.com/

Liquid Architecture is an Australian organisation for artists working with sound. LA investigates the sounds themselves, but also the ideas communicated about, and the meaning of, sound and listening.

Anja Kanngieser – Listening To The Anthropocene Sound And Ecological Crisis (Liquid Architecture)

In 1950s Soviet Russia, citizens craved Western popular music—everything from jazz to rock & roll. But smuggling vinyl was dangerous, and acquiring the scarce material to make copies of those records that did make it into the country was expensive.

An ingenuous solution to this problem began to emerge in the form of “bone music.”

194- Bone Music

If Dennis Baxter and Bill Whiston are doing their job right, you probably don’t notice that they’re doing their job. But they are so good at doing their job, that you probably don’t even know that their job exists at all. They are sound designers for televised sporting events. Their job is to draw the audience into the action and make sports sound as exciting as possible, and this doesn’t mean they put a bunch of microphones on the field. This episode of 99% Invisible is produced by Peregrine Andrews for Falling Tree Productions. It is an extract from a much longer, and really stunning doc called “The Sound of Sport.” 

99% Invisible-38- Sound of Sport

In 1939, an astonishing new machine debuted at the New York World’s Fair. It was called the “Voder," short for “Voice Operating Demonstrator.”  It looked sort of like a futuristic church organ.

An operator -- known as a "Voderette" -- sat at the Voder's curved wooden console with a giant speaker towering behind her. She faced an expectant audience, placed her hands on a keyboard in front of her, and then played something the world had never really heard before.

A synthesized voice.

208- Vox Ex Machina

Sub Pop Records has signed some of the most famous and influential indie bands of the last 30 years, including Nirvana, Sleater-Kinney, The Postal Service, and Beach House. Over time, the stars and hits have changed and the formats have evolved as well, from vinyl to CDs to MP3s. In recent years, however, the label has started releasing new albums on a medium few thought would ever see a comeback: the cassette.
But there's one big user group that never entirely stopped using the old school technology. The United States prison system has the largest prison population in the world and many of its inmates listen to their music on tape. For this group, cassettes aren't necessarily the cheapest or hippest way to listen to music; in some cases, it's the only way.

214- Loud And Clear

The United States Marine Corps buys a lot of foam ear plugs. Visit any military base and you’ll find them under the bleachers at the firing range, in the bottoms of washing machines. They are cheap and effective at making noise less ... noisy.
But there’s a problem with earplugs on the battlefield. Soldiers won’t wear them. If they do wear them, they may miss other important (softer) noises happening around them. The result is lots of service members coming home from battle with tinnitus or hearing loss. In fact, for as long as the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs has reported such statistics, tinnitus and hearing loss have remained the number one and two most common injuries of service members.

222- Combat Hearing Loss

A group of babushkas, or elderly women, who live in Buranovo, Russia, have become a musical sensation. They sing Beatles tunes and songs by iconic Russian rocker Viktor Tsoi. They fly around the country for concerts. And it all started because they turned to music during tough times. Produced by David Greene.

Russia's Singing Babushkas

An audio documentary by Chris Wood, Camara Miller and Nathan Clarkson. Mastered at The Banff Centre by Magdalena Kasparek.

The programme is an overview of soundscape studies and acoustic ecology featuring new and archive interviews with Hildegaard Westerkamp, Barry Truax and researchers from Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada alongside recordings from the World Soundscape Project.

A Short History of Acoustic Ecology was commissioned by Pixel Palace for Basic FM

A Short History of Acoustic Ecology

For the ancient Greeks, sirens were mythical creatures who sang out to passing sailors from rocks in the sea. Their music was so beautiful, it was said, that the sailors were powerless against it--they would turn their ships towards these sea nymphs and crash in the impassable reefs around them.

In Homer's Odyssey, there's a story where Odysseus and his men are traveling near an area that Sirens are known to inhabit. Odysseus knows that if he hears the siren's song, his ship is going to sink. But he still wants to hear what they sound like. So he comes up with a plan: Odysseus has his men tie him to the mast of his ship so that he can't give commands. And then Odysseus has his men fill their own ears with beeswax so they can't hear anything. They set sail in striking distance of the sirens' call. The plan works: Odysseus gets to hear the music, his men don't, and they sail on to safety--with Odysseus pleading with his crew to crash the boat the whole way.

And for the next 2000 or so years, that's what a siren was: a creature that makes a beautiful sound.

But that all changed in 1819, when a French engineer named Charles Cagniard de la Tour decided to call the artificial noisemaker he was working on--the siren.

And this new, mechanical siren became one of THE signature sounds of the turn of the Century. Sirens warned people about immanent bombing raids during World War I. Sirens announced incoming fire engines, and ambulances, and police. 

Thanks in part to the siren, the world of the the early 20th Century had become a lot louder than any time in human history. And we can probably assume that these sirens that people heard in cities all over the world--sounded NOTHING like the siren songs of Greek myth.

At least to most. One man, a composer, named Arseny Avraamov heard music in the cacophony of the modern world. And he tried to create a composition--a symphony-- from the clatter of the newly formed Soviet Union.

Moscow-based producer Charles Maynes investigated the legend of Avraamov and his forgotten masterpiece. This is The Symphony of Sirens, Revisited.

This story was part of the Global Story Project, presented by PRX with support from the Open Society Foundations.

Plus, we hear a rebroadcast of "The Unsung Icons of Soviet Design."


99% Invisible-79- Symphony of Sirens, Revisited plus Soviet Design

This is a placeholder for my field recordings so I don't foresee putting any creative content any time soon, however, I am happy to make the field recordings downloadable so that others may use them for creative projects, or any non-commercial projects like film, electroacoustic composition and so on - enjoy!

Audio Examples / Podcasts

ambient-sonic