voiceoverhead – A project by Achim Lengerer & Dani Gal featuring Casper Cordes, Harun Farocki, William Furlong, Sharon Hayes :: until March 1, 2008 :: February 29, 2008: An evening of live-performances – Casper Cordes & Ellen Ugelvik; Discoteca Flaming Star; Will Holder; Guy-Marc Hinant – subrosa; Achim Lengerer & Dani Gal :: SMART Project Space, Arie Biemondstraat 105-113, Amsterdam.

In their collaborative practice Achim Lengerer & Dani Gal deal with audio-acoustics and storage media used for acoustic material. Their core interests are audio-recordings, particularly of language, spoken word and speech, original footage taken from radio-broadcastings or other archives. Continue reading

Divide Light – A New Opera by visual and performance artist Leslie Dill with music by composer Richard Marriott, and additional music by Tom Morgan:: August 13, 2008 :: Montalvo Arts Center, Saratoga, CA.

Commissioned and produced by Montalvo Arts Center, Lesley Dill redirects the classic form of opera using Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) to celebrate and investigate American Transcendentalism, a school of thought particularly prevalent in mid-19th century New England. Continue reading

As part of the New Scientist’s February issue on music, Daniel Levitin has written The Music Illusion, which looks at auditory illusions and how they can help us understand the workings of the human brain. Here are five of the most striking auditory illusions discovered so far. You can hear examples of each by going to the The Music Illusion.

1. Barber’s shop illusion, which is a demonstration of the stereo effect and how we can figure out where a sound is coming from.

2. Phantom words. I loved this one. My nephew, who I almost never see or hear from, has a unique name, “Milby”, and as I listened, I heard “Milby” loud and clear and then, “no breath” over and over again, making me wonder if I should call and see if he’s all right. Continue reading

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDTygFNhA5A[/youtube] Continue reading

Once the domain of the few, creating and customizing sophisticated DIY controllers is now more accessible than ever. That means, if you can’t find what you want, and you’re ambitious and knowledgeable enough, you go make your own. Josh Boughey was impressed by the Monome enough to buy one — but the Monome, a grid of on/off buttons, doesn’t provide any kind of variable control. So Josh built his own, combining a series of parallel touch strips with LED indicators. (The lights are the tricky part, requiring an obscene number of connections.) Continue reading

Sound in Space: AnkerBlock – Thomas Ankersmit and Phill Niblock :: February 27, 2008; 8 pm :: Sea and Space Explorations, 4755 York Blvd, LA, CA :: Bring earplugs – Ankersmit and Niblock rip a hole in the space time continuum.

Thomas Ankersmit (born 1979, Leiden, the Netherlands) is a musician and installation artist based in Berlin and Amsterdam. Initially a noise-music inspired saxophonist, his activities expanded to include live electronic music and installation pieces based on architectural acoustics and infrasound. Continue reading

Writing on Air by Gregory Whitehead (8:30 pm) :: Decomposing Spacetime by Non-linear Insertions of Waves of Sonic Tension by Isjtar and Jeroen Uyttendaele (10 pm) :: February 29, 2008; 8 pm :: OKNO (2nd floor), Koolmijnenkaai 30/34 Quai aux, Charbonnages, Brussels :: Both performances will be realtime web-streamed (details below).

Writing On Air will invite us on a journey through twisted tongues and prosthetic voices, fungal language, the global screamscape, a brief seminar of the proper facial expression for catastrophe, the song of a disembodied knee, radio philosophy and other essential audio ephemera. Continue reading

Objects Sing at ItSpace – Shower heads, down pillows and folding tables make music at ItSpace, an interactive sound project created by composer Peter Traub. Short pieces of music are composed from recordings of these everyday household objects being struck, again and again. Producer Jesse Dukes brings the story for HearingVoices.com. You can listen to the NPR storyhere.

Breath Control by Darren Copeland – an audio-video installation :: March 5-16, 2008; 1-6 pm :: Gallery 1313, 1313 Queen Street West, Toronto :: Opening Reception: March 6, 2008; 7 pm.

Breath Control is an interactive audio-visual installation by sound artist Darren Copeland that relates the visceral experience of one’s last breath to the sounds of everyday life. Breath Control also confronts the conventions of the gallery experience by altering the gallery’s interior design in order to re-structure the sensory hierarchy.

Breathing measures time. It is a rate of control, a rate for balancing input and output. R. Murray Schafer once pointed out that the human body is one of the best engineering examples of refined acoustic design. In order to best hear the sounds around one, the sounds of the body are minimized. Continue reading

[Image: Drawing by Steve Brodner ©2007] The Music of Neil Rolnick :: February 25, 2008; 8 pm :: Frederick Loewe Theater, 35 West 4th Street, New York City :: Presented by the Electronic Music Foundation and The NYU Music Technology Program.

The Program: Hammer & Hair (violin and piano); Shadow Quartet; Uptown Jump; Digits; Fiddle Faddle. The Performers: Kathleen Supové, piano; Todd Reynolds, violin; The Todd Reynolds Situation String Quartet (Todd Reynolds, Conrad Harris, Caleb Burhans, Ha-Yang Kim); MAYA (Sato Moughalian, flute, Jacqueline Kerrod, harp, and John Hadfield, percussion); Luke DuBois, video.