Pythagoras’s Veil 2.0 – by Lutz Koepnick

Thousands of college instructors, after doing their job for the last year primarily from home and via video, are back to teach in real classrooms and lecture halls this fall. Instead of seeing their students locked into separate Zoom tiles on screen, they finally face them head-on again, physically present. Little about this, however, feels … Read more

Hear for you: Smart Speakers and Techno-austerity – by Marie Thompson

Amazon Echo speaker image

In November 2020, Amazon launched Care Hub: ‘a free remote care-giving solution from Alexa’. Owners of Amazon’s Echo smart speaker in the United States are now able to use their device to provide updates to a designated caregiver, or call a loved one if they need help. In an advert for the service, an older … Read more

Perfect Pitch? The Sounds of Post-Pandemic Soccer – by Lutz Koepnick

When we look back to the early moments of the pandemic, many of us may recall eerie moments of silence as some of the crisis’s first sensible features. Not the sight of masks. Not the splashy colors of graphics in the news. Not the flashing skin of politicians trying to present possible dangers as a … Read more

Unboxing the modular – by Will Schrimshaw

Image credit: Justine Durand

Within recent years, the creation of electronic music has seen a resurgence of interest in ‘modular’ approaches to sound synthesis and composition. While now, canonical modular systems such as the Moog and Buchla are well known and bear the names of their inventors, the Eurorack format, invented by Dieter Doepfer in the 90s, is a … Read more

Denkempfindungen: We’re going to prove the impossible really exists. – by Holger Schulze

For twenty years now I am writing with, through and about sound. That is not an incredibly long time. I did not write about sound for the first thirty years of my life. By now it has become a habit, a daily practice, a craft, a part of my lifestyle, breathing, and existence. But why … Read more

The ear of the remnant: New modes of listening in the Second World War – by Ian Biddle

This blog post examines the thesis, often stated in sound studies (Goodman, Hartford, Porcello, Daughtry), that war transforms the ways in which humans engage with sound. Much of this recent work has focussed on the idea that, as Hartford puts it, war ‘challenged prior understandings of the relationship between “listening”, “noise”, and “music”.’[1] There is … Read more

Land Listening – by Jordan Lacey

It was the power of music that seeded my interest in sound studies. Music was a time, as a child, when there was maximum happiness in the family home. Often, it meant socializing with others, the drinks were flowing and there were smiles all round. And the dancing – the rhythmic movement of bodies, the … Read more

Sound and Skin

Our skin is a protective barrier between our bodies and the outside world. By wearing clothes we enhance this border. In this post I have a closer look at art works that explore and challenge this border between our insides and our surroundings. All four works discussed below are wearable and make use of sound … Read more