The MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 Layer III standard, more commonly referred to as MP3, has become a nearly ubiquitous digital audio file format. First published in 1993, this codec implements a lossy compression algorithm based on a perceptual model of human hearing.

du-ding!

Ontology is the philosophical study of existence. Object-oriented ontology ("OOO" for short) puts things at the center of this study. Its proponents contend that nothing has special status, but that everything exists equally—plumbers, cotton, bonobos, DVD players, and sandstone, for example. In conte

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Thank you for being a friend Featuring the voice of Daniel Rourke GIF Source: acecalhoun

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Thank you for being a friend Featuring the voice of Daniel Rourke GIF Source: acecalhoun

Want to take part in future episodes? : Submit a GIFbite

Project by Daniel Franke & Cedric Kiefer produced by: onformative.com chopchop.cc Documentation: vimeo.com/38505448 Music: Machinefabriek "Kreukeltape" machinefabriek.nu/ The basic idea of the project is built upon the consideration of creating a moving sculpture from the recorded motion data of a real person. For our work we asked a dancer to visualize a musical piece (Kreukeltape by Machinenfabriek) as closely as possible by movements of her body. She was recorded by three depth cameras (Kinect), in which the intersection of the images was later put together to a three-dimensional volume (3d point cloud), so we were able to use the collected data throughout the further process. The three-dimensional image allowed us a completely free handling of the digital camera, without limitations of the perspective. The camera also reacts to the sound and supports the physical imitation of the musical piece by the performer. She moves to a noise field, where a simple modification of the random seed can consistently create new versions of the video, each offering a different composition of the recorded performance. The multi-dimensionality of the sound sculpture is already contained in every movement of the dancer, as the camera footage allows any imaginable perspective. The body – constant and indefinite at the same time – “bursts” the space already with its mere physicality, creating a first distinction between the self and its environment. Only the body movements create a reference to the otherwise invisible space, much like the dots bounce on the ground to give it a physical dimension. Thus, the sound-dance constellation in the video does not only simulate a purely virtual space. The complex dynamics of the body movements is also strongly self-referential. With the complex quasi-static, inconsistent forms the body is “painting”, a new reality space emerges whose simulated aesthetics goes far beyond numerical codes. Similar to painting, a single point appears to be still very abstract, but the more points are connected to each other, the more complex and concrete the image seems. The more perfect and complex the “alternative worlds” we project (Vilém Flusser) and the closer together their point elements, the more tangible they become. A digital body, consisting of 22 000 points, thus seems so real that it comes to life again. text: Sandra Moskova nominated for the for the MuVi Award: kurzfilmtage.de/en/competitions/muvi-award/selection.html see video in full quallity: daniel-franke.com/unnamed_soundsculpture.mov HQ Stills flickr.com/photos/37752604@N05/sets/72157629203600952/Cast: Daniel Franke, onformative and Laura KeilTags: cedric kiefer, daniel franke, onformative, wearechopchop, chopchop, sculpture, soundsculpture, laura keil, unnamed soundsculpture, unnamed and machinefabriek

If the internet makes a sound (and it does), are you listening? Our correspondent uses software to transform the digital ephemera of web browsing—from network traffic to JavaScript, browser histories to JPGs—into music.

This aversion to noise I should explain as follows: If you cut up a large diamond into little bits, it will entirely lose the value it had as a whole; and an army divided up into small bodies of soldiers, loses all its strength. So a great intellect sinks to the level of an ordinary one, as soon as it is interrupted and disturbed, its attention distracted and drawn off from the matter in hand; for its superiority depends upon its power of concentration — of bringing all its strength to bear upon one theme, in the same way as a concave mirror collects into one point all the rays of light that strike upon it. Noisy interruption is a hindrance to this concentration. That is why distinguished minds have always shown such an extreme dislike to disturbance in any form, as something that breaks in upon and distracts their thoughts. Above all have they been averse to that violent interruption that comes from noise. Ordinary people are not much put out by anything of the sort. The most sensible and intelligent of all nations in Europe lays down the rule, Never Interrupt! as the eleventh commandment. Noise is the most impertinent of all forms of interruption. It is not only an interruption, but also a disruption of thought. Of course, where there is nothing to interrupt, noise will not be so particularly painful. Occasionally it happens that some slight but constant noise continues to bother and distract me for a time before I become distinctly conscious of it. All I feel is a steady increase in the labor of thinking — just as though I were trying to walk with a weight on my foot. At last I find out what it is.

Perusing the avalanche of best-of lists leading up to the New Year, the most interesting releases seemed to me to be of the sluggish and spooky sort. (Sometime in mid-November, it got to the point that I seriously started suspecting records marked as 33rpm.) Upon its release (on Valentine’s of all days) Pitchfork’s Joe Colly described Tim Hecker’s Ravedeath 1972 as “a dark and often claustrophobic record” that “is by no means about prettiness or tranquility.” Rip Empson of XLR8R called Hype Williams’ One Nation “the musical expression of a 48-hour sleepless walkabout.” Brian Kolada’s Resident Advisor review of Raime’s Hennail ep notes the prevalence of “darkened pools of reverb” summoning “a gloomy horror-flick vibe.” George Bass of Drowned In Sound portrayed Andy Stott’s recent works as “dark, twisted house”. Abeano’s Rhian characterized The Haxan Cloak’s music as “creepy”, “eerie”, and “bewitched”. Massive Attack and Burial’s “long dark collaborative effort” invokes “the gloomiest moments ever”, according to Sam Hockley-Smith of The Fader. Charlie Hale wrote in the pages of the Quietus of how Oneohtrix Point Never’s Replica opens on a heavenly note before it “dives off to somewhere far darker”. And looking toward promising upcoming recordings from moody labels like Kranky, Hyperdub, Tri Angle, and Blackest Ever Black, there’s not much light glimmering at the end of the tunnel. All of this begs the question: why so glum, chums?

This music -- which sounds like a moody piano soundtrack for a existentialist movie about a rainy day -- is made by slicing a tree in cross-section, sticking it on a turntable, and dropping a tone-arm with a PlayStation Eye Camera in the head, and processing its output through Ableton Live. It's called Years, and it was created by Bartholomäus Traubeck.

Björk's forthcoming Biophilia is an album. It's also an iPad app suite featuring interactive programs for each of its 10 songs... and a treatise on the natural world that involves everything from immense planets to tiny atoms... and a traveling exhibition that showcases one-of-a-kind instruments including a 10-foot bass-playing pendulum... and it's also an educational tool that aims to offer a modern take on music education, replacing notation and by-the-book theory with instinct and creativity. Biophilia-- due out later this year on One Little Indian/Nonesuch-- is many things.

it must have been when i was a boy at school that the phonograph was invented. at any rate it was at that time a chief object of public wonder; this was probably the reason why our science master, a man given to busying himself with all kinds of handiwork, encouraged us to try our skill in making one of these instruments from the material that lay nearest to hand. nothing more was needed than a piece of pliable cardboard bent to the shape of a funnel, on the narrower round orifice of which was stuck a piece of impermeable paper of the kind used to seal bottled fruit. this provided a vibrating membrane, in the middle of which we then stuck a bristle from a coarse clothes brush at right angles to its surface. with these few things one part of the mysterious machine was made, receiver and reproducer were complete. it now only remained to construct the receiving cylinder, which could be moved close to the needle marking the sounds by means of a small rotating handle.

Visual and audio reproduction have undergone massive changes as their underlying technologies shifted from analog to digital over the past two decades. It's clear that it is far more convenient to snap photos with a digital point-and-shoot or listen to music on an iPod. But whether the quality of images or music has improved is, however, a highly debatable proposition, one that is contested by legions of enthusiasts who have continued to cling to older technologies not out of Luddite resistance to change, but because they believe the shift to 1's and 0's is actually making things worse.

Photography and music have been hobbies of mine ever since I was a child when I built Dynakits and had my own darkroom. I was introduced to high-end audio by the political theorist Allan Bloom, who back in the early 1980s had what seemed to me a crazily expensive Linn Sondek turntable and a collection of over 2,000 records. 

What is it that constitutes (a) post-digital art, and how can it be thought in terms of aesthetic theory – or even post-aesthetic theory?

In one sense, post-digital(1) refers to works that reject the hype of the so-called digital revolution.  The familiar digital tropes of purity, pristine sound and images and perfect copies are abandoned in favour of errors, glitches and artefacts.  And in another sense (as in the term post-modernism) it refers to the continuation or completion of that trajectory.  Post-digital music incudes a number of sub-genres: glitch, clicks & cuts, microsound, headphonics, etc.  All are, more or less, concerned with the foregrounding of the flaws inherent in digital processes. This valorisation of what previously would have been seen as noise: a by-product, bearing an external relation to the work, would be one of the characterising marks of a post-digital aesthetic.

...this particular baleen whale has apparently been tracked by NOAA since 1992, using a "classified array of hydrophones employed by the Navy to monitor enemy submarines." It sings at 52 Hertz, which is roughly the same frequency as the lowest note on a tuba, and much higher than its fellow whales, whose calls fall in the 15 to 25 Hertz range.

To make matters worse, the high-pitched whale "does not follow the known migration route of any extant baleen whale species." The result, according to Dr. Kate Stafford, a researcher at the National Marine Mammal Laboratory in Seattle, is that the lonely whale keeps "saying 'Hey, I'm out here,'" but "nobody is phoning home."

The cryptozoologist Oll Lewis speculates that the lonely whale might be "a deformed hybrid between two different species of whale," or even "the last surviving member of an unknown species." Gagliano points out that the whale's plight, though poignant, has a silver lining for scientists:

"I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice and I am going to play it back into the room again and again until the resonant frequencies of the room reinforce themselves so that any sem- blance of my speech, with perhaps the exception of rhythm, is destroyed. What you will hear, then, are the natural resonant frequencies of the room articulated by speech. I regard this activity not so much as a demonstration of a physi- cal fact, but more as a way to smooth out any irregularities my speech might have."

"On January 18th 2004, Strictly Kev premiered the original 'Raiding The 20th Century' on XFM's 'The Remix' show in London. It was a 40 minute attempt to catalogue the history of cut up music - be it avant garde tape manipulation, turntable megamixes or bastard pop mash ups. It rapidly spread throughout the web and managed to cause a full scale server crash on boomselection.info when they hosted it due to the volume of net traffic.

Shortly afterwards he read Paul Morley's recently published book 'Words & Music' and was amazed that certain chapters mirrored parts of his mix. Apart from the fact that the title, 'Raiding the 20th Century' was coined by Morley 20 years before for a future Art of Noise project, he also featured Alvin Lucier, who - purely by chance - was sampled on the opening track of the mix.

Kev decided to expand his idea to make the defnitive document on cut up music including many other parts, omitted by the constraints of the original radio session. After months of fu

On July 29, as part of its Sender, Carrier, Receiver program, Triple Canopy presented a briefing on the activities of the International Necronautical Society's Berlin Inspectorate at Program. As heard in this unofficial recording, Provan, Triple Canopy's editor, and Yamamoto-Masson disputed the INS's claim that Berlin is the World Capital of Death, and discussed attempts by its members—chief among them writer Tom McCarthy, artist Anthony Auerbach, and philosopher Simon Critchley—to surreptitiously recruit agents and take over major cultural landmarks. Click here to read the draft copy of their internal report, and here to listen to a file of covert INS recordings intercepted by Triple Canopy and prepared for the occasion.

[in continuation/response to Rosa’s post responding to Kyle's post responding to Evan's post]

Inherent in glitch art is a denial for codification. Attempts to [con/de]fine this phenomenon, which by it’s very nature will always be in flux, can be easily dismissed as futile. At the same time glitch art is something specific: Bob Ross’ mountain ranges is not glitch art – Cory Arcangel’s Data Diaries is. Points in Iman Moradi’s thesis were problematic, but it laid [contributed to] the foundation for a conversation which sought to get a handle on things – it was followed by further problematic txts by other artists and thinkers which led to an even better/confused understanding of glitch art… or maybe not glitch art directly but are relationship to it. To contextualize or not to contextualize – there are pros and cons to both. You put it real nicely at the end of your txt, the Use of Artifacts as Critical Media Aeshtetics: