Education: Attentive Listening

Traditionally, educational practice gives little attention to teaching children listening skills. It seems to be assumed that if a child can hear that he/she will automatically be able to deconstruct incoming auditory messages. These two videos explore different approaches to encouraging the development of attentive listening.

Watching With Your Ears (2:51) "Educator Lynn Barnicle provides a learning activity that helps students hone their observation skills by "watching" with their ears, and the sketch symbols to describe what they heard." Source: Vimeo

Minute of Listening (4:45) "Minute of Listening is a creative learning project which encourages pupils and teachers to engage in 60 seconds of focused listening per day. The project is aimed at developing listening skills and introducing children to a wide range of new sounds. It is also anticipated that Minute of Listening will encourage creative thinking, class discussion and an inquisitive approach to aural experiences.

The project has emerged from Sound and Music’s aspiration to promote the joys and rewards of listening, and as a response to current debate around creativity and the importance of listening in a child’s learning and development." Source: Vimeo

Noise Issues: Grand Canyon National Park

The Grand Canyon National Park in the state of Arizona is a spectacular geological wonder and is visited each year by thousands who come to see its beauty and experience its unique soundscape. The tourist industry is big business in Arizona and the border state of Nevada with helicopter and aircraft tours providing a view not unlike that seen in the first video below. But there is an issues of noise.  The second video is a plea for quieting the sky above the canyon. These two videos are followed by links to US National Park Service web sites related to noise management in the Park.

Grand Canyon (3:03) The Canyon is beautiful from the air and this video illustrates the view visitors who fly over it might expect to see. It was produced by Aerial Filmworks in cooperation with Grand Canyon National Park permission. Special attention was given to securing permits and obtaining a review of the filming plan before production started. Source: Vimeo

Grand Canyon Quiet (4:39) A video plea to address the preservation of the natural quiet of this unique geological wonder, which is acoustically encroached upon by the many daily sightseeing flights over it. A video by Jim McCarthy and Tom Martin.  Source: YouTube

Efforts by the US National Park service to address soundscape issues within the park are outlined in: 

Grand Canyon Noise Management. A web site by the National Park Service addressing soundscape preservation and noise management. Source: US National Park Servicve

Special Flight Rules. National Park Service web site related to substantial restoration of natural quiet at the Grand Canyon National Park. Source: US National Park Service

Soundscape Installation: Intersection

Intersection (4:21) Intersection is a sound-based and site-specific installation by Pat Badt and Scott Sherk curated through March 2, 2012 by Creighton Michael at The Lab:Gallery in New York.  The installation concentrates on the stop and go of the midtown traffic outside the gallery, focusing on the pulse and energy of the city. A hanging string column cycles between stillness and movement, while real time video sonograms and spectrograms are projected on to the gallery walls making the sound of the intersection visual. 

Pat Badt is a painter and a Professor of Art at Cedar Crest College. Scott Sherk is sculptor who often works with sound. He  is a Professor of Art at Muhlenberg College. Together Pat Badt and Scott Sherk curate the third barn. 

Video by John Birdson 

Source: Vimeo

Documentary: Kangaroo Sounds (excerpt)

Kangaroo Sounds (9:22) This excerpt from the documentary "Kangaroos: Faces in the Mob" presents three segments related to Kangaroo vocal communication: male to male communication, courtship and mating, and mother child communication. 

"Kangaroos: Faces in the Mob" is an Emmy award-winning documentary by Australian filmmakers Dr. Jan Aldenhoven and Glen Carruthers who devoted two years of their lives to filming a group of Eastern Grey Kanagroos. 

Video source: YouTube

Soundscape Installation: Zettajoules

Zettajoules (2:35) This Interactive Audio Installation by Cormac Crawley ran for the duration of the Hilltown New Music Festival 2011 in Ireland.

Participants affected the sonic output by interacting with junk equipment in the space. This interaction was implemented using motion detection and hanging wires that could be connected together. This interaction caused the old equipment to emit electromagnetic field sounds in the space; thus sonifying energy wastage.

Programme Notes: 0.5 zettajoules is now the approximate annual global energy consumption. The natural soundscape is affected by noise pollution and our unyielding consumption of energy resources.  Our relentless energy usage creates electromagnetic fields that are all around us. This installation offers participants a unique opportunity to listen interactively to electromagnetic fields that are created by equipment and machinery used every day; frequencies otherwise imperceptible to us audibly. As participants enter the space, they stimulate equipment and electronic components, causing emission of electromagnetic sounds; i.e. buzzes, drones, pops and clicks. The piece evolves as people move around the space.

The sounds are first recorded by use of coil pickups that sonify the magnetic fields induced by equipment. These recordings, along with some other processes, are arranged in Pure Data and as participants move in the space, motion sensors trigger processes in PD related to specific equipment being stimulated. PD outputs the sounds via car stereo speakers contained inside the various equipment around the space.  A combination of tweeters, mid-range drivers and woofers are placed in strategic locations inside the equipment and this helps to diffuse the different sounds in a lofi manner in keeping with the theme of the installation. 

About the artist: Cormac Crawley is a PhD student researching in the Sonic Arts Research Centre of Queen's University Belfast. He notes, "…my  research is based on soundscape composition and tied closely to acoustic ecology. I compose multi channel tape pieces and perform interactive installations in relation to the soundscape."

Sources: YouTube, Cormac Crawley

Research: Ofer Tchernichovski and Avian Communication

These two videos provide an informative introduction to research on avian communication at the Laboratory of Animal Behavior at The City University of New York and specifically the work of Dr. Ofer Tchernichovski.

On Bird's Song (2:49) Ofer Tchernichovski uses the songbird to study mechanisms of vocal learning. Like early speech development in the human infant, the songbird learns to imitate complex sounds during a critical period of development. The adult bird cannot imitate any more - we do not know why. His lab studies the animal behavior and dynamics of vocal learning and sound production across different brain levels. The lab aims to uncover the specific physiological and molecular (gene expression) brain processes that underlie song learning. Source: PBS

Avian Einsteins (9:14) Ofer Tchernichovski discusses recent study of avian communication. He offers a look at how birds communicate and in various social situations and how communication skills are transferred from one generation to an other. This is a segment from the 2009 World Science Festival. Source: YouTube.

Soundscape Installation: Abstracted Environments

Abstracted Environments (15:00) In this project, Rob Harrison, Leeds, Britain (UK), "...aimed to create an audio visual installation which would take participants on a journey through a series of imaginary environments by immersing them in multichannel audio soundscapes with supporting visuals. These environments include a cityscape, forest/countryside and coastal/beach environment.

The soundscapes have been created using various found sounds and some synthesis techniques. The visual element has been created by taking stock footage then editing and processing it to fit the narrative of the project. "

Source: YouTube

Soundscape: Antarctic - Cruise

Note: This is the first in a number of videos exploring the soundscape of  the Antarctic that will be archived over the coming months.

Cruise to the Antarctic (6:35) One might expect the frozen world to be silent. Far from it. Pascal Wyse records the extraordinary sounds of the wild on a voyage to the Antarctic peninsula. Mr. Wyse is a multimedia producer and contributor to The Guardian newspaper. He is also a  writer and musician. (Note: Expect a commercial in the middle of this video.)

Click2Read an article in The Guardian about this voyage to the Antarctic.

Source: The Guardian's Dailymotion.