Noise Issues: Leaf Blowers - Orinda, California

Coming to Blows (6:34) The battle over leaf blowers all across the country is being led by a couple in Orinda, California who are just fed up with the noise. John Blackstone reports. CBS Sunday Morning.

Source: CBS

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East Bay town fights to outlaw leaf blowers (2:00) Some residents in the East Bay hope to follow the lead of other Bay Area cities by banning leaf blowers.

Source: KGO-TV ABC-7 Local News San Francsico

Soundscape: Culvert

Culvert (4:00) "I've tried to audiolize a hospital culvert in relation to structures, lighting, smells and sight. To show how important sounds are in architecture, I've also cut in some contradicting or surprising sounds that you might not think of hearing in a culvert."

Concept of space workshop
Umeå School of Architecture 
October 2009

Source: YouTube

Documentary: L'arbre (Clip) Brazilian Amazon Jungle

L'arbre (2:34)  By Pierre-Etienne Lessard. This is a clip from the documentary project Echografia about sound ecology and sound environment and was shot in Brazilian Amazon region.

Pierre-Etienne Lessard is a director, videographer and documentary content creator-producer for museums, TV, living arts and the web. He graduated from Laval University in journalism and public communications, film studies, he obtained in 1994 a second bachelor's degree in film production from Concordia University

Phonographer: John Hartog

Nature Sounds Recording. (6:53) John Hartog  is a nature sound recordist. Just as painters paint a landscape, or photographers photograph it, John heads into the countryside (Sauvie Island and Hart Mountain Antelope Refuge) with a microphone and a recording deck to capture the natural sounds of wild Oregon. These audio ‘snapshots’ in time tell us something about the place we live, and the wildlife that share it with us. Oregon Field Guide Production. Visit Mr. Hartog's web site.

Source: Oregon Public Broadcasting

Soundscape: Territorial Sound Making In The Forest

Territorial Sounds (4:04) David Attenborough explores the making of sounds within dense forest environments that determine an animal's territory. He impersonates the sound of a woodpecker marking its territory known in order to observe the behaviour of a pair in the woods. From the BBC. Also available from the BBC in a higher resolution but shorter version Click2View.

Source: You Tube

Soundscape Composition: The Passenger

The Passenger (5:51) This is an extract from the Soundwalk Collective's "The Passenger", which presents sounds from Tangier, Fez, and Marrakesh, with video projection by Jim Helton. Audio extracts taken from premiere of  the work performed live at FIAF's Florence Gould Hall in NYC on Monday, May 9th 2011. Click2Read more about “The Passenger”. 

Soundwalk Collective is an international art collective based in New York City. Since 2000 they have been sonic nomads, embarking on never ending journeys from the desolate land of Bessarabia to the desert of Rub al Khali. By exploring and documenting the world around us through its sounds, the Collective abstracts and re-composes narrative sound pieces through fragments of reality to form distinct audible journeys.

Lecture: Sound Health in 8 Steps

Julian Treasure: Shh! Sound health in 8 steps (7:15) Julian Treasure says our increasingly noisy world is gnawing away at our mental health -- even costing lives. He lays out an 8-step plan to soften this sonic assault (starting with those cheap earbuds) and restore our relationship with sound.

Source: TED

Documentary: Secret Language of Elephants

Secret Language of Elephants (15:00) For two decades, a group of wild African elephants has been watched over, studied and protected by their own guardian angel: an extraordinary American scientist named Andrea Turkalo. 

Turkalo's own story is pretty amazing, but not nearly as compelling as the insights into elephant behavior her research has revealed, especially when it comes to "the secret language of elephants."  This CBS' 60 Minutes documentary investigates the work researchers are doing by listening to elephant sounds and observing their behavior which is resulting in an "elephant language dictionary". Bob Simon reports.

Source: YouTube