Sound Diaries

I hope you all have had a good New Year and are looking forward to hearing many good things in 2010.

I thought that in celebration of the new decade I’d post 10 favourite sound-related things here for your listening pleasure.

This video of John Cage talking about Sound is one of my favourites and explains many of the ideas about sound that I think are important for this site.

I really enjoyed listening through to The Sounds of Oxfordshire by Robert Jarvis and reading the blog he put together, which adds so much context to the recordings in the final composition. I’m not sure where you can hear the full piece anymore; check Robert Jarvis’s website for updates.

A blog I have enjoyed consistently throughout this year - regularly updated, always with interesting sounds, great contexts, good sonic beauty/gadget geekery balance - is fieldsepulchra. I love the recordings - they are always untampered with, appreciative of what sounds do and are, and take me to places that I could never otherwise visit. I really appreciate the regular postings and thoughtful listening that go into this blog and it’s one of my favourite online finds of 2009.

A release I especially enjoyed in 2009 was James Wyness’ Figure and Ground for its simplicity, for its materiality, and for the elemental sense of landscape and weather that it contains.

I was also lucky to be included this year in a book release entitled ‘Take a closer listen,’ compiled by Rutger Zuydervelt and reviewed here on Boomkat. I love this project and reading how other people have chosen to conceptualise and write about everyday sounds and I enjoyed participating, as it added to my thoughts on my SOUND BANK project with its text/sound interface. I love the look and feeling of Take a closer listen and I like the slippage between text, sounds, and memory that takes place as I read through it.

The British Library Sound Archive was one of the best discoveries of sonic material that I uncovered in 2009. Although I have used the archives before for various things, it wasn’t until I attended one of the training days that I fully discovered the untapped potential of this incredible resource. I would urge anyone interested in sounds to organise a reading room pass and find some excuse for browsing the collections. The environment is inspiring and the sounds-collection extremely extensive. Also, there are ways of contributing to the archive, which I think is an excellent end-destination for anyone who is working in a documentary way with sound.

Audioboo is another important sonic phenomenon. Linked to an iPhone application (they are working on making it available for other platforms) Audioboo allows users to record and upload sounds to the Internet in a very instantaneous way, creating sonic snapshots from all over the world. I wonder how this will change how we listen to, share, and record sounds?

I really like the documentary, Sound in Context, that is on the Sound and Music blog at the moment. I love David Toop’s opening lines, about how sound art is ‘homeless.’ I agree with that as an assessment and I really enjoy the fact that SAM put so many important thoughts on sound art into one concise documentary. Worth watching.

Other sound things of interest for 2010 that I have enjoyed very much throughout 2009 include Nicholson Baker’s book, A box of matches, which - although not exclusively about sound - does describe mundane reality in a very material, detailed way and includes snippets of sound as part of that. I love how sound and reality are integrated in this book and in the redemptive approach to the everyday that Baker takes with his words. I think it is similar to Cage’s ideas about appreciating things as they are.

Finally, my favourite sound website of 2009 has to be the Domestic Appliance Audio Research Society, set up by Benedict Drew & Co. to explore the unexotic sounds of contemporary, Western society and the mundane, sonic details of our lives.

These are some of the resources I will be taking forward into 2010 as I think about sound diaries and documenting reality through sound. What are the books/sites/CDs/projects that have inspired you in thinking about everyday sounds in 2009 and what will you be taking forward into 2010?

Tags: 2010, inspiration, Sounds

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 7th, 2010 at 5:15 pm and is filed under Announcements. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.