music/sound/noise is an ebr thread.
Thread editor from 2006-07: Trace Reddell. MusicSoundNoise was initiated in the winter of 2000/01 by Cary Wolfe and Mark Amerika. msn logo and animation created by Cynthia Jacquette.
(Source: ebr)
As "sound" approaches ever more closely the condition of music it too approaches a kind of writing, which is then retroactively revealed to have been "noisy" all along.
Failure, A Writer’s Life is a catalogue of literary monstrosities. Its loosely organized vignettes and convolutes provide the intrepid reader with a philosophy for the unreadable, a consolation for the ignored, and a map for new literary worlds. "The unfinished, unreadable, unpublishable — the scribbled and illegible, the too slowly published, the countless unpublished, all that does not seem to count at all. . . . here lie all manner of ruins. From Marguerite Duras to Google Maps, Henri Bergson to H.P. Lovecraft, Orson Welles to Walter Benjamin to a host of literary ambulance drivers (not to mention the FBI, UFOs, and UbuWeb), _Failure, A Writer's Life_ charts empty spaces and occupied libraries, searches databases bereft of filters, files spam and porn and weather reports into their respective _konvoluts_, and realizes the full potential of cultural inscription. In a series of snapshots concatenated in the best surrealist mode, Milutis has curated a catalogue of curiosities as essential to understanding our current cultural condition as they are eccentric. With Nietzschean _witz_ and self-reflexive bravura, he teases out the occult links between heterogeneities in the tradition of Allen S. Weiss and Greil Marcus. In the process, Milutis redefines the 'virtual' as something much broader and more interesting than digital simulacra: as the unmanageable storehouse of memory and the inevitable expanse of forgetfulness. Here, in all its glamorous success, is the horizon of failure." ~ Craig Dworkin
Ether is a hypothetical medium – supposed by the ancients to fill the heavens, proposed by scientist to account for the propagation of electromagnetic radiation through space. The notion of ‘ocean’ was once as vague. Aristotle perceived of the world as a small place, bounded by a narrow river. Columbus believed the Atlantic was a much shorter distance across than we now know it to be. Even as early electromagnetic telegraphic and wireless transmissions propagating over, under, and through oceans collapsed distances between ships and shores, they revealed vast new oceans – oceans of static, oceans of noise. Etheric Ocean is an underwater web art audio writing noise site. It is an imprecise survey of sounds both animal and mechanical, and of signs both real and imaginary, of distortions born of the difficulty of communicating through the medium of deep dense dark ocean. Like stations dotting a radio dial, murky diagrams, shifting definitions, appropriated texts, nautical associations, and wonky word plays are strung along a very long, horizontally scrolling browser window. This is a world of inversions. Sounds are deep harbours, or are they depths? Sounds purposefully unfold. Out of its element, uncannily airborne, a flying jellyfish drone wobbles about. Noises are made. Islands are Heard.
this sea is nothing in sight but isles.............................................................a company of isles......................................full of fa(i)r sounds......... . . . . . . . . .........................within these sounds we sent our boats..........................................................into the [e(i)ther....................................]................ ..............................................................an etheric ocean................................................an ocean of static........................................................................................an ocean of silence.........................................an ocean of [noise...........................................]. < sounds onclick="likeThis" > [not, a bit, un-] like < /sounds> [ If you can't hear sound here, it's possible that your computer or browser doesn't support the sound file format. Or, that you have your speakers turned off. Or, that you are a land mammal bending you ear to hear sounds deep under water. ] Through its early association with the sea, wireless evoked a slight apprehension over the depthless void technology had revealed to the world. The ether was at once vast and diffuse. Drifting through the spectrum in search of transmissions from the most distant points around the nation and globe was a journey traversed primarily across mysterious expanses of static. [ w h a t I a m c a l l i n g n o i s e ] has an inchoate shape, as weather does.
requires quick-time plugin. use arrow keys or swipe to scroll from left to right.
Attempting Ziggurats 4 is an installation based on a story by John Barth entitled "Glossolalia," which is made up of a set of oblique and somewhat desperate words that have a familiar ring to them. As each section of the spoken text of the story unfolds, underlying sounds of social activities are gradually folded into its rhythm.
The various versions of Attempting Ziggurats find their basis in the story of the Tower of Babel and its ongoing reverberations in American culture. The pivotal moment of the story, the instant that language becomes noise, is one that is forever enshrined in American society through its incorporation of cultural difference as a central component of the concept and fabric of the nation. Here, that babble of noise repeatedly coalesces into the rhythms of the Lord's Prayer, a text which, prior to 1962, was recited daily in United States public school classrooms.
(Source: Artist's description, ELO_AI)
This collaborative poem is composed on a “page space” created by Valdeomillos to explore the signal-to-noise-ratio by placing interface, image, and text in a relation by which they create noise for each other.
(Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)
Hot Air reimagines a passage from Jeanette Winterson's novel Sexing the Cherry, in which the words spoken by a village's residents rise into the sky like smoke from a fire, eventually requiring cleaners to rise up in balloons and sweep away the stubborn utterances with brooms.
In this case, however, the village has become the web. The road is composed of today's most popular Google search terms. Each building is constructed of the most recent tags from some of the most popular web sites, including The Huffington Post, Perez Hilton, Engadget and YouTube. Actual reader comments from each site rise from the buildings. A cleaner in a balloon attempts to clear the sky, but the comments want to be heard -- they don't always go quietly.
Hot Air checks the sites for new tags and comments every five minutes, providing viewers with a sense of each site’s content as well as its current social temperature -- not through the sterile text of a web browser or news reader, but within the frame of a storybook narrative. Like the villagers' words in Winterson's story, the comments on a blog post often take on a life of their own, overshadowing the original content. And any attempt to control or quiet those comments is ultimately ineffective.
(Source: Author's description at Hyperrhiz)
Adobe Flash (9).
"Presenting the results of a data search sure to strain the capacities of any computer, Milutis proceeds to give an exceedingly close reading of what he modestly calls 'the fundamental core of all literature.'"
"this is a piece of literary minutiae, which, while straining the capacities of any search engine, has had a profound effect on literary experimentation. . . . "
"In 1968, Marvin Spevack developed the first computer-assisted concordance to Shakespeare, A Complete and Systematic Concordance to the Works of Shakespeare. Only then were we able to get a full sense of the statistical array of the bard’s this. But the data, while revealing, is still indiscriminant, conflating artistic uses of this with more utilitarian ones. The human operators of this mainframe—an IBM 7094 that was fed punch cards and recorded on magnetic tape—could have treated the output as mere system noise rather than significant information. But Spevack wanted pure data laid out 'in as direct and uncluttered a manner as possible, and yet as seen from different angles, to avoid editorial tinkering and conjecture.' And so this was not filtered from the results."
Author description: This work originated when I was invited to exhibit at the Medway Galleries. The most interesting features of the gallery were its high ceiling and three large windows, which I was inspired to use in the work. I wanted to explore kinetic typography, the animation of images and sound. I came across a transcription of birds' songs in the book The Thinking Ear. Suddenly, I was drawn to this transcription because of the similarities with the phonemes I was using in my other works. The repetitive aspect of letters and what looked like syllables reminded me of sound poems. So, I decided to ask some singers to sing their own interpretation of the transcriptions of the songs, in order to play with the interpretative process of these translations. Having been translated first from birds' song into linguistic interpretations, now the birdsongs would be re-interpreted by the human voice. The sounds that emerged from this study were later attached to the animated birds in the shape of calligrams. The outlines and letters of the text birds corresponded to the transcribed sound made by each bird, so making the birds sing their own visual-textual compositions. Nevertheless, the sound does not correspond to the real bird. The visual character of the typographical character was another important characteristic in the making of each individual bird, which leads to the matter of the materiality, virtuality, and movement of the letter. This work has shown an incredible versatility in reshaping itself into different forms of media and possibilities of presentation and thus of exploration.
(Source: Author's description from her site)
Instructions: To hear the sound, turn on the computer's speakers or plug in headphones. Click the buttons with the triangles to add one or more birds. To stop a bird, click the square button below the corresponding number.
The essay analyzes the phenomenon of digital poems representative of the use of a visually “busy” and typographically dense aesthetic. The essay focuses on digital works, such as Spawn by Andy Campbell, Diagram Series 6 by Jim Rosenberg, and Leaved Life by Anne Frances Wysocki. The author argues that a dominant aesthetic technique of these works, which is called “visual noise,” is generated by a tactilely responsive surface in combination with visual excess. This in turn requires an physical engagement from the reader/user in order for a reading to take place.