Art Of Immersive Soundscapes

What is an immersive soundscape? It can be as simple as a recording made in a forest: leaves crunching underfoot, birds chirping, a squirrel chattering. Or it can be as complex as a movie soundtrack, which involves music but also uses many other sounds--to set the mood for the action and to literally put the viewer in the picture. Sound art defies categorization, and artists using this medium describe their work in many different ways: as sound installations, audio art, radio art, and music. The Art of Immersive Soundscapes provides a fascinating tour of contemporary sound art practices that comprises scholarly essays, artists' statements, and a DVD with sonic and visual examples. Included are perspectives from soundscape composition and performance, site-specific sound installation, recording, and festival curation. The book and accompanying DVD will appeal to a broad audience interested in music, sound, installation art, the environment, digital culture, and media arts. Importantly, it recognizes the pioneering place of Canadian sound artists within this international field.

Immersive Sound: The Art and Science of Binaural and Multi-Channel Audio provides a comprehensive guide to multi-channel sound. With contributions from leading recording engineers, researchers, and industry experts, Immersive Sound includes an in-depth description of the physics and psychoacoustics of spatial audio as well as practical applications. Chapters include the history of 3D sound, binaural reproduction over headphones and loudspeakers, stereo, surround sound, height channels, object-based audio, soundfield (ambisonics), wavefield synthesis, and multi-channel mixing techniques. Knowledge of the development, theory, and practice of spatial and multi-channel sound is essential to those advancing the research and applications in the rapidly evolving fields of 3D sound recording, augmented and virtual reality, gaming, film sound, music production, and post-production.

Bernie Krause is the world's leading expert in natural sound. Beginning by recording the sound of wheat growing in a Kansas field, he has spent the last 40 years recording ecological soundscapes and the sounds of over 15,000 species. Due to human actions, half of the wild soundscapes he has on tape no longer exist. Krause divides natural sound into three categories. Biophony is the sound made by animals and plants, like the shrimp whose underwater clicks are equivalent to a Boeing 727 taking off. Geophony is natural sound - made by wind, water and rain - which led different tribes to have different musical scales. And anthrophony is human-generated sound, which as it has rapidly increased has affected animals - for instance, causing disoriented whales to become beached. In The Great Animal Orchestra Krause invites us to listen through his ears to all three as he showcases singing trees, contrasting coasts, and the roar of the modern world. Just as streetlights engulf the stars, human noise is drowning out the sounds of nature, and our focus on the visual today blinds us to this. The Great Animal Orchestra shows why it is vital we preserve our remaining natural soundscapes - and will make you hear the world entirely differently. Loved by experts from E. O. Wilson to Norman Lebrecht, this unique book - now out in paperback, combines music and cultural history with science to appeal to everyone from David Attenborough fans to music lovers.

We live all our lives surrounded by sounds. Sounds are communication and aggression, emotions and alienation, art and...pollution. Creating sound landscapes means becoming aware of the existence of an individual acoustic space and learning how to enjoy it while respecting other people's spaces. How? By developing an aesthetic sensitivity that will allow us to distinguish quality sounds from noises that damage our health; by building a new ecologic conscience to correct compromised environments; by listening... and not just to music.

AWARD WINNER OF THE 2018 SOCIETY OF ETHNOMUSICLOGY ELLEN KOSKOFF PRIZE This volume is the first sustained examination of the complex perspectives that comprise ecomusicology—the study of the intersections of music/sound, culture/society, and nature/environment. Twenty-two authors provide a range of theoretical, methodological, and empirical chapters representing disciplines such as anthropology, biology, ecology, environmental studies, ethnomusicology, history, literature, musicology, performance studies, and psychology. They bring their specialized training to bear on interdisciplinary topics, both individually and in collaboration. Emerging from the whole is a view of ecomusicology as a field, a place where many disciplines come together. The topics addressed in this volume—contemporary composers and traditional musics, acoustic ecology and politicized soundscapes, material sustainability and environmental crisis, familiar and unfamiliar sounds, local places and global warming, birds and mice, hearing and listening, biomusic and soundscape ecology, and more—engage with conversations in the various realms of music study as well as in environmental studies and cultural studies. As with any healthy ecosystem, the field of ecomusicology is dynamic, but this edited collection provides a snapshot of it in a formative period. Each chapter is short, designed to be accessible to the nonspecialist, and includes extensive bibliographies; some chapters also provide further materials on a companion website: http://www.ecomusicology.info/cde/. An introduction and interspersed editorial summaries help guide readers through four current directions—ecological, fieldwork, critical, and textual—in the field of ecomusicology.

The soundscape--a term coined by the author--is our sonic environment, the ever-present array of noises with which we all live. Beginning with the primordial sounds of nature, we have experienced an ever-increasing complexity of our sonic surroundings. As civilization develops, new noises rise up around us: from the creaking wheel, the clang of the blacksmith’s hammer, and the distant chugging of steam trains to the “sound imperialism” of airports, city streets, and factories. The author contends that we now suffer from an overabundance of acoustic information and a proportionate diminishing of our ability to hear the nuances and subtleties of sound. Our task, he maintains, is to listen, analyze, and make distinctions. As a society we have become more aware of the toxic wastes that can enter our bodies through the air we breathe and the water we drink. In fact, the pollution of our sonic environment is no less real. Schafer emphasizes the importance of discerning the sounds that enrich and feed us and using them to create healthier environments. To this end, he explains how to classify sounds, appreciating their beauty or ugliness, and provides exercises and “soundwalks” to help us become more discriminating and sensitive to the sounds around us. This book is a pioneering exploration of our acoustic environment, past and present, and an attempt to imagine what it might become in the future.

A distinctly Indigenous form of landscape representation is emerging in the creations of contemporary Indigenous artists from North America. For centuries, landscape painting in European art typically used representational strategies such as single-point perspective to lure viewers--and settlers--into the territories of the old and new worlds. In the twentieth century, abstract expressionism transformed painting to encompass something beyond the visual world, and later, minimalism and the Land Art movement broadened the genre of landscape art to include sculptural forms and site-specific installations. In Shifting Grounds, art historian Kate Morris argues that Indigenous artists are expanding, reconceptualizing, and remaking the forms of the genre still further, expressing Indigenous attitudes toward land and belonging even as they draw upon mainstream art practices. The resulting works are rarely if ever primarily visual representations, but instead evoke all five senses: from the overt sensuality of Kay WalkingStick's tactile paintings to the eerie soundscapes of Alan Michelson's videos and Postcommodity's installations to the immersive environments of Kent Monkman's dioramas, this landscape art resonates with a fully embodied and embedded subjectivity. In the works of these and many other Native artists, Shifting Grounds explores themes of presence and absence, connection and dislocation, survival and vulnerability, memory and commemoration, and power and resistance, illuminating the artists' sustained engagement not only with land and landscape but also with the history of representation itself. A Helen Marie Ryan Wyman Book Art History Publication Initiative. For more information, visit http: //arthistorypi.org/books/shifting-grounds