Jeremy wins for a tweet that is at the exact intersection of this blog and my other blog, Nerdtown USA.

Any musicians want to write this piece? The escalators are cumulatively 143 feet long, but I don’t know the duration of the ride.

The sound of a dial-up modem, time-stretched by 700%. Creepy yet strangely beautiful.

Click here to learn more (like if you don’t know what a dial-up modem sounds like, grasshoppers).

(via Kirstin Butler)

A Line: Secret Sounds of Your Surroundings is an interactive soundscape project by Chris DeLaurenti for Seattle’s new A line.

(via Ben Houge)

"People have been making music for a long time, but machines haven’t. Ours are the first few generations whose entire existence, waking and sleeping, is often accompanied by secondhand music. We have inherited an understanding of music as metaphor, and now we are being subjected to what might be considered subliminal messages — oblique emotional statements delivered by the appliances that fill our modern lives. Background noise is not just background noise."

Secondhand Music: the chance harmonies of everyday sound may mean more than we think.

Lovely essay in the Atlantic about the psychoacoustics of the sounds in our environments.

(via Gearfuse)

fascinated:

Outside of the Malba museum, an ambient city noise sensor

Sergio Avello, “Volume”

An installation for the forecourt of the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires, this piece uses 7 VU  meters to gather ambient noise, and then converts them into a visual display of LEDs.

More information here.

The Organ of Conti: Award-winning art piece that ‘recycles’ ambient sound by modulating it with a sonic crystal. Watch the vid for the full explanation, and to learn why it’s as cool as it sounds.

[via Peggy Nelson]

Wheel of Stars: Using publicly-available data from the ESA, Jim Bumgardner created this beautiful sidereal clock. The stars rotate around Polaris in the centre, and they chime as they cross the centreline: the pitch corresponds to the color (temperature) and the loudness with the apparent magnitude. And as you would expect, the stars wheel around completely once every 24 hours. Click through for the piece and more details about the project.