Sound Art: Beneath and Beyond by Stephen Hurrel

Beneath and Beyond is an audio visual installation by Stephen Hurrel at Glasgow's Tranway as part of the annual GI festival for Visual Art. The installation presents a realtime feed of seismic shifts recorded from data of 100 of so seismic monitoring stations around the Earth. We are presented with the sound of the various vibrations going on within the Earth's core at that very moment. We also see two visual screens showing graphical displays of particularly large tectonic shifts or events at that one time.

We went to this on Saturday and were totally blown away. The work has been two years in the making following Hurrel being awarded the prestigious Creative Scotland award in 2005, but the hard work has paid off - we could have sat there all day just listening to the sound of the Earth grinding away.

Highly recommended!

Stephen Hurrel - Beneath and Beyond

The birds take on radio

A digital radio station which plays the sound of bird song from an English country garden is causing quite a chatter by swooping up over half a million listeners. There is now a campaign to keep the station on the air before a commercial station takes over it's frequency range..

I love the idea of this - we have all come to accept that mainstream radio represents annoying 'personality djs', offensive adverts and playlisting formats which limits diversity of music being played. The fact that so many listeners would choose to listen to bird song instead should acts as a wake up call to radio producers.. tweet tweet

listen to birdsong radio

Sound Art: Encounters by Katie Paterson

Saw this advertised in the Sunday Times last week - Sound installation by Katie Paterson at the Modern Art Oxford from the 2nd April to 1st June 2008. You are confronted by a telephone which connects you to the Vatnajökull glacier in Iceland where you can hear the sound of the glacier melting.

Sounds interesting and obviously a topical subject to pick, what with constant stream of global warming debates dominating the news. But does the Sunday Times really need to give us ANOTHER history of 'Sound art' - brian eno, cage et al?? Surely, there must come a point where audiences can accept the concept of using sound as a medium for art - how hard can that be to grasp?!

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