Sonic Exploration Research Articles

Fuzzy Cluster Pitch Synthesis System for the Violin Sound with Machine Learning

Pitch synthesis with violin sound involves the generation of musical pitches using technology to mimic the distinctive tonal characteristics of a violin. This process typically employs digital signal processing techniques to recreate the timbre, articulation, and nuances of a real violin. Advanced algorithms analyze and model the acoustic properties of a violin sound, allowing for the synthesis of realistic pitch variations and expressive qualities. Whether utilized in electronic music production, virtual instruments, or sound design, pitch synthesis with violin sound aims to emulate the rich and complex sonic palette of the violin, offering musicians and composers versatile tools for creative expression and sonic exploration. In this paper proposed Fuzzy Pitch Clustering Machine Learning (FPC-ML) for the violin Music Pitch Synthesis using Machine Learning. The proposed FPC-ML model uses the Fuzzy Clustering model for the estimation of pitches in the violin music signal. Based on the Fuzzy clustering model membership degree is computed for the proposed FPC-ML for the estimation of the pitch in the violin music. With the estimation of linguistic variables, clustering is performed in the Music signal for the computation of pitches. With the estimated pitches in the violin music, the features are trained in the machine learning model for the classification and estimation of features in the Violin Music. Simulation analysis demonstrated that the proposed FPC-ML model computes the features of the Violin Music Pitch values based on the estimated clustering values synthesis performed for the classification of the Violin Music signal. The proposed FPC-ML technique achieves an accuracy value of 0.98 for the violin signal with an iteration of 20. With the increase in several iterations and epoch, the accuracy of the FPC-ML model is further increased for the synthesis of the Violin Music.

A System for Sonic Explorations With Evolutionary Algorithms

A System for Sonic Explorations With Evolutionary Algorithms

Cranial asymmetry in odontocetes: a facilitator of sonic exploration?

Directional cranial asymmetry is an intriguing condition that has evolved in all odontocetes which has mostly been associated with sound production for echolocation. In this study, we investigated how cranial asymmetry varies across odontocete species both in terms of quality (i.e., shape), and quantity (magnitude of deviation from symmetry). We investigated 72 species across all ten families of Odontoceti using two-dimensional geometric morphometrics. The average asymmetric shape was largely consistent across odontocetes – the rostral tip, maxillae, antorbital notches and braincase, as well as the suture crest between the frontal and interparietal bones were displaced to the right, whereas the nasal septum and premaxillae showed leftward shifts, in concert with an enlargement of the right premaxilla and maxilla. A clear phylogenetic signal related to asymmetric shape variation was identified across odontocetes using squared-change parsimony. The magnitude of asymmetry was widely variable across Odontoceti, with greatest asymmetry in Kogiidae, Monodontidae and Globicephalinae, followed by Physeteridae, Platanistidae and Lipotidae, while the asymmetry was lowest in Lissodelphininae, Phocoenidae, Iniidae and Pontoporiidae. Ziphiidae presented a wide spectrum of asymmetry. Generalized linear models explaining magnitude of asymmetry found associations with click source level while accounting for cranial size. Using phylogenetic generalized least squares, we reconfirm that source level and centroid size significantly predict the level of cranial asymmetry, with more asymmetric marine taxa generally consisting of bigger species emitting higher output sonar signal, i.e. louder sounds. Both characteristics theoretically support foraging at depth, the former by allowing extended diving and the latter being adaptive for prey detection at longer distances. Thus, cranial asymmetry seems to be an evolutionary pathway that allows odontocetes to devote more space for sound-generating structures associated with echolocation and thus increases biosonar search range and foraging efficiency beyond simple phylogenetic scaling predictions.

Houses on Fire: The Hauntologies of Sankomota

The following essay is part of a body of work titled Signal to Noise: sound and fury in (post)apartheid South Africa. These are a collection of creative non-fiction essays set against the backdrop of my involvement with a small, independent mobile recording studio based in Johannesburg between 1983 and 1997. The metaphor of a drowning signal, pushing through and making itself heard above the noise, resonates throughout the collection. The complexities of the political versus artistic nature of what we were involved with provide a setting for an anecdotal approach to what is part history, part biography, part memoir and part theoretical sonic exploration. The following essay falls into this approach and is constructed from memories enhanced by diaries, scrap-books, shards of notes, lyrics, photos and conversations. These have been employed in reconstructing a narrative arc that covers the recording of the first album made by the band Sankomota, who were banned from entry into South Africa and were based in Maseru, mostly playing to audiences at one of the leading hotels. Sankomota, then called Uhuru, experienced extraordinary, almost metaphysical, peaks and troughs throughout their nearly thirty-year existence hence the hauntological device in the title. The record was also the first made in our fledgling mobile studio using newly affordable equipment that kickstarted many such do-it-yourself projects worldwide. This was the first in a steady stream of technologies that would eventually break the hegemony of mainstream record companies. In apartheid South Africa, this was hugely significant, as being able to sideline the censorship of state-owned media enterprises meant immense freedom in the kind of projects one came to consider. Savage incidents of force and brutality were still common then, and our small venture has to be seen in the context of broader unrest and suffering. Frank Leepa was an uncompromising survivor. His words and melodies still move and inspire a younger generation.

Exercises in listening to the inaudible: About Cona institute’s programme and the Acoustic Commons network

The activities of the Acoustic Commons network for live environmental streams draw attention to the unique sounds of particular places and explore the acoustic ecology of bio-anthropo-genic locations. The network connects sound ecologists, live streamers, sound artists and experimental musicians who reflect in various ways upon the role of sonic explorations in promoting biocentric thinking that rejects the primacy of human rights and needs over those of other living and nonliving beings such as birds, spiders, trees or stones. Attentive listening goes beyond the notion that music is purely a human activity and opens the ears to sonic structures that may inform human culture in becoming more inclusive of nonhuman entities. Indeed, acoustic sensitivity is one piece of the puzzle in raising awareness and helping prevent numerous sound-sensitive creatures from declining into extinction.

Размышляя с Сюзанной Лангер: сонарные связи с нечеловеческим

Аn aesthetic and epistemological departure from ocular centrism has occurred in the wake of current technological evolutions and the posthuman turn. The sonic exploration of the more-than-human takes artists and philosophers beyond anthropomorphism to reveal the hidden patterning of life forms and yet-unfathomed universes. The conflation of nature(s) with culture(s) is one shift that takes place when thinking with sounds and rhythm and studying our environments. On an ontological level, a reordering of subject and object occurs when encountering the reciprocal relationship of sounding. What if culture is actually nature? How does technology connect with botany, and what does it mean to engage the environment with the expanded tactility of the ear? This essay observes current inter-species practices in sound art by revisiting philosopher Susanne Langer's theory of an embodied and embedded mind. Her "new key" in philosophy emphasizes music as a dynamic sound-pattern to conceptualize a semiology of artistic forms that renders human feeling in regard to non-human antecedents. This serves as a tool to trace the preconceptual substrata of mind, leading us through process-oriented studies of nature and psychophysical affect. Thinking with Langer involves the interconnection of natural systems, behavioural patterns, and human expression, which emerges in art.

Dance Librarian: Sonic Explorations of the Bandcamp Underground

Dance Librarian: Sonic Explorations of the Bandcamp Underground

Positively Monstrous!

Positively Monstrous!

Thinking with Susanne Langer: Sonar Entanglements with the Non-human

Abstract An aesthetic and epistemological departure from ocular centrism has occurred in the wake of current technological evolutions and the posthuman turn. The sonic exploration of the more-than-human takes artists and philosophers beyond anthropomorphism to reveal the hidden patterning of life forms and yet-unfathomed universes. The conflation of nature(s) with culture(s) is one shift that takes place when thinking with sounds and rhythm and studying our environments. On an ontological level, a reordering of subject and object occurs when encountering the reciprocal relationship of sounding. What if culture is actually nature? How does technology connect with botany, and what does it mean to engage the environment with the expanded tactility of the ear? This essay observes current inter-species practices in sound art by revisiting philosopher Susanne Langer’s theory of an embodied and embedded mind. Her “new key” in philosophy emphasizes music as a dynamic sound-pattern to conceptualize a semiology of artistic forms that renders human feeling in regard to non-human antecedents. This serves as a tool to trace the preconceptual substrata of mind, leading us through process-oriented studies of nature and psychophysical affect. Thinking with Langer involves the interconnection of natural systems, behavioural patterns, and human expression, which emerges in art.

World

World

Revolution

Revolution

‘Crimes’: a Sonic Exploration of Colonial Injuries

‘Crimes’: a Sonic Exploration of Colonial Injuries

Thinking Medieval Romance by Katherine C. Little Nicola McDonald

MLR, .,   make culturally credible a concept of Europe that is neither exclusively spatial nor economically based. e volume has the merit not only of retracing debates and discoveries of a centuries-old history, but also of producing a description of Romance linguistics that is both revolutionary and illuminating. Marked by a prejudice-free fascination for the subject and a clear and engaging exposition, it proves essential reading as an introduction to linguistics and as a reflection on its connections to human culture. C U  N Y F F inking Medieval Romance. Ed. by K C. L and N MD- . Oxford: Oxford University Press. . xii+ pp. £. ISBN – –––. Arising from the ‘ink Romance!’ conference held at Fordham University in , this volume presents eleven essays, along with a comprehensive Introduction, from international contributors in the fields of medieval literature and music. Encompassing literary, visual, and sonic explorations of French, Anglo-Norman, and Middle English romances, the interdisciplinary chapters frequently overlap and invite us to read and think across the volume’s five sections, and, more broadly, across the genre. Collectively, the essays constitute a significant contribution to scholarship with appeal to interdisciplinary scholars and students of the medieval period, as well as to scholars of earlier and later periods whose works intersect with it. In the Introduction, the editors trace romance’s roots in classical and historiographical traditions and its emergence in the twelh century as an experimental form. e genre’s most distinctive trait—fictionality—provides a critical space for interrogations of social, economic, and political issues, they suggest. Section  presents the paired concepts of ‘unknowing’ and ‘unthinking’, which are undertaken, respectively, by Nicola McDonald and James Simpson. For McDonald, Octavian Imperator exemplifies how the mundane constitutes a type of unknowing or wonder , and how wonder itself can engage directly with contemporary concerns, from the spending habits of the royal treasury to the power of guilds in late medieval culture. In contrast, Simpson illustrates romance’s ability to think indirectly. Reassessing an episode of sexual violence in Sir Degaré, he suggests that shame operates subtly as a generative force, one which ultimately contributes to the restoration of the family unit and social order. Romance’s potent intertextuality and dialogic relationships with politics, religion , and visual and sonic media are the concerns of the volume’s middle sections. Here, Laura Ashe teases out the contexts and implications of various accounts of King John’s death, especially in the Brut tradition, simultaneously highlighting the slippage between and the circular influence of historiographical and fictional texts. Lee Manion reveals how the Baltic elements of Sir Gowther reflect the range of crusading activities prevalent in the medieval period and how the narrative operates as a possible speculum for crusaders in other regions. Both Matilda Tomaryn  Reviews Bruckner, examining Chrétien de Troyes’s unfinished Le Conte du Graal, and Geoff Rector, analysing Marie de France’s Lais, focus on how romancers innovate and create authorial space by integrating and reworking religious materials (for Chrétien , from exegetical traditions, and for Marie, from the Psalms). Consequently, the authors highlight how the sacred and the secular intermingle in medieval thought. Returning to Octavian, Emma O’Loughlin Bérat draws out connections between romance and Revelation in representations of motherhood, the apocalyptic Woman, and manuscript illuminations, noting that these connections can offer moments of agency for female figures. e next two essays examine the literary and the sonic, with an emphasis on French romance. Emma Dillon suggests that in a variety of romances sonic interpolations, such as festal soundscapes, demarcate space and contribute to community-building both inside and outside the text. Monika Otter , through the example of Tristan romances and songs, unravels the reciprocal influence literary texts and musical creations (extant or lost) can have upon each other. e final section foregrounds the mutability of generic labels, reinforcing the volume’s message that romance not only thinks but also needs rethinking. rough a study of Floire et Blancheflor and its Hellenistic antecedent Callirhoe, Sharon Kinoshita argues for regional considerations of romance, here one grounded in the histories and experiences of the Mediterranean, reflecting its specific...

The suitcase royale: Sonic explorations of gothic Victorian towns

The suitcase royale: Sonic explorations of gothic Victorian towns

Effect of Nada Yoga on Hypertension & Anxiety Level

In Nada yoga the sound speed of an object vibrates (as well as its size, however infinitesimal) contributes to its particular sound. Different tone and frequencies contains the subject of meditation in Nada Yoga, which also takes into consideration the musical intervals used in music and in the musical recitation of mantras, is brought together with meditation techniques and certain Hatha Yoga practices that are conducive to sonic exploration. Recently a study conducted on anxiety and hypertension level in Raigarh entitled as “The effect of Nada Yoga on Hypertension and anxiety level”. The outcome of the study shows that Nada Yoga significantly reduces Anxiety as well as Hypertension. Results founds were surprisingly shows a significant difference between the two means, at .01 level of significance. It shows how Nada Yoga can effectively help to reduce anxiety and hypertension as well as many improves in health also.

Musical diversity in the classroom: Ingenuity and integrity in sound exploration

This paper examines the practice of five music educators in Canada and Australia who, despite the pervasiveness of ingrained Western-based pedagogy in these countries, are forging ahead with culturally diverse music programmes. Their work is presented as five ‘snapshots of practice’ which provide inspiration and conceptual ideas for other teachers aiming to diversify their practice in music education. While willingness and enthusiasm are paramount, it is these exemplars of innovative and resourceful practice which are crucial in assisting teachers to recognize that alternative forms of musicianship are both legitimate and essential to a well-rounded education in sonic exploration.

‘There Must Be a Poetry of Sound That None of Us Knows…’: Early British documentary film and the prefiguring of musique concrète

Standard histories of electronic music tend to trace the lineage of musique concrète as lying mainly in the Futurists’ declarations of the 1910s, through Cage’s ‘emancipation’ of noise in the 1930s, to Schaeffer’s work and codifications of the late 1940s and early 1950s. This article challenges this narrative by drawing attention to the work of filmmakers in the 1930s that foreshadowed the sound experiments of Pierre Schaeffer and thus offers an alternative history of their background. The main focus of the article is on the innovations within documentary film and specifically the sonic explorations in early British documentary that prefigured musique concrète, an area ignored by electronic music studies. The theoretical and philosophical underpinnings of the documentary movement’s members, particularly their leader John Grierson, will be compared with those of Pierre Schaeffer, and the important influence of Russian avant-garde filmmaking on the British (and musique concrète) will be addressed. Case studies will focus on the groundbreaking soundtracks of two films made by the General Post Office Film Unit that feature both practical and theoretical correspondences to Schaeffer: 6.30 Collection (1934) and Coal Face (1935). Parallels between the nature and use of technologies and how this affected creative outputs will also be discussed, as will the relationship of the British documentary movement’s practice and ideas to post-Schaefferian ‘anecdotal music’ and the work of Luc Ferrari.

Sonic Explorations of the Southernmost Continent: Four composers’ responses to Antarctica and climate change in the twenty-first century

Composers have been drawn to the world’s southernmost continent, Antarctica, for creative inspiration since the so-called ‘Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration’ in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. However, it has only been since the final few years of the twentieth century that professional composers have had opportunities to travel to the far south as part of arts residency programmes to experience its environment – and its unique soundscapes – first-hand. Most composers who have visited Antarctica to date have utilised sound recording technologies to document their journeys sonically and have subsequently created compositions that feature their soundscape recordings. Typically, such compositions include biological sounds, such as vocalisations of penguins and seals (both on the ice and underwater); non-biological or ‘geophysical’ ambient sounds that emanate from the natural landscape, such as those created by wind, blizzards, and ice cracking and calving; and/or anthropogenic (human) sounds recorded within the Antarctic environment.This article examines a series of recent compositions by four established composers who have visited Antarctica and used their experiences and field recordings to inform their creative work: Douglas Quin, Jay Needham, Lawrence English and Philip Samartzis. The primary aim of this research is to investigate what these composers’ Antarctica-related works reveal about their individual encounters with and perceptions of the frozen continent, as well as to consider the role of such compositions in conveying messages related to climate change to listeners around the globe – the vast majority of whom are unlikely to ever see orhearthe place in person.

Developing Telematic Electroacoustic Music: Complex networks, machine intelligence and affective data stream sonification

This paper proposes expanding telematic electroacoustic music practice through the consideration of affective computing and integration with complex data streams. Current telematic electroacoustic music practice, despite the distances involved, is largely embedded in older music/sonic arts paradigms. For example, it is dominated by using concert halls, by concerns about the relationship between people and machines, and by concerns about geographically distributed cultures and natural environments. A more suitable environment for telematic sonic works is found in the inter-relationship between ‘players’ and broader contemporary networked life – one embedded in multiple real-time informational data streams. These streams will increase rapidly with the expansion of the Internet of Things (IoT), and with the increasing deployment of algorithmic decision-making and machine learning software. While collated data streams, such as news feeds, are often rendered visually, they are also partly interpreted through embodied cognition that is similar to music and sonic art interpretation. A meeting point for telematic electroacoustic music and real-time data sonification is in affective composition/performance models and data sonification. These allow for the sonic exploration of participants’ place in a matrix of increasingly networked relationships.

The Third Soundscape

The creative rediscovery of exploration through sound opens up new spaces for reflection on the processes of deep transformation occurring in territories and landscapes today. Western culture has produced abandoned ruins and deterritorialised places and it is necessary to come to terms with these places ‘out of place’, listening to them with the sense of anticipation that migrants have. The projects of sound artists such as Peter Cusack, Enrico Ascoli, Fabio Lattuca and Pietro Bonanno aim at the exploration of abandoned places through sound. They open up rare aesthetic spaces, creating a different sense of place that has more to do with experience: sonic explorations of place as a social and political construction. All of these works demonstrate how much field recordings take us deep into the layers of image and language in order to ‘transmit[s] a powerful sense of spatiality, atmosphere and timing’ as Peter Cusack puts it.