The Field Guide » Sound Art

Arts Electric: A tribute to Maryanne Amacher (1943—2009)

Holland Hopson — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 19:06:23 +0000

Arts Electric: A tribute to Maryanne Amacher (1943—2009)

Arts Electric has posted a moving tribute to Maryanne Amacher written by Micah Silver.

These Days

Holland Hopson — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 17:40:20 +0000

These days I’ve been helping sound artist Micah Silver with his upcoming installation, The End of Safari, at MassMoCA. It’s part of an exhibit called These Days that opens on Saturday 4/4.

Micah asked me to build a way to aim a Holosonics Audio Spotlight speaker on a pan/tilt head using MIDI messages. I worked with a MidiTron he already owned, a handful of relays and the usual baling wire, duct tape and chewing gum. The setup provides an uncanny sense of localization–much more ghostly than panning a sound around an array of speakers.

Here’s a shot of the altogether messy electronics.

Soundwalkers: Film about Sound

Holland Hopson — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 18:57:33 +0000

Here’s Soundwalkers by Raquel Castro: a wonderful film on sound, listening, acoustic ecology.

Max Neuhaus: Sound Art Pioneer

Holland Hopson — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 17:14:33 +0000

Just heard through the webvine that sound artist Max Neuhaus has died. Neuhaus was a pioneer of sound installation work and will definitely be missed.

I remember being pleased to hear that his quasi-official Times Square installation had finally been granted permanent status. It’s invisible, sometimes inaudible, but still the best reason to visit Times Square.

Read an obit from the Houston Chronicle.

Sound Art in Geometer

Holland Hopson — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 15:10:12 +0000

Geometer Magazine has published an essay by James Wyness: Sound Art – the Politics of Representation, Truth and Listening. Wyness provides a good overview of the many art practices that fall under the Sound Art rubric with special attention given to Environmental Sound Art. A nice read–let’s hope Geometer and Wyness add links to sound files soon.

Note: sound files are here.

Tellus on UBUweb

Holland Hopson — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 15:24:34 +0000

Selected volumes of the sound-art cassette series Tellus are now available on UBUweb. About 10 years ago I helped transfer some of the Tellus master tapes onto CDs for the Harvestworks archive. There are some true gems in the Tellus series. It’s great to have them more widely available.