Experimental · 8D · Drone
Concepts, myths and unsettling uses of sound in the modern world.
The study of people and their sonic environment, born from R. Murray Schafer's World Soundscape Project in 1969.
A room built to absorb all echoes; John Cage's 1951 visit to one at Harvard shaped his belief that silence does not exist.
An adjective from novelist J. G. Ballard for dystopian modernity, bleak built landscapes and their psychology, much echoed in music.
A supposed infrasonic tone that would make listeners lose bowel control; a modern myth with no scientific support.
The 1980s network of home-taping musicians, mail-order tape labels and zines that sustained noise, industrial and drone music.
A strand of science fiction about networks, implants and corporate power, whose sound took shape in Vangelis's Blade Runner score.
The vast span of geological history, named by John McPhee in 1981, which long-duration drone works try to make audible.
Performance in which length is the material, from the 18-hour Vexations of 1963 to Max Richter's eight-hour Sleep.
The claim that voices of the dead can be caught in tape hiss and radio noise; tests point to perception, not the paranormal.
Erik Satie's 1917 idea of music as part of a room's furnishings, to be heard but not listened to; an ancestor of ambient.
An extreme noise subgenre of dense static held unchanged from start to finish; drone's saturated, motionless mirror image.
A word borrowed from Derrida by 2000s critics for music haunted by lost futures, decaying media and half-remembered broadcasts.
The acoustic noise machines Luigi Russolo built from 1913, cranked boxes with horns that slid between pitches; no originals survive.
A British anti-loitering device emitting a high tone that mostly young people can hear; the Council of Europe urged a ban in 2010.
Music composed from recorded sounds rather than notes, launched by Pierre Schaeffer on French radio in 1948 and a root of drone.
The background-music company founded on George Owen Squier's 1922 patent, whose name became shorthand for bland piped sound.
Shortwave broadcasts of voices reading strings of digits, widely believed to carry coded messages to intelligence agents.
The use of sound and vibration as instruments of power and fear, theorised by Steve Goodman (Kode9) in a 2010 book.
Art that uses sound as its primary medium, usually in galleries or sites rather than concerts; the term dates from a 1983 New York show.
Luigi Russolo's 1913 Futurist manifesto calling for music built from the noises of the machine age, the founding text of noise music.
A four-CD set of shortwave numbers station recordings issued by Irdial-Discs in 1997, a cult source of eerie voices and samples.
A low droning noise reported by a minority of people in places from Bristol to Taos; some cases are traced, most remain unexplained.
Brian Eno's phrase for thinking in millennia, and the foundation, formed in 1996, building a clock meant to run for ten thousand years.
John Cage's 1952 piece in which the performer plays nothing, leaving listeners to hear the sounds of the room and the world.