A site dedicated to format changes? Why not; what’s more historic than when something begins or ends? The Format Change Archive is your home for airchecks of the beginnings and endings of some of the most historic radio stations (and some you may never have heard).

The act of writing has always been an art. Now, it can also be an act of music. Each letter you type corresponds to a specific musical note putting a new spin to your composition. Make music while you write.

Philip Sherburne asked for my opinion on headphones for this article, and here it is! Portland, Oregon, web developer Matthew McVickar says, “I have yet to find a pair of over-ear headphones that don't feel uncomfortable with glasses after more than half an hour or so, but I love the Sony MDR 7506.”

Free download of samples made from a collection of broken instruments. The Broken Instruments Sample Pack is a free download of Found Sound Nation's favorite sounds from the Symphony for a Broken Orchestra Project.

Why is ultra-repetitive music so special? Matt Unicomb speaks with Robert Hood, William Basinski and more to find out. --- For the first minute of Robert Hood's "Self Powered," you might focus on the bassline. But as it loops, your attention may shift to the hi-hats and the subtle ways they're manipulated. A great loop techno track hooks a lister with simple pattern. A listener who allows themselves to fall into the track actively follows the progression, whether they realise it or not. Subtle changes, like a slight filter effect on some bleeps, shifts the sound, bringing the listener even closer. The best producers, perhaps inexplicably, know exactly when and what to tweak, to the point where a simple series of tones and a four-on-the-floor kick becomes intensely powerful. […] There seems to be an inverse relationship between the prevalence of great loops and the amount of equipment available to producers.

Just outside of Paris. Enter the still-functioning workshop of the innovative and influential French sonic pioneers.

The makers of the Cristal Baschet glass musical instrument. I must visit this place in France! The Baschet Sound Structures Association’s mission is to ensure the work of the Baschet brothers lives on.

Featuring Patricia Wolf’s new project that turns any device with a web browser and speakers into a piece of a larger sound art. Every time you invoke the Cellular Chorus page, a random audio file will be set as the browser’s default. (There are currently 64 different audio files in all.) Then let them play, all of them at once. Move the devices around the room. Don’t let any single device take prominence. Adjust the volume accordingly. Use the pulldown menu or the forward/back buttons to alternate between tracks. Note how the same file will sound different on your rattly old tablet than it does on your brand new laptop, how your humble kitchen speaker can’t hold a candle to your bleeding-edge smartphone.

Her eccentric sound exercises—what she once called “recipes” for listening—briefly went viral. One score reads, in its entirety, “Take a walk at night. Walk so silently that the bottoms of your feet become ears.” Like much of her work, Oliveros’s “Meditations” posited listening as a fully embodied pursuit—a posture of attending to sounds and to the world. But her “Meditations” are more than quotable texts. They began as sound and body experiments within a women’s group. Recounting their early history offers a look at the roots of Oliveros’s body-centered politics; in the midst of America’s current political chaos, her “Meditations” make a timely case for listening as a form of activism.

Jeremy Larson’s favorite moments in music in 2019. Reportedly inspired somewhat by my 'Favorite Sounds of [year]’ lists I've been doing.

What’s played over the speakers at Logan originates in a room in a yellow house in North Providence. --- This question of how to please everyone is something that many large public spaces — and small private spaces — deal with on a daily basis. This desire to please the largest crowd — or not to offend — drove the popularity of “elevator music.” On some level, this challenge continues to drive companies like Spotify to create better and better algorithms. And it drives Dalzell to continually add and delete, listen and select.

Now researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have devised a radical new approach to brain imaging that reveals what past studies had missed. By mathematically analyzing scans of the auditory cortex and grouping clusters of brain cells with similar activation patterns, the scientists have identified neural pathways that react almost exclusively to the sound of music — any music. It may be Bach, bluegrass, hip-hop, big band, sitar or Julie Andrews. A listener may relish the sampled genre or revile it. No matter. When a musical passage is played, a distinct set of neurons tucked inside a furrow of a listener’s auditory cortex will fire in response. Other sounds, by contrast — a dog barking, a car skidding, a toilet flushing — leave the musical circuits unmoved.

Crysknife007 specializes in extended ambient space and spaceship sounds. He also enjoys working with other scifi soundscapes. Fans of ambient starship noise from TV and movies, look no further than this Bandcamp, which also includes loops of ambient noise from the Starfox video game, a submarine, fans and air conditioners, and ‘Every Super Mario Brothers Sound Effect At Once.’

"In his 'photosonic' process, Dudon shines light through a series of semi-transparent, rotating discs that slow and modify the light waves’ frequencies; the resulting waveforms are picked up by photoelectric (solar-power) cells connected to standard analog amplifiers."

“One day, Phil was playing the drums and I had the reverse talkback on because he was speaking, and then he started playing the drums. The most unbelievable sound came out because of the heavy compressor. I said, ‘My God, this is the most amazing sound! Steve, listen to this.’”

Matthew isolates individual moments from songs released this past year, and then very briefly explains why he likes these moments while allowing you to hear them. On one hand, he’s an electronic music composer himself, so he knows what he’s talking about in technical terms. On the other hand, it’s a very personal peek into the nooks and crannies of a music fan’s brain—what those things are that made him go “eh?” other than a cool chorus or a lyric segment. On the third hand (I have three hands, it helps with chores), a lot of these are just cool sounds. Listen and follow along.

Explaining what we mean by ‘popular’ and ‘music’ when we talk about ‘popular music.’

Composer

In his new book, Mp3: The Meaning of a Format, McGill University professor Jonathan Sterne exhaustively and eloquently traces the history of the mp3 from the initial hearing model developed in Bell Labs to the current debates about piracy. As the author argues, each time we rip a CD to our hard drives, we're not only saving space in our living rooms or ensuring we have the appropriate gym soundtrack, but also reaffirming a fundamental idea about the limits of human perception.

I interviewed Jonathan Sterne for Pitchfork about his new book. While conducting the interview, I thought Pitchfork readers would like to know about how AT&T’s capitalistic policies in the 1910s and 1920s laid the groundwork for those compressed bits of data currently clogging their hard drives, and other gentle, science-laden facts about the mp3’s history. I was wrong. But not to worry! Here are the cut bits.

Great explanation. I intend to use this bit: By placing a compressor after the reverb and assigning the lead vocal sound as a side-chain trigger for the compressor, the reverb level will drop whenever the vocal part is performing but rise whenever a phrase finishes, providing long reverb times in gaps but apparently smaller levels when the vocal is in full flow.

‘Sleigh Bells' music has always been about overwhelming your senses, making things so loud and so blurred that you don't know where one thing stops and another ends, how fast the day is passing. Slow things run at double-time, fast things run at half-time; the world runs backwards, slows down, speeds up.’

‘So, you want to make a contact microphone? Whether you want create noise music by banging on scrap metal, cheaply and easily amplify your acoustic instrument, or just play with wires, you’re in the right place.’

Great free releases. Post-pop, lo-fi, experimental, etc. etc.

Fantastic collage/ambient label whose releases are mostly free.

A fun tenori-on sort of musical instrument.

A great selection of VST and AU audio effects plugins for free download.

This is absolutely beautiful. "Brilliant Noise takes us into the data vaults of solar astronomy. After sifting through hundreds of thousands of computer files, made accessible via open access archives, Semiconductor have brought together some of the sun's finest unseen moments. These images have been kept in their most raw form, revealing the energetic particles and solar wind as a rain of white noise. This grainy black and white quality is routinely cleaned up by NASA, hiding the processes and mechanics in action behind the capturing procedure. Most of the imagery has been collected as single snapshots containing additional information, by satellites orbiting the Earth. They are then reorganised into their spectral groups to create time-lapse sequences. The soundtrack highlights the hidden forces at play upon the solar surface, by directly translating areas of intensity within the image brightness into layers of audio manipulation and radio frequencies."

"Adaptable, minimalist interfaces." Oh. My. God.