NEW YORK SOUNDSCAPE

A first look at Ear to the Earth 2008
October 10 - 23, 2008

Ear to the Earth 2008, EMF's annual festival of environmental sound, will take place between October 10 and 23 at Judson CHurch, Chelsea Art Museum, and other venues in New York City.

Among many events, the festival will launch New York Soundscape, a panoramic portrayal of New York City's personality and urban ecology in sound, including documentary field recordings, sound art compositions, and multimedia created by artists, students, and New Yorkers from all walks of life.

New York Soundscape will open on October 10 at Judsion Church with 'New York Big Fritz', a major multimedia event portraying 24 hours in the course of a day in New York City. The audio will be created by Agnieszka Roginska and Paul Geluso, both faculty members in the NYU Music Technology Program, with a group of students; and the imagery will be created by Ken Perlin, faculty member at the NYU Media Research Laboratory, with a group of students. Fritz, btw, is a listening head, a model with microphones placed as if they were ears, used in psychoacoustical research. Big Fritz is a multi-microphone extension of (Little) Fritz, designed to 'listen' from many different simultaneous perspectives, all of which presented together result in a wild, multi-dimensional, immersive sound environment.

Other New York Soundscape events include Francisco Lopez, who will come from Spain to present the New York work from his trilogy 'The World As Instrument'. We've commissioned Michael Schumacher, Bruce Odland, Elliott Sharp, Miya Masaoka, Lo Vid, Liz Phillips, Marina Rosenfeld, and Richard Lainhart, all New York sound artists, to create works based on New York sounds. Andrea Polli will present Cloud Car, a technicolor steam-spurting gas-guzzling sound-and-visual demonstration of automobile emissions. Laurie Spiegel will present Ferals, a touching image-and-sound portrayal of the lives of New York City pigeons. Madeleine Shapiro will perform a new work by Walter Branchi. And we're planning two panels and a public forum titled "How Can Art Affect Social Change in Environmental Issues?" with keynote speaker Andrea Polli.

A three-year project, New York Soundscape is a major artistic and preservation activity. The result will be a collection of works that in their ensemble portray the audio personality and urban ecology of New York City at this time in history.

New York Soundscape is also a social and educational experiment. It will foster community, develop a model for learning about the environment through the composition of digital art works, and preserve the collection of resulting works and related documentation as a historical document.

Ear to the Earth is a program of Electronic Music Foundation.

Learn more about Ear to the Earth.

Learn more about Electronic Music Foundation.