Sonic Internet
There is so much to listen to on the internet and many ways of playing with sound.
Turn up the sound or plug in your headphones and allow your ears to guide you..
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Do-It-Yourself Browser Music
Brilliant computer programming is allowing the computer user to create their own music using a variety of new “instruments.” Click on the highlighted text to try some of these.
Draw lines with your curser to create surfaces for the toning bouncing balls.
The New York City subway system is turned into a harp.
Ambient: Critically massed “Buddha Machine” opportunity; click on the buttons to activate dreamy sound loops.
Begin the Equine doo-wop: Singing horses stand next to a fence, click to hear them sing.
PBS has easy-to-use, simple sequencers to play with and learn about rhythm quantization.
Use your mouse or trackpad to turn visual patterns into a soundfield with the Voice Interactive Visual Sound Applet.
The orDrumbox has a lot of parameters to change the sound.
For iPod Touch and iPad, 3 apps made by Brian Eno and Peter Chilvers that allow for co-creation of musical soundscapes. I have been calling freely improvised music made with hospitalized children and teens generative music, but I like Eno/Chilvers use of that term to describe this project as well.
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Phonography
Awareness and practice of phonography continues to grow, inspiring, inviting all of us to listen closely to the world around us. Quiet American offers one-minute location recordings from around the world. Get involved with advocacy for our sonic environment with the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology. Search for “phonography” or any other sound at the Free Sound Project. From the search results page, you can play more than one sound at a time. Check out the samples of frogs!
Meta-Phonography
NASA’s Earth Songs – listen to the Earth’s natural radio emissions via a Very Low Frequency antenna
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Instrumental Improvisation
Play Ken Brashear’s Virtual Drumset with your mouse. Try out other virtual drumsets at Virtual Drumming.
Click knobs on Nick’s Virtual Synthesizer.
Virtual celesta? Try out the interactive music box.
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Learning about sound
Decibels? What are they?
Educypedia gives a detailed explanation of how string and wind instruments produce sound.
The Soundry features applets/in-browser applications that demonstrate acoustic principles of beating, the Doppler effect, and harmonics.
A large collection of sound phenomenon demonstrated and explained from a physics perspective.
Listening through the Exploratorium.
Explore the Sound Site for listening games and activities.
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Learning about music & instrument resources
Explore Morton Subotnick’s Creating Music – pages and pages of music learning concepts from a pioneering electroacoustic composer.
Method Behind the Music has a great flash keyboard you can use to find reference pitches, practice arpeggios and scales; improvise.
Check your guitar harmony here. More lessons in guitar harmony at Chordbook.
See chords for ukelele.
What’s this?
Take a ride on the Moody Motorcycle singing face with moveable parts.
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Recommended Radio
One of local audio guru and Jack Straw engineer Doug Haire’s long standing broadcast projects, Sonarchy is broadcast on KEXP 90.3 at midnight Sunday nights. Always a signal path in to Doug’s latest example of fresh sounds of the area. And always available for streaming or podcast.
Create personalized radio stations and be introduced to music you may like on Pandora.
New application seeking to provide music according to listener’s mood – the Musicovery. (caution, takes a while to load up and is processor intensive)
