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"Sommerens hovedpine" er fortsat i weekenden for landets politikredse, som igen og igen får klager over støj.

ØSTJYLLAND: Landets politikredse kan tidligt søndag morgen igen melde om en weekend med usædvanligt mange klager over høj musik.

Det er kombinationen af sommerhumør og beværtninger, som lukker klokken 24.00 på grund af coronaregler, der får festerne til at flytte ud på både åbne pladser og ind i huse og lejligheder.

- Jeg tror aldrig, at jeg har oplevet en vagt, hvor vi har fået så mange klager, siger vagtchef Jes Frederiksen fra Østjyllands Politi tidligt søndag morgen.

- I løbet af natten har vi nok fået omkring 25, og det er usædvanligt mange. Den korte forklaring er jo, at folk ikke har mulighed for at komme ud.

Venlig opfordring

Også hos kredsene i København, Københavns Vestegn, Nordjylland, Østjylland, Midt- og Vestsjælland og Sydøstjylland har der i løbet af natten været usædvanligt mange klager over "musik til ulempe", som politiet kalder det.

Det lader til, at folk bare skal tænde for en radio, og så bliver der klaget.

Lars Grønlund, vagtchef ved Sydøstjyllands Politi

Sommertendensen fik for nogle uger siden Rigspolitiet til at sende et nødråb ud på Twitter.

- Vi får i øjeblikket mange anmeldelser om musik til ulempe, og vi vil så nødig skulle ødelægge den gode feststemning ved at komme på besøg, skrev politiet.

- Så skru ned for musikken og op for hyggen og tag hensyn til dine naboer. God sommer!

Spiller videre

Men danskerne har ikke lyttet til opfordringen.

- Vi har flere anmeldelser om høj musik end normalt her i coronatiden, siger vagtchef for Københavns Politi Henrik Stormer, der melder om en særdeles travl nat på støjfronten.

For høj musik i haven kan give bøde

Landets politikredse har meldt om et stort antal klager over høj musik.

Barer og værtshuse må på grund af coronarestriktionerne kun have åbent til klokken 24, og det får fester til at rykke hjem i private hjem og haver og ud på gader og stræder.

Hvis man spiller høj musik, er der risiko for bøder og forbud:

Det kan straffes med bøde at spille musik, der er til væsentlig ulempe for naboerne. Det betyder, at det er forbudt at spille så høj musik i haven, at det generer naboerne.

Om musik i haven er til gene afhænger blandt andet af tidspunktet. Der er forskel på at spille musik om eftermiddagen og midt om natten. Ofte vil politiet starte med at give en advarsel og opfordre til, at musikken bliver skruet ned.

Politiet kan forbyde brug af højttalere, musikanlæg, musikinstrumenter eller lignende, når benyttelsen må antages at være til væsentlig ulempe for de omkringboende eller forbipasserende.

Imens karakteriser vagtchefen ved Midt- og Vestsjællands Politi problemet som "sommerens hovedpine".

Og Jess Falberg, vagtchef ved Nordjyllands Politi, kan fortælle, at det er et problem, der har præget hele kredsen.

- Vi har haft masser af musik til ulempe i nat. Det har været fra privatfester rundt omkring, og det har fyldt meget. Og det er vel at mærke i hele Nordjylland, siger han.

Nogle af vagtcheferne fortæller dog også, at tolerancetærsklen i forhold til naboernes udskejelser lader til at være blevet mindre.

- Vi har fået mange klager over musik til ulempe. Det lader til, at folk bare skal tænde for en radio, og så bliver der klaget, siger Lars Grønlund, vagtchef ved Sydøstjyllands Politi, tidligt søndag morgen.

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Øh, gider I godt lige skrue ned: Politiet modtager storm af klager over høj musik

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"Sommerens hovedpine" er fortsat i weekenden for landets politikredse, som igen og igen får klager over støj. ØSTJYLLAND: Landets politikredse kan tidligt søndag morgen igen melde om en weekend med usædvanligt mange klager over høj musik.

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Effekt af coronakrisen

Østjylland er et af de steder, hvor man har haft over dobbelt så mange anmeldelser i løbet af de sidste fire måneder, som man plejer.

Det kunne godt være en effekt af corona. Vi ser mange hjemmefester, fordi alt lukker ned ved midnat.

Kristian Juliussen, vicepolitiinspektør, Østjyllands Politi

- Det er primært i de seneste aftentimer eller de tidlige nattetimer, at vi har udfordringen, siger Kristian Juliussen, der er vicepolitiinspektør i Østjyllands Politi.

- En ting er vejret, men det kunne godt være en afledt

af corona. Når værtshusene lukker klokken tolv, er det ikke alle, der går hjem. Så sætter de sig i parker eller holder en hjemmefest, siger han.

Tjekker man vejrudsigten for sidste år og i år, viser det sig dog, at der ikke er de store forskelle at spore.

Gennemsnitstemperaturen har været nogenlunde den samme, men der var lidt mere regn sidste år fra marts til juni.

Yngre mødes bare et andet sted

Ifølge vicepolitiinspektør Kristian Juliussen fra Østjyllands Politi er det primært den yngre aldersgruppe i politikredsen, som der klages over.

- Det er primært det yngre segment, som er ude. Dem, som normalt ville befinde sig i nattelivet, men som nu ikke kan gå ud, men stadig har behov for at mødes og holde en god fest.

For regeringen fastholder stadig kravet om, at barer og restauranter lukker ned ved midnat, ellers risikerer beværtningerne at få en bøde.

- Der er ikke sket en kulturændring. De mødes jo et andet sted, lyder det fra Kristian Juliussen.

Tre gode råd fra politiet

1. Hold især volumen nede i det offentlige rum og på de skæve tidspunkter af døgnet. Hvis vinduerne er åbne, så skal du skrue endnu mere ned.

2. Skal der være fest, så giv dine naboer et praj på forhånd og oplys et telefonnummer, de kan kontakte jer på.

3. Er du nabo? Så bank lige på, hvis musikken er for høj, inden du ringer til politiet.

Kilde: Østjylland - og Nordsjællands Politi.

Politi: Tag hensyn

Et af de steder, som har taget konsekvensen af for mange fester, er Kongens Have i København.

I starten af juni valgte man at indskrænke åbningstiden, så parken nu lukker allerede klokken 20.

- Vi er nødt til klart at signalere, at haven ikke skal have karakter af en festivalplads, hvilket desværre er den situation, vi er havnet i, sagde slotshavechefen hos Slots- og Kulturstyrelsen, Niels Mellergaard, til TV 2 Lorry tidligere på måneden.

Forleden måtte Nordsjællands Politi også opfordre til, at folk huskede at skrue ned for boomblasteren, hvis det generede andre.

Og det råd vil Kristian Juliussen fra Østjyllands Politi også lige sende videre.

- Skru ned, og hvis man har åbne vinduer, så skal man skrue endnu mere ned, og så skal man heller ikke gå på altanen og tale højt.

- Det giver god mening, at de unge mødes, og de bliver siddende på den anden side af midnat. Men det giver også god mening, at man tager hensyn.

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Godt vejr og corona: 2.300 flere anmeldelser om musiklarm lander hos politiet

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Effekt af coronakrisen Østjylland er et af de steder, hvor man har haft over dobbelt så mange anmeldelser i løbet af de sidste fire måneder, som man plejer. - Det er primært i de seneste aftentimer eller de tidlige nattetimer, at vi har udfordringen, siger Kristian Juliussen, der er vicepolitiinspektør i Østjyllands Politi.

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Throughout the quarter, students in BISMCS 260 Working With Audio were asked to share a found sound each week that captured their emotional state that week. Here is an edit of those sounds. This is how students felt this quarter.

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Storytelling

Contains tracks

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License: all-rights-reserved

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Pandemic Sound Collages by Jill Freidberg

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Throughout the quarter, students in BISMCS 260 Working With Audio were asked to share a found sound each week that captured their emotional state that week. Here is an edit of those sounds. This is how students felt this quarter.

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For 18 minutes, nothing interrupts the purr of insects bar the sound of kookaburras calling, and a solitary passing car. This is Field Recordings, a creation of the London-based radio producer Eleanor McDowall, "a podcast where audio-makers stand silently in fields". Boasting submissions from all over the world, the first episode debuted in March and captures the sounds of an Australian town at dusk. Highlights from the more than 70 episodes since include a recording from the inside of a hollow tree in Russia, which becomes an orchestra of creaks and whistles as it sways in the wind. It is, in McDowall's words, "a real banger".

Field Recordings was born after a tough year in which McDowall experienced the end of a relationship and began to feel burnt out at work. Compiling this library of ambient soundscapes was part of her solution. "It felt like something that would give me a bit of space and respite," she says. Many of us now adopt similar strategies to capture moments of contemplation, focus or distraction. Music-streaming platforms offer playlists tailored to heighten concentration. Guided-meditation apps offer complementary audio "soundscapes" such as "the cosy sound of rain on a cabin roof".

In 2009, Norwegian television screened a seven-hour film of an unedited train journey from Bergen to Oslo. The programme had its roots in experimental art such as Andy Warhol's 1963 work Sleep, a five-hour film of a poet sleeping, but by taking "slow media" to small-screen audiences, the Norwegian train journey paved the way for "slow TV", a new genre intended to offer a break from the relentless pace dictated by much of digital life. In 2015, the BBC Four Goes Slow series included a real-time "portrait of the making of a simple glass jug" and an uninterrupted two-hour boat journey down the Kennet and Avon canal. Later that year, the channel paid tribute to slow media's Scandi roots with a broadcast of a reindeer sleigh ride across the Norwegian wilderness.

While television pioneered the genre, it is in radio and podcasts where the slow media movement has really gathered momentum. One of the most notable recent examples is Walking, a podcast in which the American writer Jon Mooallem steps out into the woods near his home, on Bainbridge Island near Seattle, with an audio recorder wrapped in a sock. Listeners hear the crunch of gravel, the creaking of gates and twigs snapping underfoot, but Mooallem himself stays largely silent. Naming the podcasts one of its best of 2019, New York Magazine said: "The sheer banality of the recordings both clears and focuses the mind."

Caroline Crampton, a podcast writer for Hot Pod and The Listener, has seen an increasing number of ambient or slow podcasts emerging in the last couple of years. "Sometimes you want news or sport but sometimes you just want sound in order to insulate you from whatever you were thinking about," she says. "I think people enjoy the feeling of being transported. It's often about locations that would be very inaccessible." Crampton says this trend has been accompanied by a broader shift in podcast production methods. While the sounds of phones ringing and car doors slamming have long been a feature of This American Life, she cites the BBC and NRK's Death in Ice Valley and Gimlet's Heavyweight as recent examples of shows incorporating ambient sounds and added audio texture to enhance the listening experience.

BBC Radio 3 has emerged as a champion of the slow media movement. Alan Davey, who took over as controller in 2015, says the station's listeners were well-primed for more reflective programming, used to classical compositions lasting 12 minutes compared to the three-minute pop favoured elsewhere.

In September 2015, Radio 3 broadcast an eight-hour composition by Max Richter where a live audience was encouraged to sleep through the performance. The programme set a world record for the longest broadcast of a single piece of music. Since then, Radio 3 has broadcast a series of slow radio specials, including a real-time recording of a 10-mile walk through the Welsh countryside. "Radio is a very intimate medium," says Davey. "It's a very close relationship between what's being broadcast and the listener. And, especially if you listen on headphones, you can really immerse yourself in it and get lost in it."

While sounds of nature make an obvious choice for slow radio, Davey says soundscapes imbued with the hum of human activity resonate just as much with audiences. In one episode, a correspondent takes a walk across Tokyo to capture the sounds of gaming arcades and a baseball batting range. In downtown Nashville, motorbike engines roar as listeners catch muffled snatches of streetside conversations and the sounds of Dolly Parton drifting from bars.

Slow media producers are largely absent from their creations, but McDowall says some of the most beautiful moments occur when her audio-makers break their silence. The first Field Recording ends with the sound of a bag being zipped and the mimicking of a bird call. In a recording from Darwin, Australia, a child whispers nervously during a rainstorm. "The thing I've found really moving is the sense of the person holding the microphone," says McDowall. "Hearing someone moving through a landscape, or opening their window." A lack of narrative leaves listeners free to choose their own meaning. Some may tune in for a sense of solitude. For McDowall: "It feels more to me like standing with someone."
Field Recordings is available now on fieldrecordings.xyz Topics

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Rain on rooftops: the strange appeal of 'slow audio'

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or 18 minutes, nothing interrupts the purr of insects bar the sound of kookaburras calling, and a solitary passing car. This is Field Recordings, a creation of the London-based radio producer Eleanor McDowall, "a podcast where audio-makers stand silently in fields".

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https://citiesandmemory.com/2020/05/remixing-sounds-global-lockdown/?fbclid=IwAR2-23ej4jQC7uUH35hiia1W1Iis2TTSeQHGNPIhymSQOU0AyqvGKYqD7i0

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En oversigt over lydplatforme/tiltag til at dele coronalyde

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En oversigt over lydplatforme/tiltag til at dele coronalyde

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https://merikyto.net/2020/05/13/pandemia-sound-music-environment-list-of-web-content-from-spring-2020/?fbclid=IwAR3ACruuhqJ8hSdlBnHJfBTqJ9a7Xo9sybAVPjJTllKV_pMHr0bAbh34OAw

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https://citiesandmemory.com/covid19-sounds/

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https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/04/scientists-have-turned-structure-coronavirus-music

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Sounds of nature to soothe lockdown disconnect

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Sounds of nature to soothe lockdown disconnect

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https://www.usc.edu.au/explore/usc-news/news-archive/2020/april/sounds-of-nature-to-soothe-lockdown-disconnect

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Coronavirus lockdown: Can nature help improve our mood?

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Coronavirus lockdown: Can nature help improve our mood?

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https://www.bbc.com/news/health-52479763

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https://soundcloud.com/user-275864738/viral-counterpoint-of-the-coronavirus-spike-protein-2019-ncov

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http://passiveaggressive.dk/scientific-sonification-the-sound-of-corona/?fbclid=IwAR2JAiFp9KOmwUoNUhs8hDsB-Q-HHdAqbQ67IQkV-SJYwORWV0QFFFOyMnE

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Samling af soundscapes fra New York udgivet af New York Public Library

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Hvis 2020 har en lyd, må det være lyden af covid-19, den nye coronavirus, som i foråret satte verden på den anden ende. Pandemien flåede verdens vaner i tusind stykker med uoverskuelige konsekvenser for både enkeltindivider, firmaer og verdensøkonomien. Men den kom også som en mærkbar forandring i vores auditive kultur. Den kom med en lyd.

I mit netværk beretter nogle, at de har væsentligt lettere ved at gå ud om dagen, fordi der er færre indtryk, andre, at de sover væsentligt bedre om natten, mens atter andre opdager nye lyde i fraværet af de gamle, hvilket giver en vis uro eller bare kræver en tilvænning. Flere af dem, jeg har talt med i kraft af mine roller som underviser og lydforsker, fortæller derudover, at isolationen sætter dem i et nyt og meget intimt forhold til hjemmets lyde.

Når en så pludselig ændring i vores hverdagslige soundscape indtræffer, er det mærkbart: noget, vi umiddelbart kan sanse

Det hjem, hvor man før brugte et afgrænset antal timer, hvoraf man sov i langt størstedelen, er nu blevet både arbejdsplads, fitnesscenter og legeplads. Og er man flere på matriklen, må man fordele rummene imellem sig, også lydrummene: Hvem har ret til at skype i stuen og fylde den med fagsnak, og hvem skal forholde sig tavs imens?
Det seneste nye skrig
At store samfundsændringer fødes med et skrig, er ikke noget nyt. Det er let at konstatere, når vi ser tilbage i historien - for eksempel på, hvordan industrialiseringen ikke blot revolutionerede vores produktionsapparat, men også byens hverdagslige lydtapet. Nye maskinelle lyde blev føjet til: damptogets repetitive hakken over jernbanesvellerne, symaskinens rytmiske stød og industriens metallyde - og senere, da forbrændingsmotoren blev opfundet, også bilmotorernes brummen, dækstøj og jetmotorens øresønderrivende fræsen.

Nu er den pandemiske verdensomvæltning, vi står midt i, forhåbentlig ikke en permanent krise. Alligevel kan man på lignende vis beskrive covid-19-skriget, der indebærer lyde som: den ildevarslende hosten, vi hører i køen i supermarkedet, det pludselige snirp fra de digitale glitches i de virtuelle møderum, mange af os nu må træde ind i, eller den karakteristiske klapren fra fingre over tastaturer og tunge åndedrag fra de mødedeltagere, som har glemt at slukke mikrofonen. En anden nytilføjelse til vores hverdag er den spillen op til fællessang, man overalt i verden ser fra altaner og baggårde.

Det var den canadiske komponist og lydforsker R. Murray Schafer (f. 1933), som beskrev industrialiseringen som en sådan lydhistorie, og han gav også lydtapetet det rammende navn soundscape som en lydlig pendant til landskabet. Schafer mente, at alle kulturer også altid var auditive, og det ville ikke komme bag på ham, at en verdensomvæltende pandemi kunne høres. Når en så pludselig ændring i vores hverdagslige soundscape indtræffer, er det mærkbart: noget, vi umiddelbart kan sanse.

Således er virussen ikke blot noget, som forskere og laboranter ser via mikroskoper og testapparater, men også noget, som civilbefolkningen sanser direkte og umiddelbart som en mærkbart ændret stemning i den lydkulisse, vi ellers var så vant til. Det chok, som har skyllet ind over landet, over os som gruppe og som individer med varierende udtryk og styrke, skyldes måske ikke blot, at vi har læst foruroligende overskrifter, men også at vi sanser en mærkbar ændring i vores hverdagslige soundscape.
Hjernen på overarbejde
Hverdagens lydkulisse lægger vi som regel ikke mærke til. Hjernen er så snedigt indrettet, at den sorterer langt de fleste sansedata fra, inden de når vores bevidsthed. Den komponerer med andre ord vores lydlige verden for os. Når hverdagslydene ændres, skal hjernens indbyggede støjfilter pludselig rekonfigureres: Hjernen skal lige finde ud af at tilpasse sig den nye virkelighed og beslutte sig for, om de nye lyde er nogle, vi skal høre eller ej. Derfor er hjernen på overarbejde, når vores soundscape undergår store forandringer.

Hjernen er også på overarbejde i de virtuelle rum, hvor lydene ofte er dårlige og kaotiske. Særligt slemt er det for dem, som i forvejen lider af misofoni, et angstpræget forhold til lyde eller måske blot lydsensitivitet. Ofte er det smaske-, snøfte- og snorkelyde, som disse mennesker ikke kan holde ud, og netop de lyde har det med at blive forstærket i de virtuelle rum, hvor der er mange munde tæt på mikrofoner.

Vores lydvaner ændres, fordi vi vil overskride den afstand, virussen har pålagt os. At høre er at røre på afstand

Så måske er coronalyden ikke så meget nye lyde, som tilføjes vores soundscape, men snarere ombygninger i de vanlige måder, vi forbinder os til hinanden på via lyd - ombygninger, som afslører, at vi ikke alle er lige stillet, når det kommer til lyd. Ikke blot har vi forskellige hjerner. Vi har også forskellig økonomi, og for dem med en ny Macbook vil det alt andet lige være nemmere at hoppe på Zoom-mødet end for den, der sidder med en gammel stationær PC uden kamera.
Nye trafikveje
R. Murray Schafer beskriver vores soundscape som en optælling og kategorisering af lyde, men skal vi forstå vores nye inficerede soundscape, må vi se lidt mere relationelt på sagen. For her er der ikke blot tale om, at nye lyde tilføjes og andre dæmpes, men snarere om, at de eksisterende trafikveje for støj, lyd og kommunikation rekonfigureres. En lydkultur har nemlig ikke blot impact på trommehinder og hverdagserfaringer, men sætter sig større spor i samfundet: i lovgivning, arkitektur, design, sprog, kunst og socialitet.

For eksempel udgjorde forbrændingsmotoren ikke blot en ny lyd i byen, men også en hidtil uhørt lydstyrke, hvilket i midten af det 20. århundrede resulterede i nye støjregulativer i både USA og Europa. Det er dette ret komplekse netværk af forbindelser i det sociale, som virussen piller ved på grund af den isolation, som vi er pålagt fra regeringen, så mere end der er tale om nye instrumenter i orkestret, er der snarere tale om, at vi bruger instrumenterne på nye måder.

Vi omrokerer i medielandskabet for at finde os til rette i de nye rammer, og her er lyd et godt virkemiddel. Det er derfor, vi mødes på Skype: for at overskride den afstand, som isolationen har pålagt os, og det er derfor, mennesker verden over synger sammen på afstand. Fællessangen får nye vinger og bærer på andre måder. Vores lydvaner ændres, fordi vi vil overskride den afstand, virussen har pålagt os. At høre er at røre på afstand, siger Schafer.

Og sangen bliver i disse dage brugt som en erstatning for det kram, vi ikke kan give hinanden. Forskere har vist, at sang kan udløse samme lykkebringende hormoner som et godt kram, så det er ikke underligt, at vi bliver rørt og berørt, når vi deler vores stemmer med andre. Et andet fænomen, som er opstået som en reaktion på virussen, er folk, som spiller derhjemme i stuerne og optager det og deler det. Både amatørmusikere og verdensstjerner som Norah Jones og Steve Martin deler musik, der er spillet derhjemme i stuen uden redigering, og uden at lyden er mixet - som en privat musiceren, der igen skal forbinde os med hinanden.
Samfund og sanser
Covid-19 rammer vores krop på andre måder end blot den beskrevne sygdom med feber og træthed. Den rammer også vores trommehinder, omend det er i en afledt form. Den skaber en ændring i de kollektive måder, vi sanser på, vores fælles sansekultur. De nye fænomener, vi ser med fællessang på balkonerne og endeløse Skype-møder med headset på, er netop ikke blot enkeltstående cases, men globale fænomener.

Der venter os et lydligt efterspil, når isolationen igen ophører og vores nye, mere støjfølsomme hjerner skal håndtere, at bilerne kommer tilbage

Den nye coronavirus skaber ikke blot bølger i vores økonomi, men også i vores kollektive sensorium. Og de chokbølger bør vi tage alvorligt. Her raser angst og utryghed på grund af de ændrede lydtapeter, men her findes også nye og gode, betryggende møder på afstand. Således er der et laboratorium uden for forskningens rum. Det styres nedefra af noget så uregerligt som bevægelser i 'folket'. Og her er der bud på designløsninger, som kan bringe os sikkert igennem krisen. Dem har vi brug for. For der venter os et lydligt efterspil, når isolationen igen ophører og vores nye, mere støjfølsomme hjerner skal håndtere, at bilerne kommer tilbage.

Lyden af 2020 er således ikke den destruktive lyd af en pandemisk rasen, men en yderst rørende lyd, der bruges til at skabe nye former for nærhed på afstand. Til slut: en tak til mine studerende på Æstetik og Kultur ved Aarhus Universitet for deres mange kloge betragtninger, som delvist kan spores i dette essay.
Obs. Denne artikel er et konkurrencebidrag; teksten er korrekturlæst og layoutet, men ellers kun minimalt redigeret. Redaktionens kommentar: "Anettes essay giver et vidende historisk og antropologisk perspektiv på den aktuelle situations ændrede lydlandskab. Teksten veksler fint mellem fortid, nutid og fremtid, og der er et klart kulturpolitisk potentiale i observationerne. Af og til strækker teksten sig næsten over for meget på for kort tid, men så må man blot som læser gribe stafetten og tænke videre selv. Der er i hvert fald nok at reflektere over efter endt læsning, og den auditive forskningsverden får tilsyneladende rigeligt at beskæftige sig med i de kommende år."

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Hvis 2020 har en lyd, må det være lyden af covid-19, den nye coronavirus, som i foråret satte verden på den anden ende. Pandemien flåede verdens vaner i tusind stykker med uoverskuelige konsekvenser for både enkeltindivider, firmaer og verdensøkonomien. Men den kom også som en mærkbar forandring i vores auditive kultur.

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Can you hear the coronavirus? What does it sound like?

Recently, some compositions which used data gathered from the coronavirus, stirred up some conversations among listeners, composers, musicians, scientists, engineers, and artists: the "Proteine Counterpoint Sonification".

This sonification was produced by the engineer and material scientist Markus J. Buehler and his team. They claim to have generated the sounds from original data stemming from the virus, following a sonification method for proteins which they described in an article from 2019: A Self-Consistent Sonification Method to Translate Amino Acid Sequences into Musical Compositions and Application in Protein Design Using Artificial Intelligence:

"The vibrational frequencies are transposed to the audible spectrum following the musical concept of transpositional equivalence, playing or writing music in a way that makes it sound higher or lower in pitch while retaining the relationships between tones or chords played." (Yu, Qin, Martin-Martinez, Buehler 2019)

Sonifying a virus
Their method demonstrates some of the fundamental steps for sonification: gathering data, assigning rules of transposition or transformation of these data entries into audible sound events (cf. Hermann, Hunt, Neuhoff 2011), organizing these sound events into a time-based structure that listeners of a largely westernized, vernacular music culture may recognize as 'musical' - and that allows for a new, scientific insight into the material. This last point is, allegedly, the main goal of a scientific sonification.

The results of Buehler and his team sound quite pleasing. One listener to the Soundcloud upload commented: "Reminds me of Chinese meditation music." You might recognize the sound of a lute, a spinet or even a japanese koto. The tempo is somewhere between lento and larghetto, there is a constant pulse and a counterpoint; it has a character of minimal music and some listeners might even be reminded of Johann Pachelbel's iconic " Canon and Gigue in D major", that has been used recurrently to represent a notion of cosmic universality and unity between all lifeforms and all natural and cultural processes. Some listeners, hence, seem to have expected a more threatening sound - but of course it does not sound threatening: a biological process of viral expansion is only actually threatening from the perspective of the affected lifeforms, not from the perspective of the expanding virus. The expectation that a sonification of a virus potentially carrying deadly diseases would also sound threatening and deadly, is a deeply anthropocentric one: an expectation that treats a scientific sonification like an aesthetic artifact, a musical composition. Yet, a scientific sonification is not a musical composition.

However - and that is really the main flaw of this sonification, I'd say - there is not really a scientific insight to be gained from it, at least not from what I heard or read or understood. The six pieces presented remain largely in the realm of somewhat pleasing sonic artifacts, with various references to existing musical genres and sound designs. As a result, the main goal of sonifying any dataset, the goal to gain new insights into the material, is not really achieved.

So, is this sonification then closer to a musical composition? And what would we expect from it then? C

Composing a pandemic?
As listeners we surely would expect something completely different from an actually contemporary, artistic interpretation of the coronavirus than from a sonification. In this case, the aesthetic decision for certain sounds or musical structures would then not be camouflaged by an often failing argument of being directly determined by a dataset and not by a producer's personal decisions: whenever the personal is hidden underneath a notion of the objective, neutral or even the arithmetic, one can be very sure that deeply personal inclinations and idiosyncrasies will have a much stronger and unmitigated impact in the end. This means that also producers of sonifications are actually mainly composers of a certain kind, with certain aesthetic preferences and aversions, maybe even obsessions and definitely also a particular personal style and sonic or musical aesthetic (of what quality or of what expertise we would then be able to discuss).

In case of a clearly musical representation some of us would probably expect it to sound indeed threatening and to represent - obviously in a refined and aesthetically interesting and challenging way - the phenomena of social distancing, masks, hand sanitizers and gloves. It could even include in its artistic and instrumentalist techniques some of the harsher symptoms one does apparently experience when fallen ill with the lung disease of COVID-19 such as troubles with breathing and a persistent pain or pressure in the chest. Maybe the musical material of circular breathing techniques could be employed, explored, skilfully disrupted and expanded in such a composition?

Other listeners might wish to hear more of the punctually decreased social activities in public places that seem so characteristic for social life these days. A hum of looming danger, underneath all of our activities - at times louder, then almost inaudible - but in general not a musical structure, more an arithmetic display of expansion and decrease that avoids the more trivial illustrations. Such a composition could then maybe sound like this recent record by Thomas Köner: "Motus". The hum of the pandemic.

But maybe we wish even to recognize the sound of getting in touch through one of the videoconferencing tools that dominate social activities under Corona. I am thinking here of the strange effect that through these tools two, three, five or ten people can interact with each other, sonically and visually, and each of them can be seen and heard in totally different rooms and environments. Sometimes the characteristics of these rooms are wiped out, but in many more focused productions of a higher quality, one can actually hear the switch between and the mash-up of these various room acoustics: a quite unusual experience for a lifeform like ours that is not yet familiar with teleportation.

For me, personally speaking, this mash-up of room acoustics is perhaps the strongest sonic signature of the pandemic these days: a sonic icon of being bodily distanced yet socially even more connected (and I haven't even yet touched upon the painful class struggle between precarious gig economy workers on the streets and the privileged self-quarantined in larger mansions or spacious appartments: the actual challenge for any musical piece might lie precisely in this struggle).

Viral Science Communication
All in all, I would claim this sonification by Buehler and his team serves primarily the purpose of science communication, which is fair enough. It needs to be compared, understood and interpreted as a sonic equivalent of the visual representation we all know so well by now (a grizzly, fluffy ball with loads of scary and bright red triangular spikes attached to it), crafted by Alissa Eckert and Dan Higgins for the CDC: an iconic design, ready to be used for communication purposes across all media and publication formats. But neither the visual design nor the sonic design of the coronavirus is a means of research or a tool for further insights, right now.

How could one then employ sonification for a more scientific purpose in this particular case? One proposal came recently from the sound designers around Rainer Hirt: they proposed a series of single sounds for the single most important constituents of the coronavirus and their activities. So, they designed the "Spike Glycoprotein, the Hemagglutinin-esterasem, the Matrixprotein, the Envelope, and the ssRNA und N-Protein" and they subsequently combined so-called "audio scenes for 4 major processes within the viral infection cycle: (A) Attachment & entry, (B) Replicase protein expression, (C) Replication & transcription, (D) Assembly & release". These individual sounds and scenes now indeed could help to identify and to analyze the activities of the virus; I am still not sure, what insight could be gained; however, it seems to me that these sound dewigners propose primarily a sonic repertoire that can now be used by researchers, designers, artists. It offers, if you will, a sonic toolbox for analysis less than an aesthetically pleasing artifact, ready for dissemination across all media platforms. And that is an inspiring and generative first step, in my understanding.

Aside from this, a sonification could also focus on the global spread of the virus and its acceleration: this could provide indeed deeper insights. Or a sonification of the actual propagation of a virus (or a plethora of virus particles) through one individual body's various respiratory pathways, organs and systems. One could then even craft a sonic artifact close to this legendary sonification, almost two decades old now, developed and refined by Isao Hashimoto in 2003: a visualized and sonified sequence of all the nuclear explosions, their locations, and their home nations in the years between 1945 and 1998.

This piece offers - only through the method of sonification - a synopsis of events and of developments that one could not gain access and insight into in any other way:
Info: This article was originally published by soundstudieslab.org on 4. April. Read our review of recent Schulze's book "Sonic Fiction" here.

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Scientific Sonification - The Sound of Corona

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Can you hear the coronavirus? What does it sound like? Recently, some compositions which used data gathered from the coronavirus, stirred up some conversations among listeners, composers, musicians, scientists, engineers, and artists: the "Proteine Counterpoint Sonification". This sonification was produced by the engineer and material scientist Markus J. Buehler and his team.

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Multiple AI labs are working on algorithms that they believe could help diagnose COVID-19 simply by listening to the sound of people speaking.

Researchers at universities including Carnegie Mellon University, Harvard, and MIT are collecting voice data to train algorithms.

If they're proven to be successful, the AI tools could be used to screen workers at businesses attempting to reopen amid COVID-19.

But research has hit some early roadblocks as labs that specialize in AI attempt to foray into epidemiology.

Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

In the fight against COVID-19, several artificial intelligence labs are turning to an unexpected piece of evidence that might help diagnose the illness: people's voices.

A team of researchers from Harvard and MIT is using machine learning to comb through voice recordings from COVID-19 patients and healthy people in an attempt to identify specific vocal signatures that could indicate someone is carrying the virus. A similar project is underway at Carnegie Mellon University's CyLab.

Research is still in early stages, but the teams aim to develop AI tools that could tell people whether they have coronavirus based on an audio recording of their voice. If proven successful, the tools could allow more people to choose to self-isolate even if they don't have access to a COVID-19 test.

"If we can prove that it works, this would be a very easy-to-use tool for businesses when they open up. People can just talk into a machine and the machine could alert them if there's something wrong," Carnegie Mellon researcher Rita Singh told Business Insider. "It would be a powerful technology that could ease testing all across the world."

The team of Harvard and MIT researchers is using speech audio data provided by Voca.ai, an Israeli startup that sells AI-powered customer service tools. Voca.ai cofounder and CTO Alan Bekker told Business Insider the company has set up a web portal for voice recording donations, and has collected more than 100 samples from COVID-19 patients and several thousand samples from healthy people.

Analyzing people's speech, coughing, and breathing patterns as a diagnostic tool isn't new - tussiphonography, or the study of cough sounds, has been around for decades. Now, AI researchers are emboldened by early reports from doctors that COVID-19 appears to have unique effects on patients' coughing and speech.

While the research shows promise, it has also hit some early roadblocks. AI researchers eager to help the worldwide fight against COVID-19 have faced a difficulties due to their relatively limited experience with epidemiology.

To give people an incentive to donate voice audio, Singh's lab initially published a rough AI tool online that would predict whether people have a higher chance of being COVID-19 positive using voice samples, along with a disclaimer that the tool wasn't giving real medical advice. But within 48 hours, Carnegie Mellon forced the lab to take down the online test, which could have run afoul of FDA guidelines and be misinterpreted by people regardless of the disclaimer.

"It's a perfectly valid concern, and my whole team had not thought of that ethical side of things," Singh said. "The other side is that hopefully the COVID pandemic will pass, and once it passes, hopefully it will never come back. So if we don't get the data now, we're never going to have data for research."

Satrajit Ghosh, a professor at MIT and Harvard overseeing the schools' research on COVID-19 AI voice tools, and Daniel Low, a PhD student in the program, echoed the need for more data in a statement to Business Insider.

"Screening for COVID-19 using voice recordings is promising especially given how easy it is to acquire samples while maintaining social distancing," they said. "[But] we simply do not yet have enough data to understand the diversity of symptoms and the changes that occur when an individual is infected."

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Do I sound sick to you? Researchers are building AI that would diagnose COVID-19 by listening to people talk.

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Multiple AI labs are working on algorithms that they believe could help diagnose COVID-19 simply by listening to the sound of people speaking. Researchers at universities including Carnegie Mellon University, Harvard, and MIT are collecting voice data to train algorithms. If they're proven to be successful, the AI tools could be used to screen workers at businesses attempting to reopen amid COVID-19.

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For months, the Covid-19 virus has passed from body to body around the world. Its corporeal work is silent, but it reshapes the soundscape wherever it goes. Coughs and sneezes turn paranoid heads; ventilators whoosh in hospital rooms; streets go suddenly quiet, as people shelter inside. Kids home from school create a new daytime soundtrack, and neighbors gather on balconies in the evening, to sing together or applaud health workers. As physicians monitor the rattle of afflicted lungs, the rest of us listen for acoustic cues that our city is convalescing, that we've turned inward to prevent transmission.

As we adjust to new spatial confines, to an altered sense of time, we also retune our hearing.

But contextual shifts are not always as sudden as a viral pandemic. We are constantly revising the way we listen to the city, and for at least a century our aural capacities have been growing in the direction of urban surveillance and public health. With technology, we track sounds over greater distances, at different timescales and intervals, discerning patterns and aberrations that are often encoded as symptoms, so that we (or our public officials) can diagnose problems and apply cures. Indeed, many of the modern technologies used to sound out the city are inspired by diagnostic tools from medicine and psychology. Through these soundings, we grasp the city's internal mechanics, assess the materiality of its parts, analyze its rhythms. And those two domains, surveillance and health, are increasingly entwined with a third, machine intelligence.

With all the attention given to urban applications of machine vision - from facial recognition systems to autonomous vehicles - it's easy to forget about machines that listen to the city. Google scientist Dan Ellis has called machine listening a "poor second" to machine vision; there's not as much research dedicated to machine listening, and it's frequently reduced to speech recognition. Yet we can learn a lot about urban processes and epistemologies by studying how machines listen to cities; or, rather, how humans use machines to listen to cities. Through a history of instrumented listening, we can access the city's "algorhythms," a term coined by Shintaro Miyazaki to describe the "lively, rhythmical, performative, tactile and physical" aspects of digital culture, where symbolic and physical structures are combined. The algorhythm, Miyazaki says, oscillates "between codes and real world processes of matter." The mechanical operations of a transit system, the social life of a public library, the overload of hospital emergency rooms: all can be intoned through algorhythmic analysis.

Our tools for urban listening embody particular ways of knowing the city.

How we imagine ourselves as listening subjects, as hearing bodies, informs how we make sense of our sonic environments. As we listen to the city with both human and machinic ears, we sound it out as a particular kind of resonant or reflective body or system. If we are constantly listening for alien accents or breaking glass and gunfire - as some automated police systems do - we might imagine the city as a body that needs protection from threats. If our stock-trading bots equate the hum of vehicular traffic with economic production, we might be alarmed by quiet streets. If, instead, we listen to the city at macro scale, as an ecology of diverse lifeforms and resources and habitats, we might recognize a dynamic, vital system to be stewarded for future generations of humans and other species. When the sounds of the pandemic recede, how will our hearing be changed? Our tools for urban listening embody particular ways of knowing the city, with implications for how the city is designed, administered, policed, beautified, and maintained.

In other words, how we listen to the city is as important as what we are listening for. Amid the rise of artificially intelligent, algorithmically attuned ears, scoring the city in accordance with their own computational logics, we humans need to better understand our own acoustic agency so that we can make thoughtful choices about how to supplement our ears with machinic ones. In a world defined by climate crisis, surveillance capitalism, and the periodic collapse of global health, we need to think as much about a city's resonance as we do its resilience and livability.

The Stethoscope

Cities historically were compared to organic bodies, and many tools for sounding out the city were developed by first listening to ourselves. The human body is a resonance chamber whose particular sonic qualities can reveal its condition of well-being. To diagnose a patient with fluid in the lungs, Hippocrates advised a technique called succession: "you will place the patient on a seat which does not move, and an assistant will take him by the shoulders, and you will shake him, applying the ear to the chest, so as to recognize on which side the sign occurs." Leopold Auenbrügger, in 1761, proposed a slightly less violent method, percussion, which involved striking the body and listening to its internal resonances to locate diseases of the lungs and heart.

Laennec advocated for the use of instruments to 'mediate' the physician's attention to audible movements inside the body.

Yet even in Auenbrügger's time most diagnoses relied on the doctor's visual examination and the patient's subjective testimony. There was no need to listen deeply to the body because pathologies were attributed not to deep internal causes, but to an imbalance of humors. As autopsies became more widely accepted, those deeper causes were eventually revealed. But "without the larger ideological edifices of empiricism, pathological anatomy, and physiology," Jonathan Sterne observes, physicians "found listening to the interior of the body to have no practical, informative purpose. ... It was only when the body came to be understood as an assembly of related organs and functions that percussion ... would take on such a primary role in medical diagnosis."

The stethoscope, introduced by René-Théophile-Hyacinthe Laennec in the early 19th century, marks an epochal turn in the histories of listening and medicine. Treating a young, corpulent woman "laboring under general symptoms of a diseased heart," Laennec found that her gender, age, and girth made "direct auscultation" - laying ears and hands on her body - "inadmissible." And so he "rolled a quire of paper into a sort of cylinder and applied one end of it to the region of the heart, and the other to my ear, and was not a little surprised and pleased, to find that I could thereby perceive the action of the heart in a manner much more clear and distinct than I had ever been able to do by the immediate application of the ear." Laennec's 1819 treatise De L'auscultation Mediate ( On Mediate Auscultation) advocated for the use of instruments to "mediate" the physician's attention to audible movements inside the body.

The stethoscope further mediated a transition in medicine and its ways of knowing. According to Sterne, Laennec's followers cultivated an "audile technique," a rational mode of observation, that was "instrumental in reconstructing the living body as an object of knowledge." Mediate auscultation placed a new physical distance between the doctor and patient, and it established sound as a source of medical data. Seeking to validate listening as a scientific method, practitioners created a taxonomy of the body's internal sounds, a "new medical semiotics," with each sound indexically representing a specific movement of liquids or gases. Auscultation, Sterne writes, was a "hydraulic, physiological hermeneutics."

From here it is not a far leap to contemplate the stethoscope being used to listen to other systems. Natural philosopher Robert Hooke had already imagined the sounding body as a machine or factory:

There may be ... a Possibility of discovering the Internal Motions and Actions of Bodies by the sound they make, who knows but that as in a Watch we may hear the beating of the Balance, and the running of the Wheels, and the striking of the Hammers and the grating of the Teeth, and Multitudes of other Noises; who knows, I say, but that it may be possible to discover the Motions of the Internal Parts of Bodies, whether Animal, Vegetable, or Mineral, by the sound they make, that one many discover the Works perform'd in the several Offices and Shops of a Man's body, and thereby discover what Instrument or Engine is out of order.

Monitoring the body's functions with new technical and conceptual instruments required specialized knowledge, which elevated physicians' social status. Over time, tools like specula, endoscopes, X-ray machines, and MRIs enabled further investigation of internal causes for external symptoms, and the discovery of maladies with no external expression. Yet the stethoscope has a special place in history, as the instrument that first registered a new way of knowing. Auscultation - mediated listening - is fundamental to modern life. Indeed, Sterne links the instrumentation of medicine to the growth of industrial cities. "Medicine itself industrialized," he says, "in gaining a more rationalized structure; in taking shape as a self-conscious profession; in a heavier investment in the discourses of science and reason; and, finally, in its adoption of technology."

The Sound Meter

The professionalization of landscape architecture and city planning were not far behind. The 19th-century urban reformers who portrayed the city as a body, with its own circulatory, respiratory, nervous, and excretory systems, drew heavily on medical discourses of the day. As early as the 1850s, designers joined forces with health officials to push for public sanitation measures, water and waste removal infrastructures, and amenities like playgrounds and bathhouses. Public parks, "the lungs of the city," were prescribed to clear out the "miasma" of urban decay and filth. But as physicians traded humoral pathology for empirical science and clinical physiology, they came to understand that infectious diseases were caused by germs, not foul air. Early 20th-century planners influenced by models like Baron Haussmann's Paris, Daniel Burnham's City Beautiful, and Ebenezer Howard's Garden Cities conceived land-use zoning as a way of "immunizing urban populations from the undesirable externalities of the economy."

The first urban noise surveys, produced in the 1920s, revealed the limits of efforts to instrumentalize and objectify hearing.

And the new urban administrative machine required new tools to regulate the machinic environment. The portable audiometer produced a "subjective" measure of loudness; its operator compared a test sound with a reference tone, which could be dialed down until it was masked by the sound under investigation. A later technology, the acoustimeter, added a microphone, amplifier, and indicator signal, eliminating the need for user judgment. These new tools of urban auscultation were combined with a new unit of measurement, the decibel, to produce the first urban noise surveys in London, New York, Chicago, and Washington, D.C., in the 1920s. As Karin Bijsterveld notes, "Although audiometers were at first used in a strictly medical context to test hearing, the city turned out to be a crucial context for [their] development and application."

This context quickly revealed the limits of efforts to instrumentalize and objectify hearing. The meters couldn't replicate the way human ears perceived loudness, and they had trouble tracking fluctuating sounds. Bell Labs' Rogers Galt, who reviewed urban sound surveys for the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America in 1930, emphasized the subjective, situational nature of aural perception. Whether a sound was perceived as noise, he wrote, depended on how long it lasted and how often it occurred, whether it was steady or intermittent, who made the sound, who was disturbed, and whether the sound was understood as necessary. "Noise" was a product of acoustics and psychology.

Whether or not cities actually were too loud, measurable "noise levels," with their positivist certainty, "became the sign of how bad the situation was." Public health concerns were taken seriously only after noise exposure could be quantified. Leonardo Cardoso, in his study of sound politics in São Paolo, argues that the seemingly objective measurements produced by sound-level meters came to "replac[e] our ears as the authoritative hearing actor" and ultimately conditioned our hearing to a world that the instrument could validate. "Through the minuscule repetition of a series of exposures to sound that are allowed to exist thanks to the [meter's] validation, this technological being" has reshaped our own organic perceptual instruments. We became attuned to what the machine is capable of sensing.

The Sensor Array

As our cities grow increasingly datafied, algorithmically filtered, and optimized for efficiency, they require new instrumentation.

The SONYC team has also created a visualization tool, Urbane, that generates a 3D map of a city's sound data over time and connects it to other urban data streams, so that local governments can efficiently schedule inspections at sites of potential noise code violation. Claudio Coletta and Rob Kitchin propose that such systems could be made "algorhythmic," or responsive to urban flows and fluctuations across seasons, days of the week, and times of day. Planners could correlate noise readings with data about road surfaces, vehicle counts, traffic speed, topology, and other variables to create daytime and nighttime sound maps that inform noise reduction policies. Here, Coletta and Kitchin write, "we have a set of algorhythms at work, algorithmically measuring, processing, and analyzing urban sound and its rhythms."

Data ethicists warn that the racial and gender biases built into our measuring machines will further inequities in care.

The turn toward algorithmic city planning mirrors what is happening in medical offices. Some health professionals worry that the stethoscope is going out of fashion, supplanted by echocardiography and handheld ultrasound devices that increase the physical and affective distance between doctor and patient. Yet anthropologist Tom Rice finds that some physicians remain committed to auscultation as an "index of sympathetic and empathetic medical practice." So, too, could we commit ourselves to sounding out the city with more empathic modes of instrumented listening.

Listening to Systems

In the 1960 and '70s, acoustic ecologists like R. Murray Schafer, Barry Truax, and Hildegard Westerkamp developed qualitative, subjective methods for studying relationships between humans and their environments. These researchers deployed field units to make comparative site recordings across time, invented annotation systems, made maps, and experimented with alternative ways to visualize sonic data. In the decades since, their followers have conducted longitudinal sound studies that reveal insights about climate change, species loss, urbanization, gentrification, and other forms of environmental and social change. The sociologist Henri Lefebvre, in an essay published after his death, proposed an embodied practice of rhythmanalysis, a way of mediating urban perception with one's physical presence. The rhythmanalyst, Lefebvre says, "listens - and first to his body; he learns rhythm from it, in order consequently to appreciate external rhythms. His body serves him as a metronome." The body is a means of mediate auscultation; the rhythmanalyst approaches the city as a physician would, listening for "malfunctions of rhythm, or ... arrhythmia."

Lefebvre advised that we 'listen to a house, a street, a town, as an audience listens to a symphony.' We should also listen to urban systems like transit and public health, regardless of their musicality.

This is a holistic practice, extending across spatial and temporal scales. Lefebvre advised that we "listen to a house, a street, a town, as an audience listens to a symphony," discerning the role of each agent, or instrument, in composing the whole. We should also listen to urban systems like housing and transit and public health, regardless of their musicality. To be good stewards of (or interventionists in) these systems, we must be able to recognize submerged sounds and obscure patterns, with and without machines. As a viral pandemic sweeps the world, we can supplement our reading of public health statistics by listening with our bodies to the street and the supermarket.

Using the example of a car engine, Bijsterveld draws a distinction between "monitory listening," which tells drivers whether the internal mechanisms of a system are working as they should, and "diagnostic listening," which experts use to identify internal problems based on a taxonomy of aberrant sounds. These two modes of listening are constantly happening all around us, and they are crucial to the maintenance and care of the city's technical and social infrastructures. Civil engineers, for example, listen to ambient vibrations, harmonic excitations, and wave propagation to detect structural weaknesses in buildings and bridges and transit beds. And advanced instruments help us listen across urban scales that are not easily heard by human ears or bodies. Researchers in Alister Smith's Listening to Infrastructure lab at Loughborough University study sensors that monitor high-frequency "acoustic emissions" from "geotechnical assets" (buried pipelines, foundations, retaining structures, tunnels, and dams) in order to assess their condition, locate weakness, and target maintenance work.

This work to auscultate infrastructure, to render it sensible, helps us appreciate how much listening we have ceded to machines.

This applied research extends a tradition among artists who have sounded out infrastructural elements. For the centennial of the Brooklyn Bridge, in 1983, Bill Fontana mounted eight microphones under the bridge's steel grid roadway and broadcast live sounds at the World Trade Center plaza. In 1999, Stephen Vitiello spent six months in residence on the 91st floor of the World Trade Center, recording how Tower One swayed and creaked with the wind. Such works make sensible the micro-rhythms and macro-scale physical stresses that infrastructures withstand and amplify the distinct mechanics of their materials and construction techniques. Other artists have encouraged listening to technical and media infrastructures, such as WiFi networks, cell connections, and the global positioning system. Since 2004, Christina Kubisch has hosted "Electrical Walks" in several dozen cities. Participants wear specially designed headphones that translate electromagnetic signals into audible sounds, disclosing the waves and particles - generated by activities like ATM transactions and CCTV surveillance - which perpetually envelop and penetrate urban bodies. Similarly, Shintaro Miyazaki and Martin Howse use logarithmic detectors, amplifiers, and wave-filter circuits to transform electromagnetism into sound, revealing the "rhythms, signals, fluctuations, oscillations and other effects of hidden agencies within the invisible networks of the 'technical unconscious.'"

This work to auscultate infrastructure, to render it sensible, helps us appreciate how much listening we have ceded to machines. Turbines, windmills, freezers, vent fans, and hard-to-access machines in the off-limits "clean rooms" of pharmaceutical and tech manufacturing facilities - all signal their health to system operators by chugging along with a consistent tone and rhythm. AI can purportedly predict and prevent infrastructural snafus by scanning for idiosyncrasies within high-performance systems. Some players in the predictive analytics field build training sets with sound samples of well-behaved machines, while others listen across a wide array of systems, identify anomalies, and then invite human engineers to help them analyze and classify the aberrant sounds. Humans also play a mediating role as liaisons between automated sonic analysis and the deployment of emergency services or maintenance workers. A manager overseeing a water treatment plant during a violent storm might rely on a dashboard of sonic alerts to pinpoint mechanical failures and then dispatch staff - or robots - to fix the problem. In the future, this auscultative agent might be the only human in the facility.

Listening to Ourselves and Each Other

And sometimes the city's artificially-intelligent ears are turned on us. Xiaochang Li and Mara Mills describe the historical role of "vocal portraits" in criminal records. Since the early 20th century, police departments across the U.S. and Europe have recorded and archived voices for forensic purposes - to aid in speaker identification, or to allow researchers to identify supposed qualities of the criminal character. Today, international law enforcement agencies use software to match speech samples from phone calls and social media posts with "voice-prints" in a shared database. China has reportedly linked voice-prints to transit ticket machines, health care and educational systems, and citizens' national IDs.

Speech recognition also helps investigators probe alibis and insurance companies verify claims. Layered voice analysis software can purportedly detect lies and incriminating affective qualities like embarrassment, overzealousness, anxiety, or an "attempt to outsmart" the interviewer. Embedded in the software are algorithmic shibboleths: inflections, catchwords, expressions, and marks of dialect that act as "aural biopolitical signatures" of individual identity. At immigration offices, forensic linguists scrutinize accented voices to determine whether they match the traumatic narratives presented in asylum claims, a disembodiment that artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan says violates the principle of habeas corpus, which stipulates that the accused must appear before the judge in recognition of the fact that "the voice is a corporeal product" whose semantic and forensic value exceeds its written documentation or audio recording. The voice has a body. He proposes that heterogenous, hard-to-place accents should be understood as a "biography of migration," a sonic composition that defies the body's identification with a single nation-state.

And a growing number of schools, prisons, hospitals, and city governments deploy audio analytics to passively monitor their populations. The Dutch company Sound Intelligence, founded in 2000, makes software that scans voices in the environment for signs of fear, anger, and duress, and then summons authorities or records a sonic event for forensic purposes. This "aggression detection" software is loaded on microphones made in California by Louroe Electronics and security cameras made in Sweden by Axis Communications, which are then marketed through school safety and law enforcement catalogs and conventions. (Sound Intelligence also offers systems that detect and geolocate gunshots and broken glass.) While some customers told ProPublica that these products have become "indispensable" in their operations, reporters found that the systems were often hyper-sensitive and unreliable, interpreting rough, high-pitched voices - like those you might hear often in high-school gyms and cafeterias - as aggressive, and even mistaking slammed lockers for gunshots.

Such machines can listen from the macro to the micro scale, taking in the chatter of an entire concert hall or public square and then homing in on the granular properties of an individual voice. A large enough network of automated ears could hypothetically listen at the scale of the city, identify anomalies, and sonically access the interiority of urban subjects, discerning their identity or intention, their humor or their health. Which, again, underscores the role of human arbiters. Just as we want an empathetic physician at the other end of the stethoscope (and a robust health department and licensing board setting the terms of that relationship), we should want a qualitative methodologist to contextualize urban noise data, a human engineer to make sense of recorded vibrations in buried pipelines, an asylum-seeking body present before the judge to defend herself with the full power of her voice. Machines might be used to listen widely, to identify general areas and issues of concern, but we should then follow up with diverse, localized, qualitative methods of investigation. And sometimes it's best that we not listen at all - that we let the city's sounds be ephemeral and private and inscrutable.

We might imagine a machine listening system serving a compositional role, creating soundtracks that report the operational status of transit or waste management systems.

Sarah Barns proposes that we recognize the future city as a "complex field of cognition, computation, desire and experience," an assemblage of vibrating, resonating, listening, sounding machines and bodies, including those of other species. The polyphonic city contains many distinct ways of sensing and knowing, of diagnosing and healing, our selves and our spaces. Perhaps listening machines - rather than making scripted determinations about what "meaningful" information is extracted from the sonic environment - could be recruited by cities or community groups or artists to amplify the messy richness of that assemblage, or to highlight the machines' own subjectivity, or to compel us to listen to ourselves, and our machines, listening.

Other projects push back against machine listening by surfacing its flaws. "Laughing Room," by Hannah Davis and Jonny Sun, and "Hey Robot," by Everybody House Games, are interactive games that invite players to read the computer's "personality" in order to trigger its canned laughter or elicit other responses. As we probe a machine's glitches and failures, we get a better sense of the logics by which it operates, the taxonomies and training sets that underscore its performance, the way it operationalizes affect through keywords and speech patterns. Our laughter is a means of auscultating the machine itself.

Then again, human auditors are glitchy, too. We harbor sonic prejudices and modulate our attention when we hear particular rhetorical registers or vocal affectations. And we are conditioned by our class, race, gender, and personal and cultural histories to tune in to, or out of, particular environmental sounds: traffic noise, loud neighbors, street music, howling winds, crying babies, braying animals. Like machine algorithms, we run on biased training sets.

Recognizing the logics and illogics of automated systems can help us see the variables that condition our own practices of immediate auscultation, and the sounding and listening capacities of the other entities who share our environments. A polyphonic mode of distributed listening helps us appreciate how our actions - making music and noise, building and maintaining infrastructure, tracking and monitoring fellow citizens, creating acoustic space for bodies to rest and heal - reverberate across time and space, and beyond the range of human ears.

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Urban Auscultation: Listening to the City

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For months, the Covid-19 virus has passed from body to body around the world. Its corporeal work is silent, but it reshapes the soundscape wherever it goes. Coughs and sneezes turn paranoid heads; ventilators whoosh in hospital rooms; streets go suddenly quiet, as people shelter inside.

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Foundsoundscape : Notes

At the launch of foundsoundscape [April 2015],it's been 20 years exactly since I created ' Recorded Delivery', which quietly collected sounds of the inner realm of the Post Office in March 1995. Back then I could only use cassettes to capture sound, and there was no internet or digital in my world. Two decades later the technical options are staggering, but simplicity and calm is more in demand than ever before.

Foundsoundscape was inspired by the very first Digital Radio station in the UK, that simply played a recording of a rural location. Radio you could just leave running to add a peaceful ambience to your environment indoors. It heralded a new media paradigm, as digital broadcasting offered more capacity than requred for the first time, and that space needed filling. At the same time on TV, Channel 4 was broadcasting Big Brother live 24hours, and at night I loved to tune-in my analogue TV sets all over the house, and the shed, so I could hear the housemates gently sleeping as I worked through the night. Since then infomercials, and gambling TV have taken over, and I greatly miss that sense of real-time space, that does not demand your attention. Foundsoundscape quietly underscores your environment, by creating new ones from others.

Radio is special as it was the first medium that could be experienced by many people in many places, all at the same time > > > Foundsoundscape.com is an online radio station that streams live 24hours a day, which can now be broadcast to people all over the globe. Using over 1000 calm & curious location recordings captured by 100+ recordists, the sounds were simply edited, and then played back three at a time at various volumes in shuffle mode, and the result is never the same twice. You often hear the edges of time as files begin or stop playing mid flow. If you listen ever so carefully you can also hear me working in the studio at the end of the garden late at night, as I have a live mic feeding into the mix. I sometimes like to work with tv radio & music playing, to absorb information, give me ideas, create and share. Email me for a shout-out!

My hope is that others will find foundsoundscape enjoyable and leave it running all day & all night long, just like a radio! It's as simple as that, with one click. A salute to serendipity and shared sonic space. Bookmark it. Play it in rooms around the house. Share it . . Take a break . . . Every day is different. Happy Daze . . . . . . .

Massive thanks to everyone who has helped make this possible
Commissioned by the Sonic Art Research Unit, Oxford Brookes, UK
Programming by Efthymios Chatzigiannis & David Tinapple
Curatorial assistance by Holly Jarvis special thanks to Prof Paul Whitty - Director at SARU

> > >

List of the 100+ audio recorders

sending sound from every corner of the globe

Selection was from an open call for contributions, Knut Aufermann
via my newslist, & online, & in print media.

Chris Dooks
Felicity Ford
Darren McClure
Jeremy Young
Stuart Bannister
Robin Parmar
Yui Onodera
Lauren Bonn
Frans de Waard
Ben Gwilliam
Craig Johnson
Stuart Craig
Luis Fernandes
Philipp Ilinskiy
David Slater
Hiroki Sasajima
Chris Deison
Paul Whitty
Bas Mantel
Richard Chartier
Martin Franklin
Peter Cusack
Martin.A.Smith
Derek Holzer
Ben Horner
Nick Fells
Taylor Dupree
Patrick McGinley
Nickolas Mohanna
Charlotte Heffernan
Bobbie-Jane Gardner
Yan Jun
Ian Baxter
zhang zhongshu
Tomotsugu Nakamura
Chihei Hatakeyama
Yannick Dauby
William Yates
Chris Koelle
Stephen Vitiello
Rod Stasick
Jonathan Palmer
Gregory Kramer
Rob Dansby
Dave the Rave
Wouter Messchendorp
Robert Svantesson
Omer Eilam
Radboud Mens
Mary Malecka
Danny Lavie
Christopher Bradbury
Stephen Packe
Kevin Wienke
Mark Lyken
Michael Jennings
Kerry Ware
John Grzinich
Marc Namblard
Graham Dunning
Radovan Scasascia
Bibio
FOO|OFF
John Wynne
Pete Warren
Craig Goods
Jason Domers
Vijay Sekhon
Robin Russell
Jan van den Brink
Yasuhiro Morinaga
Javier Ucelay Urech
Wayland Iverson
Raquel Castro
Tony Webster
Hanetration
Matt Wright
Jez Riley French
Robert Curgenven
Mari & Ben Minto
Cedrick Eymenier
Laurel Halo
Maggi Payne
Maria Minerva
Victoria Keddie
Marielle Jakobsons
Antye Greie Ripatti
Maria Chavez
Miya Masaoka
Julie Rousse
Laetitia Sonami
Beatriz Ferreyra
Sarah Angliss
Iris Garrelfs
John Kannenberg
Dawn Scarfe
Anne Wellmer
La Cosa Preziosa
Amy Liptrot
Signe Liden
Bethan Parkes
Sarah Peebles
Martyna Poznanska
Rowan Forestier-Walker
Karen Power
Alice Eldridge
Amanda Belantara
Poulomi Desai
Helen Frosi
Susan Martin
Cathy Lane
Rie Nakajima
Marina Rosenfeld
Rhys Chatham
Michael J. Schumacher
Philip Blackburn
Douglas Benford
Jake Muir
The first people to send in sound were chosen by serendipity,
and I curated and edited the content.
Future participation is by invitation only.
> > >

+

Physical Installation version / Oxford 2015

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( ( ( foundsoundscape ) ) ) : created & curated by Janek Schaefer

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Foundsoundscape : Notes At the launch of foundsoundscape [April 2015],it's been 20 years exactly since I created ' Recorded Delivery', which quietly collected sounds of the inner realm of the Post Office in March 1995. Back then I could only use cassettes to capture sound, and there was no internet or digital in my world.

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Widespread social-distancing measures have produced some jarring effects across land, air, and sea.

Barry Wilmore / NASA

From inside her living room in London, Paula Koelemeijer can feel the world around her growing quieter.

Koelemeijer, a seismologist, has a miniature seismometer sitting on a concrete slab at the base of her first-floor fireplace. The apparatus, though smaller than a box of tissues, can sense all kinds of movement, from the rattle of trains on the tracks near Koelemeijer's home to the waves of earthquakes rolling in from afar. Since the United Kingdom announced stricter social-distancing rules last month, telling residents not to leave their home except for essential reasons, the seismometer has registered a sharp decrease in the vibrations produced by human activity.

With fewer trains, buses, and people pounding the pavement, the usual hum of public life has vanished, and so has its dependable rhythms: Before the spread of COVID-19 shut down the city, Koelemeijer could plot the seismometer's data and see the train schedule reflected in the spikes, down to the minute. Now, with fewer trains running, the spikes seem to come at random.

"It's very literally reflecting a slowdown of our lives," Koelemeijer told me over Skype.

Koelemeijer said she briefly geeked out over the recent data before reality set in. At first glance, this is indeed a fascinating observation, the kind of factoid that might appear on the underside of a Snapple cap. The "wow" moment is short-lived, of course, because the explanation is not a quirk of nature or some other benign eccentricity, but a catastrophic virus that has sickened and killed thousands, crumpled economies, and plunged public life into a fearful limbo with no easily discernible end.

But the response to the pandemic has unwittingly produced some other large-scale, though less conspicuous, effects. In a bittersweet twist, the surreal slowdown of life as we know it has presented researchers with a rare opportunity to study the modern world under some truly bizarre conditions, and they're scrambling to collect as much data as they can. Here are four ways the pandemic is being felt across land, air, and sea.

There's less rumbling on the surface

Seismologists around the world have noticed the same effect Koelemeijer detected in London, and at more traditional stations than a fireplace.

The trend started with Thomas Lecocq, a seismologist at the Royal Observatory of Belgium, in Brussels. Seismic stations are usually found well outside metropolitan areas, away from vibrations that could obscure subtle tremors within Earth's interior, but the Brussels station was established more than a century ago, before a city grew around it. Today, it provides a fascinating glimpse of the ebb and flow of a bustling city; Lecocq has found that when it snows, anthropogenic seismic activity decreases, and on the day of a road race, it spikes. Lecocq checked seismic data the day before Belgium began a nationwide lockdown, and then the following morning. The drop in activity, he said, was "immediate." Right now, daytime in Brussels resembles Christmas Day.

Lecocq shared his approach online, and seismologists in the United States, France, New Zealand, and elsewhere are now seeing the effects of their country's own social-distancing measures on seismic activity. For seismologists who study seismic signals from Earth's interior-rather than other sources, including people, animals, even storms-quarantines seem to have made it easier to listen. "Normally we wouldn't pick up a 5.5 [magnitude earthquake] from the other side of the world, because it would be too noisy, but with less noise, our instrument is now able to pick up 5.5's with much nicer signals during the day," Koelemeijer said.

There's Less Air Pollution

As cities and, in some cases, entire nations weather the pandemic under lockdown, Earth-observing satellites have detected a significant decrease in the concentration of a common air pollutant, nitrogen dioxide, which enters the atmosphere through emissions from cars, trucks, buses, and power plants. The drop, observed in China and Europe, coincided with stringent social-distancing measures on the ground. Air pollution can seriously damage human health, and the World Health Organization estimates that conditions stemming from exposure to ambient pollution-including stroke, heart disease, and respiratory illnesses-kill about 4.2 million people a year.
Read: 5 big trends that increased Earth's carbon pollution
The cleaner air could lead to a brief respite in parts of the world with severe air pollution even as they battle the coronavirus. According to an analysis by Marshall Burke, a professor in Stanford's Earth-system science department, a pandemic-related reduction in particulate matter in the atmosphere-the deadliest form of air pollution-likely saved the lives of 4,000 young children and 73,000 elderly adults in China over two months this year.

"There's a quantifiable temporary benefit," Joseph Majkut, the director of climate policy at the Niskanen Center, in Washington, D.C., told me, referring to Burke's analysis. But-and it's an important "but"-"as we go about our recovery, I think we'll go back to business as usual," he said. A drop in emissions this year, including carbon dioxide, the pollutant that causes global warming, won't make a dent in the long-term effort to manage the climate crisis. "We're not solving climate change by having a global pandemic," Majkut said.

City Soundscapes Are Changing

With so many people staying home-and public-transit agencies cutting service as a result-there's significantly less noise from cars, buses, trains, and other transportation. Erica Walker, a public-health researcher at Boston University, has taken a decibel meter with her on her socially distanced walks, and she has been stunned by the measurements. "It's a lot quieter," she told me.

Before the coronavirus pandemic, the acoustic environment in Kenmore Square, a busy intersection near campus, is usually about 90 decibels during rush hour. Yesterday, Walker's rush-hour readings were just under 68 decibels. ( For comparison, a subway train rumbling past nearby registers at 95 decibels-the level at which chronic exposure could result in impaired hearing-and the sound of normal conversation is 60 to 70 decibels.) In some spots in the Fenway Park area, where Walker has studied noise pollution for several years through her program Noise and the City, her latest data show reductions close to 30 decibels. "It's unbelievably a huge difference," Walker said.
Read: Why everything is getting louder
City dwellers might now be hearing sounds that can get muffled by the usual drone. Rebecca Franks, an American who lives in Wuhan, the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak in China, made this observation 48 days into the city's quarantine last month: "I used to think there weren't really birds in Wuhan, because you rarely saw them and never heard them. I now know they were just muted and crowded out by the traffic and people," Franks wrote on Facebook. "All day long now I hear birds singing. It stops me in my tracks to hear the sound of their wings." Sylvia Poggioli, an NPR correspondent in Italy, reported that the streets of Rome are so empty, "you can actually hear the squeak of rusty door hinges," and "the chirping of birds, an early sign of spring, is almost too loud."

A quick search for the phrase birds are louder on Twitter reveals that many other people have been wondering the same thing I have lately: Are the birds chirping more fiercely these days, or am I losing my mind? With spring migration in full swing in the Northern Hemisphere, there are certainly more birds around. But the reduction in noise pollution-and, in some places, its total absence-might make it easier to notice the usual trilling and squawking.

Quieter conditions, perhaps for several months, might seem like a good thing; it's well established that noise pollution can negatively affect our health, contributing to stress-related ailments, high blood pressure, sleep disruption, and other problems. Any potential benefits are difficult to predict without more research, Walker said, and based on recent activity in the Noise and the City's app, where Bostonians can record neighborhood sounds and provide their own descriptions, people might respond to newfound quiet in different ways. For some residents, the new soundscape reminds them of the peacefulness of their childhood decades ago, when the city was less built up. For others, it's another source of pandemic-related stress-eerie, like the calm before a storm.

The Oceans Are Probably Quieter, Too

For other species, less noise pollution is no doubt welcome. Michelle Fournet, a marine ecologist at Cornell who studies acoustic environments, is hoping to position underwater microphones off the coast of Alaska and Florida, where she has studied humpback whales and other marine life, to investigate how the waters have changed in the absence of noise from cruise ships as the industry suspends operations worldwide.

"Just pulling those cruise ships out of the water is going to reduce the amount of global ocean noise almost instantaneously," Fournet told me. "We're experiencing an unprecedented pause in ocean noise that probably hasn't been experienced in decades."
Read: It's tough being a right whale these days
Research has shown that ambient noise from ships and other maritime traffic can increase stress-hormone levels in marine creatures, which can affect their reproductive success. Whales have even shown they can adapt to the din, pausing their singing when cargo ships are near and resuming when they move away.

The unexpected ecological moment brought on by the pandemic reminds Fournet of an accidental experiment that unfolded in the days after 9/11, when ship traffic in North American waters ground to a halt. Researchers working in Canada's Bay of Fundy-already making recordings and taking samples before the terrorist attacks-eventually found that over the course of just a few days, when the noisy waters calmed, right whales in the bay experienced a drop in their stress-level hormones.

Fournet is thinking now of North Pacific humpback whales, who have begun to move northward this month and will soon be swimming with newborn calves in southeast Alaska, a region also popular with cruise ships for views of local wildlife. "This will be the quietest entry that humpback whales have had in southeastern Alaska in decades," Fournet said. "Nature is taking a breath when the rest of us are holding ours."

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

Marina Koren is a staff writer at The Atlantic.

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pandemic reminds fournet of an accidental experiment

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The Pandemic Is Turning the Natural World Upside Down

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Widespread social-distancing measures have produced some jarring effects across land, air, and sea. From inside her living room in London, Paula Koelemeijer can feel the world around her growing quieter. Koelemeijer, a seismologist, has a miniature seismometer sitting on a concrete slab at the base of her first-floor fireplace.

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Deep in Olympic National Park lies one of the least noise-polluted places in the United States, maybe the world. The distant drone of the Hoh River fills the valley, as the piercing song of Swainson's thrush bounces around 800-year-old Sitka spruce trees, a cathedral-like reverberation. It is home to One Square Inch of Silence, a research project started by nature sound recordist Gordon Hempton to protect and preserve the rare ecosystem from noise pollution. I took Atlas Obscura to this magical place in 2018 for a collaboration with NPR's All Things Considered. The Hoh Rainforest remains a special, transformative place in part because of the way it forces you to listen, really listen, to the world around. And it highlights some of what we are all experiencing today. The sonic landscape has changed. Even in the biggest, most densely populated cities, amid the uncertainty and suffering of the pandemic, people are beginning to hear something entirely new.

I am a nature sound recordist. Yes, that is a job. I seek out and record sounds that get used in movies, television, video games, and apps. I capture the sounds of factories, mines, farms, and cities around the world, but I specialize in trying to document the pristine, sans-human world. Recording the uninterrupted sounds of nature in our industrialized world is difficult, if not nearly impossible. All you have to do is look at a map of air-traffic patterns to grasp how few places in the world are truly quiet-even in Olympic National Park, a plane flies overhead every 15 to 20 minutes during peak traffic. It's amazing how much we've just grown accustomed to the noise. I work to protect the few remaining "quiet" places through a nonprofit called Quiet Parks International.

Like many people around the world, my professional life has been upended by COVID-19. Each day we see news of the rising death toll, economic turmoil, and social isolation-the new constants of our lives. But there are also moments of connection and grace: people smiling and waving from across the street, check ins with neighbors we may not have spoken to before, expressions of support for healthcare workers, first responders, and other essential workers. It seems like there's nothing that hasn't been affected by this crisis, including the way the entire world sounds. It is, in a word, quiet.

Passenger air traffic has declined dramatically, streets are almost empty, and most people are staying home. I live just south of Yellowstone National Park, where the population density is just six people per square mile. Even in this normally quiet place, I've noticed an incredible change in my sonic surroundings. On a hike I took last week, I heard two planes in three hours, compared with one every 10 minutes or so under normal circumstances.

In thinking about this change of sound, I reached out via social media to some of my sound recording colleagues around the world to ask them to share with me how their soundscapes have changed. The results are truly astounding. We've all seen the pictures of bustling metropolises, newly empty, but the sound of them is more elusive. Large cities and their iconic points of interest are so void of people that we're hearing them in new ways for the first time, and probably for the last time. I received more than 50 submissions from all over the world, and these are just a few of the soundscapes that stuck out to me. I hope you enjoy this unique experience-use your headphones for the greatest effect. While I'm fascinated by this new quiet that has swept the globe, I'm looking forward to the time when quiet is again hard to find. Stay safe and be well.

Covent Garden, London

Will Cohen

Usually packed with antiques and craft stalls, buzzing with people on holiday looking for something to remember from their trip, the Apple Market is at the center of this iconic shopping, food, and cultural destination. Now it is uncommonly, almost unbelievably, still.

Times Square, New York

Geoff Gersh

Times Square is always full of activity-day and night. Street performers, food vendors, tourists, locals rushing to and from work, automobile traffic. There's always a cacophonous drone emanating from the epicenter of New York City. The lack of those sounds brings to the forefront the many mechanical sounds generated by the buildings in the area.

Grand Central Station, New York

Geoff Gersh

Grand Central rarely is not buzzing. As a major transportation hub in New York City, there is always the sound of commuters arriving or waiting for departing trains, announcements, people transferring from one train line to another, tourists gawking at the grandness of the station, and shoppers wandering through. Now all that's left is an echoing din and announcements reminding us to cover our mouths and keep our distance from others.

Near Subhash Chandra Bose Airport, Kolkata

Dibakar Saha

This ambient sound was recorded from my home near the Kolkata International Airport, in the Indian state of West Bengal. Generally there is a lot air traffic, but now that is gone, along with the traffic and sounds of concentrated human activity-even at 4 p.m.

LAX Airport, Los Angeles

Gerardo González

This recording was taken at LAX airport during morning rush hour. Cars passed by strangely fast, construction crews continued to work, and the few remaining TSA agents were busy with their phones. For the hour I was there recording, nobody asked me to move my car. The vibe was creepy. There was almost no one else there, save a single traveler with a roller bag and someone collecting bottles and cans.
You can join the conversation about this and other stories in the Atlas Obscura Community Forums.

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Hear the Soundscapes of Cities Transformed

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Deep in Olympic National Park lies one of the least noise-polluted places in the United States, maybe the world. The distant drone of the Hoh River fills the valley, as the piercing song of Swainson's thrush bounces around 800-year-old Sitka spruce trees, a cathedral-like reverberation.

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published on

Position: 55°41'13.3"N 12°33'45.7"E Dato: 13.04.2020 Tidsrum: 16:15:00-16:17:01 Binaural optagelse, lyt i hovedtelefoner. www.lyttilkbh.dk

Genre

Field Recording

License: all-rights-reserved

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
published on Position: 55°41'13.3"N 12°33'45.7"E Dato: 13.04.2020 Tidsrum: 16:15:00-16:17:01 Binaural optagelse, lyt i hovedtelefoner. www.lyttilkbh.dk Genre Field Recording License: all-rights-reserved

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https://www.facebook.com/vocallinedk/videos/674868780009848/

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https://www.berlingske.dk/videnskab/jordskaelvsforskere-forbloeffes-sygdommen-har-gjort-kloden-stille

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Journal of Sonic Studies, Leiden, Netherlands. 5.3K likes. www.sonicstudies.org - JSS is an online, open access journal devoted to Sonic Studies and Acoustic Culture

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For at skabe glæde i en ellers svær tid, vil forskellige musikere i den nærmeste tid give koncerter foran vinduerne på de århusianske plejehjem.

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For at skabe glæde i en ellers svær tid, vil forskellige musikere i den nærmeste tid give koncerter foran vinduerne på de århusianske plejehjem.

AARHUS: For flere plejehjemsbeboere er det i særdeleshed en hård tid lige nu. De er afskåret fra normalbesøg og kontakt med familiemedlemmer for at mindske risikoen for coronavirus.

Derfor er flere musikalske kræfter i Aarhus gået sammen om at give plejehjemsbeboerne en god oplevelse. De vil nemlig spille vindueskoncerter uden for plejehjemmene i Aarhus.

Bag projektet står Aarhus Musikskole, Foreningen Samværd, Aarhus Jazz Orchestra og Aarhus Symfoniorkester og de får hjælp af kunstnere, bands og hjemsendte musikere.

Det glæder Jette Skive (DF), der er rådmand i Sundhed og Omsorg.

- Det er en svær tid for mange borgere og særligt plejehjemsbeboere, der er afskærmet fra deres nærmeste familie og venner. Samtidig kommer vores oplevelsesmedarbejdere og mange frivillige heller ikke længere på plejehjemmene. Derfor er det utrolig dejligt, byens musikanter og foreninger vil tage forbi plejehjemmene og optræde uden for med sang og musik, siger hun i en pressemeddelelse.

Vindueskoncerter

I samarbejde med de enkelte plejehjem i Aarhus bliver der aftalt et tidspunkt for koncerterne

Tilmelding for interesserede musikere til Mathilde Tougaard Hansen, konsulent, Sundhed og Omsorgm, tlf. 41864620, hmato@aarhus.dk

Quiz og kaffe i haven

Koncerterne bliver et supplement til, at plejehjemmene gør meget for, at beboerne har en aktiv og god hverdag.

- Mange plejehjem har en aktivitetsmedarbejder, som kan gå en tur på plejehjemmets område, lave en quiz i haven eller drikke en kop kaffe og snakke om verdenssituationen, fortæller Jette Skive.

Aktivitetsmedarbejderne er i denne tid også trukket udenfor med både sang, musik og andre kreative påfund, som kan skabe glæde, uden at der er personlig kontakt.

Foreningen Samværd, som arrangerer legestuer på plejehjemmene, er også afskåret fra at tage på besøg i øjeblikket. Derfor har de valgt at aktivere deres netværk af musikere, som normalt er værter ved legestuerne, som i stedet vil spille uden for plejehjemmene.

Musikerne vil optræde maksimalt op til tre personer. Koncerterne kan have forskellig længde, men vil typisk vare omkring 20 minutter.

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For at skabe glæde i en ellers svær tid, vil forskellige musikere i den nærmeste tid give koncerter foran vinduerne på de århusianske plejehjem. AARHUS: For flere plejehjemsbeboere er det i særdeleshed en hård tid lige nu. De er afskåret fra normalbesøg og kontakt med familiemedlemmer for at mindske risikoen for coronavirus.

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Gaderne i landets næststørste by var i hvert fald ualmindeligt tomme i tidsrummet mellem klokken 8 og klokken 12, da man sendte en drone i luften for at filme flere af byens normalt mest befærdede områder.

På et pressemøde mandag valgte regeringen at fastholde forbuddet mod at samles mere end ti personer samt en række andre tiltag for at forhindre smitte med coronavirus frem til den 13. april.

En stor del af Aarhus Kommunes 350.000 indbyggere er unge mennesker. En gruppe, der har fået en løftet pegefinger fra landets statsminister:

- Det kan godt være, at du er ung og rask, men du kan bære smitten videre til andre mennesker, uden at du ved det - også en, der ikke kan klare at blive smittet, lød det på et pressemøde forrige uge.

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Se videoen: Coronavirus lagde gaderne i Aarhus øde

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Gaderne i landets næststørste by var i hvert fald ualmindeligt tomme i tidsrummet mellem klokken 8 og klokken 12, da man sendte en drone i luften for at filme flere af byens normalt mest befærdede områder.

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Mere fællessang

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Når kram og fysisk samvær med hinanden er bandlyst, kan netop den slags arrangementer gøre en stor forskel. Det viser forskning, forklarer Stine Isaksen, der er formidler på Videncenter for Sang i Herning.

- Når vi synger, frigør vi endorfiner i kroppen, som gør, at vi kan blive i bedre humør.

Det at synge sammen med andre frigør også et andet hormon, der hedder oxytocin, forklarer hun.

- Det er et hormon, der ellers bliver frigivet, når man kysser og krammer hinanden. Men det har vi ikke så meget mulighed for i dag. Så kan sangen blive en vej til et fællesskab, som vi har behov for som mennesker, siger hun.

Som i krigens tid

Stine Isaksen sammenligner fællessang fra vinduet med alsang under besættelsen.

Dengang blev store omvæltninger også bearbejdet med fællessang.

- Det var en måde, man kunne håndtere chokket på og i fællesskab finde en ny mening og på én eller anden måde bearbejde chokket med, siger hun.

På Lundø går valget af sang på skift mellem halvøboerne: for eksempel en fødselsdagssang i aftenmørket til én af naboerne eller klassikere fra højskolesangbogen som 'Kringsat af fjender' og 'Det er i dag et vejr'.

- På den måde får folk lov til at vise, hvad hjertet er fuldt af, forklarer Hanne Juel.
Tidligere på ugen var der fællessang på Trøjborg i Aarhus. Hør her, hvordan det gik for sig:

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'Vi har brug for at mærke hinanden': Fællessang udløser krammehormon

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Når kram og fysisk samvær med hinanden er bandlyst, kan netop den slags arrangementer gøre en stor forskel. Det viser forskning, forklarer Stine Isaksen, der er formidler på Videncenter for Sang i Herning. - Når vi synger, frigør vi endorfiner i kroppen, som gør, at vi kan blive i bedre humør.

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Da klokken slog 17.15 bryder christianshavnerne fra altaner og vinduer ud i sang. Det har de gjort siden mandag for at skabe sammenhold i en adskilt tid.

Og fra fredag eftermiddag blev det en smule nemmere at finde takt og tone, da 'Den blå anemone' fra Højskolesangbogen gav genlyd i de øde gader.

Klokkenist Lars Sømod fra Vor Frelsers Kirke akkompagnerede fællessangen med skønspil fra kirkens tårn.

Det er sket på opfordring fra de lokale borgere, siger Lars Sømod til TV 2 Lorry.

- Jeg skulle lige overveje, om jeg måtte, for jeg er jo offentligt ansat i kirken og sendt hjem. Men det her er jo ikke arbejde, det er en god gerning, siger Lars Sømod.
Hør dagens klokkespil herunder - artiklen fortsætter efter videoen.
Åben for forslag

Han fik hurtigt organiseret det fælles projektet med blandt andre medlemmerne af Facebook-gruppen 'Os Fra Christianshavn' og deltagerne i begivenheden 'Christianshavn synger sammen hver for sig'.

De har foreløbig fundet sange fra Højskolesangbogen frem til torsdag den 27. mars. Herefter er Lars Sømod åben for nye forslag.

- Jeg har fået meget positiv respons på initiativet indtil videre, siger Lars Sømod.
Artiklen fortsætter efter faktaboksen...
Det kan du synge med på
Kilde: Lars Sømod
Har spillet Kim Larsen

Det er ikke første gang, at der kan høres alternativ klokkeklang fra toppen af Vor Frelsers Kirke. Tidligere har Lars Sømod således spillet titelmelodien til Game of Thrones, da det sidste afsnit gik i luften i maj 2019.

Mange vil sikkert også huske, at det var Vor Frelsers Kirke, der spillede forskellige Kim Larsen-hit allerede få timer efter hans død tilbage i oktober 2018.

- Den her kirke afspejler helt naturligt lokalmiljøet og den bredde, der er her. Det er en kirke, som alle i området er meget stolte af. Vi har en lang tradition for udadvendthed og klokkespil, siger Lars Sømod.
Artiklen fortsætter efter videoerne...
01:24

Da da, dada da da, dada da da!

00:47

Papirsklip.

Oprindeligt var det lokale borgere, der tilbage i 1920'erne betalte for klokkespillet i Vor Frelsers Kirke. Det er blevet brugt til adskillige lejligheder, og Lars Sømod sætter sig således også til stok-klaveret øverst i tårnet hvert år ved translokationen på Christianshavn Gymnasium.

Mange kan høre det

Lars Sømod spiller på kirketårnets klokke ved at slå med knytnæverne til lange kosteskaftslignende stave, der er forbundet til klokkerne. Han kan også bruge fødderne, så der i alt kan spilles på fire klokker. Lars Sømod råder over fire oktaver på 48 klokker.

Han vurderer, at mange borgere har mulighed for at synge med til tonerne af det 12 tons tunge klokkespillet.

- Det sider meget højt - i 60 til 65 meters højde - og når meget langt ud. Man aner ikke, om det fungerer, når man sidder deroppe. Men jeg skal nok få respons, hvis ikke det går godt, siger Lars Sømod.
Hvis du vil deltage, men ikke har en højskolesangbog kan du få dagens tekst sendt på mail ved at skrive til klokkenistlars@gmail.com.

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Her er der fællessang fra altaner og vinduer til tonerne af klokkespil i kirketårn

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Da klokken slog 17.15 bryder christianshavnerne fra altaner og vinduer ud i sang. Det har de gjort siden mandag for at skabe sammenhold i en adskilt tid. Og fra fredag eftermiddag blev det en smule nemmere at finde takt og tone, da 'Den blå anemone' fra Højskolesangbogen gav genlyd i de øde gader.

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Der lyder en infernalsk larm i Rio de Janeiros gader. Tusindvis af brasilianere er gået på altanerne bevæbnet med potter og pander, og med dem protesterer de højlydt mod landets præsident, Jair Bolsonaro.

Brasilianerne føler ikke, at landets præsident tager den verdensomspændende corona-pandemi alvorligt nok.

Bolsonaro blev verdenskendt, da han som præsident blev testet positiv for corona, få dage efter at han havde trykket hånd med USA's præsident, Donald Trump. Trump er siden blevet testet negativ.

Præsident Bolsonaro har efterfølgende talt om et 'vis hysteri' i forbindelse med coronaudbruddet - og så sent som i søndags trykkede præsidenten igen hånd - denne gang med flere tilhængere, mens han stadig ventede på sin efterfølgende test.

Bolsonaro har desuden antydet, at 'corona-hysteriet' er skabt af Kina for at svække konkurrerende nationers økonomi. Ligesom han har udfordret sit eget sundhedsministeriums anbefalinger i forbindelse med krisen.

Der er i skrivende stund 529 bekræftede smittetilfælde i Brasilien - og fire dødsfald direkte relateret til corona.

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Brasilianere i corona-protest med potter og pander

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Der lyder en infernalsk larm i Rio de Janeiros gader. Tusindvis af brasilianere er gået på altanerne bevæbnet med potter og pander, og med dem protesterer de højlydt mod landets præsident, Jair Bolsonaro. Brasilianerne føler ikke, at landets præsident tager den verdensomspændende corona-pandemi alvorligt nok.

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Fællessang

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- Der var et par, der gik forbi, og nogen hilste gennem vinduet. Men ellers kan jeg ikke se folk. Men jeg ved, at folk synger rundt omkring!

Sådan fortæller Line Hassall Thomsen, efter hun fredag morgen klokken 9.05 stod på sin altan og sammen med sin ti-årige søn Viktor sang ud i den aarhusianske morgen.

Helt alene var Line og Viktor dog ikke. Sangene blev nemlig samtidig spillet i programmet 'Morgensang med Phillip Faber' på radiokanalen P2 og på DR1, hvor den daglige morgensang de seneste dage har samlet langt over 100.000 danskere til sang på slaget 9.05.

Fredag var programmet udvidet fra to til fire sange på grund af projektet 'Danmark synger'.
Se DR PigeKorets sammenklip af danskere, der synger fredag morgen - læs mere og se alle sangene nedenfor.
For bare en uge siden eksisterede det projekt ikke. Men efter at Danmark lukkede ned sidste uge på grund af coronakrisen, fik udviklingschef Heidi Kudahl fra Sangens Hus det op at stå på få dage.

På ingen tid skaffede hun opbakning fra 38 danske organisationer: Fra spejderne, højskolerne og Lungeforeningen til DR og Det Kongelige Teater:

- Jeg skrev en ganske kort mail til nogle af dem, jeg kender godt i forvejen. Det var lørdag morgen, og så var jeg ude i haven for at rive blade sammen. Så sagde det bare: "ding-ding-ding" i min lomme med folk, der svarede tilbage, fortæller Heidi Kudahl.

Hun arbejder til daglig med alle former for sang - og er derfor heller ikke i tvivl om, hvor vigtigt fællessang kan være i den svære tid.

- Vi trænger alle sammen til et virtuelt gruppekram lige nu, siger hun.

Herunder kan du se eller gense de fire sange fra fredagens morgensang med Phillip Faber, der til daglig er chefdirigent for DR PigeKoret.

Du skal ikke være bange for at åbne næbbet og synge med - det er der mindst 100.000 danskere, der allerede har gjort.

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100.000 danskere i fællessang: 'Vi trænger alle sammen til et virtuelt gruppekram'

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Der var et par, der gik forbi, og nogen hilste gennem vinduet. Men ellers kan jeg ikke se folk. Men jeg ved, at folk synger rundt omkring! Sådan fortæller Line Hassall Thomsen, efter hun fredag morgen klokken 9.05 stod på sin altan og sammen med sin ti-årige søn Viktor sang ud i den aarhusianske morgen.

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Paris klapper af læger og sundhedspersonale hver aften

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Det er på meget kort tid blevet et fast lille ritual.

Rundt omkring i landet følger franskmændene med, når sundhedsmyndighederne leverer seneste nyt om den alvorlige situation med coronavirus, der lige nu lammer lande i hele verden; hvor mange smittetilfælde er der i Frankrig, hvor mange er indlagt, hvor kritisk er det og desværre også, hvor mange der er døde af Covid-19.

Et tal, der er stigende for hver dag, der går, og som kræver enorme ressourcer af landets hospitalsvæsen.

Og måske netop derfor - umiddelbart efter opdateringen - går franskmænd over hele landet ud på balkoner og altaner eller stikker hovedet ud af vinduet for at klappe, huje og hylde landets sundhedspersonale.

Landets præsident, Emmanuel Macron, hyldede også hospitalspersonalet i sin tale i forrige uge, hvor han takkede "heltene i de hvide trøjer", der kæmper mod pandemien.

De seneste dage har det spredt sig over hele landet, og hver aften omkring klokken 20 lyder der altså en hyldest til de mange ansatte i sundhedsvæsenet. Ifølge de seneste tal er der 12.612 smittetilfælde, mens 450 har mistet livet til Covid-19.

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Paris fyldes af klapsalver hver aften: Hylder 'heltene i de hvide trøjer'

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Det er på meget kort tid blevet et fast lille ritual. Rundt omkring i landet følger franskmændene med, når sundhedsmyndighederne leverer seneste nyt om den alvorlige situation med coronavirus, der lige nu lammer lande i hele verden; hvor mange smittetilfælde er der i Frankrig, hvor mange er indlagt, hvor kritisk er det og desværre også, hvor mange der er døde af Covid-19.