of smell and screams

“I wonder how your nose will sound?” said László Maholy-Nagy and instantly intrigued me. There are not so many circumstances in which the olfactory and auditory senses have the chance to work in unison as in the case of fear. The intersection of fear, smell and sound produces a language that has only itineratively been conceptualised, [...]

echoing off the surface, or, a superficial look at echolocation (or one week’s Twitter feed)

[It] roars/barks/croaks/grunts/squeaks/bleats/lows/crows/trumpets/neighs. This barrage of options appears on a German site aiming to teach (putatively) teenagers how to imitate animal (mostly mammalian, some bird and amphibian) sounds in English. Choose your option, then press “CHECK”. My favourite option, though, is “???”. Animals have a fascinatingly sensible attitude to sound. As far as I know, they [...]

going off to war: scouring google for sonic equipment

The term “sonic warfare” is rather more likely to hit a log of various dubstep events than a good article on how such a war would “sound like” in a pedestrian Google search. Looking for sonic weapons on the interwebs I came in contact with a range of speculation and esoterica; here’s one evening’s search [...]