Monday is Murray Schafer’s 78th birthday.  It’s also World Listening Day. Here’s a 5-minute film profile of Murray from the good ol’ National Film Board of Canada:

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Irv Teibel passed away on Oct. 28 in Austin, TX. He was 72, and died of cancer that was diagnosed only a couple weeks before his death.  Irv first opened my ears to our living soundscapes in around 1972, when as a teenager I purchased two of his Environments LPs. He released this series under [...]

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David Abram, whose widely acclaimed first book, The Spell of the Sensuous, addressed the mixed legacy of the written word in our culture, has released a new one, Becoming Animal, which draws on another decade of deep experience with the human and more-than-human world.  While the first book was his Ph.D. project, and veered deeply [...]

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The American Society for Acoustic Ecology is pleased to announce ASAE Chicago: Listening for the Future. This is the first-ever national gathering of the ASAE membership and the general public. Hosted by the Midwest Society for Acoustic Ecology and the World Listening Project, Listening for the Future will take place from July 9-11, 2010. We [...]

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Laurie Anderson just keeps on amazing:  she’s written a 20-minute piece for dogs, to be performed outside the Sydney Opera House this week as part of a music festival she’s curating with long-time partner Lou Reed.  It’s billed as “an interspecies social gathering,” and will be largely inaudible to humans who accompany the audience to [...]

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Paul Spong and Helena Symonds are legends in the field of whale research; since the early 1970’s they’ve dedicated themselves to studying orcas from their independent lab on an island between Vancouver Island and the mainland.  Over those many years, they’ve accumulated 20,000 hours of tapes, which are now being digitized and cleaned up (to [...]

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Thanks to EarthEar’s Facebook community, I was just clued into the Cooroora Institute, a wonderful initiative out of Australia, centered on improvised and ceremonial engagement with the natural world, in all art media.  Check out their website (linked above) and their various writings; I highly recommend Tamsin Kerr’s Listen Like a River.  Here’s a taste: “Yet, humans [...]

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Check out Ear Room, which does one thing very well: talk at length with sound artists about their work.  The most recent post features Eric Leonardon, with Andrea Polli and Loren Chasse among previous artists featured.  Francisco Lopez and many others are yet to come….

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Lisa Walker, one of the artists that EarthEar has worked with for years, has begun blogging at her site, Grooved Whale.  She’s mostly posting short reflections on her explorations of music, and how music may link or differentiate species, often with questions to spur us to reflect ourselves on these themes.  A very enjoyable new online [...]

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This past summer I had the pleasure of traveling to New Caledonia (an island nation northeast of Australia, between New Zealand and New Guinea), where I was part of a team that was developing a methodology and protocol for remote acoustic sensing to help monitor populations of the Kagu, a ground-nesting bird, and eventually other [...]

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