News January 2007

THE AUSTRALIAN SOUND DESIGN PROJECT: UPDATE

The Australian Sound Design Project continues to lead the University of Melbourne in pioneering sound research and making it audible online. The site has been showcased and exhibited as one of the University’s most innovative projects in annual design innovation fests. It has appeared in publications as an example of innovative sound research.

During 2006 the website has grown to include 147 works in its online digital gallery, with 98,478 hits on the site during the year. Most activity was from Australia followed by the Netherlands, Japan, France and the USA Educational. The faculty of Arts awarded Dr Ros Bandt the excellence for research Award for 2006 which featured this innovative digital publishing along with her other books, writings and original sounding artworks.

City of Melbourne Collaboration and Commission | <top>

The Australian Sound Design has completed a major new commission for the Melbourne City Council publishing seventeen new sound works that fall under their custodianship. These include a) newly commissioned public sound works b) works from the Council’s collection and c) works in the Melbourne CBD. The online publication will encourage sound to be recognised as an important part of cultural heritage. Iain Mott and Ros Bandt documented the works on site and liaised with the artists to publish the works in image, sound video and text. Iain Mott developed an interactive map as a portal to these works. You can see the works in site on a map of the City of Melbourne and zoom in to the detailed documentation directly for each work.

Browse works on map of Melbourne.

Research and Development of the Site | <top>

In 2006 the site has been recommended for inclusion in the National Research Network for Data Sustainability. At the University of Melbourne, Gavan McCarthy—director of Austehc and the team who invented the OHRM data archival methodology—is now using the ASDP site data to trial innovative aspects of the newest upgrade of the OHRM. The site is currently being reconfigured in OHRM 5 sponsored by Austehc.

In 2004-5 the National Library mined the site data for its lasting value through its Music Australia project, contributing $6000 to have the information transposed into a meta-data compatible format with the National Library system.

Scholarly Interpretation | <top>

Since its inception, the site has been the subject of scholarly interpretation in international journals such as Contemporary Music Review (2006) and

Organised Sound (2005), keynote speeches (ICAD, AG Ideas), conference papers (IRCAM, WFAE, SIMS, ASCA) and included in new international writings on Australian sound (Richards 2007). These can all be accessed in the bibliography (Bandt 2001-2007).

International Interdisciplinary Sound Research | <top>

Since the formation of the ASDP website, launched in 2001, it has been pleasing to see the increase in sound-focused research and discourse, sound conferences and new publications and readers. Last year’s seminal conference in Amsterdam Sonic Interventions: pushing the boundaries of cultural analysis, took up the mantle of sound within four broad cultural and theoretical themes of 1) Sound and the Moving Image & Sound Technologies and Cultural Change 2) The Sonic in the ‘Silent’ Arts and Bring the Noise 3) Silence/Orality 4) Soundscapes: Sound, Space and the Body and Sound Practices and Events. See www.turbulence.org/blog/archives/000909.html.

The yearly ICAD (International Community for Auditory Display) conferences have raised public awareness of applications of sound data and the many ways auditory information can be displayed. The links between Architecture Music and A, acoustics was taken up by the Toronto Sound Axis Conference, and the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology took place in Hirosaki in Japan in November. In Australia the Liquid Architecture Sound Conference took place in three states simultaneously with concerts and forums. Cross cultural Regimes of the Senses at UTS and the Senses of Place conference in the University of Tasmania, both situated Sound in the broader arena. Both are planning interdisciplinary publications including sound.

Written Publications | <top>

Many other exciting local events are profiling sound. Barry Truax in a recent review of the new anthology The Auditory Reader (Berg, 2003), points to the importance of interdisciplinary sound research and that it is heartening to see sound research becoming important in geography and the social sciences. Building on the Hearing Place double exhibition and audiotheque opened by Murray Schafer in Melbourne at the last WFAE conference, a new book is in progress for Cambridge Scholars Press. Hearing Places, an anthology of interdisciplinary writings with audio CD, includes 35 international responses by theorists and artists about how we hear and respond to place. It expands the current Eurocentric studies to date by including works from many cultures including Brazil, China, Japan, Vietnam, Timor, Chile and Australia. It will be available in 2007. Hearing Places is edited by an interdisciplinary team: Bandt (musicology and sound art), Duffy (sonic geographer) and McKinnon (historian).