Nicolas Collins (ed.): A Call for Silence (2004)

As in the old Roue’s quip that “a drink before and a cigarette after are three best things in life,” sometimes the most important moments of our lives lie in an unspoken ellipse. The same is true of some of our most beautiful sounds. On this CD 34 artists provide personal views into that sonic ellipse, suggestions for listening to that which might otherwise pass you by: count-offs, groove grit, tape hiss, breaths, rests, CD glitch, guitar hum, audience anticipation, reverb tails, room tones, minutes of silence, the calm before a storm.

Publisher Sonic Art Network, London, 2004
28 pages

PDF
PDF (compressed version; for the sake of scanning)
Listen (34 tracks)

John M. Picker: Victorian Soundscapes (2003)

“Far from the hushed restraint we associate with the Victorians, their world pulsated with sound. This book shows how, in more ways than one, Victorians were hearing things. The representations close listeners left of their soundscapes offered new meanings for silence, music, noise, voice, and echo that constitute an important part of the Victorian legacy to us today. In chronicling the shift from Romantic to modern configurations of sound and voice, Picker draws upon literary and scientific works to recapture the sense of aural discovery figures such as Babbage, Helmholtz, Freud, Bell, and Edison shared with the likes of Dickens, George Eliot, Tennyson, Stoker, and Conrad.”

Publisher Oxford University Press, 2003
ISBN 0195151917, 9780195151916
220 pages

Publisher

PDF, PDF (updated on 2017-3-2)

Thomas Hermann, Andy Hunt, John G. Neuhoff (eds.): The Sonification Handbook (2011)

This book is a comprehensive introductory presentation of the key research areas in the interdisciplinary fields of sonification and auditory display. Chapters are written by leading experts, providing a wide-ranging coverage of the central issues, and can be read from start to finish, or dipped into as required (like a smorgasbord menu).

Sonification conveys information by using non-speech sounds. To listen to data as sound and noise can be a surprising new experience with diverse applications ranging from novel interfaces for visually impaired people to data analysis problems in many scientific fields.

This book gives a solid introduction to the field of auditory display, the techniques for sonification, suitable technologies for developing sonification algorithms, and the most promising application areas. The book is accompanied by an online repository of sound examples.

Publisher Logos Publishing House, Berlin, 2011
OpenAccess book
ISBN 9783832528195
586 pages
via xgz

publisher

PDF (single PDF)
PDF (PDF articles, with audio samples)