House Music

[Image: "Pass the Mic" by Sean Galbraith].

The company Airborne Sound has a near-infinite website on which you can listen to royalty-free sound effects for everyday scenarios like dishwashers, traffic noise, office ambiance, overhead helicopters, vacuum cleaners, elevator shafts, construction sites, and more.

The extreme specificity with which many of these sounds are cataloged—"Small metal military tin, empty, closing concisely," for instance, versus "Small metal military tin, empty, closing quickly and smartly," or even the encyclopedic varieties of sounds created by someone eating ice—often outdoes Borges.

"Magazine dropping and picking up from a table in a series in an indifferent manner." "Rain in the city nasal and heavy and constant with some thunder." "Room tone in a New York apartment on the tenth floor with window open and helicopters departing and traffic and AC." "Room tone in a large machine shop with fluorescent buzz and pipe hiss in a loop." "Construction site with junk sliding down a chute"—in case you like the sound of sliding your junk down a chute. "A homeless guy digs in a garbage bin with rain"—which apparently consists of "Alley, Rain, Homeless Guy." There are even hospital sounds: "Room tone in a radiology clinic with nurses and x-rays." "Crowd in New York City at Bellevue hospital lobby passing with voices."

But my original purpose in mentioning this was for the company's domestic sound effects, filed under Household. Why have a housemate when you can simply listen to endless loops of air-conditioning units, refrigerator hum, distant TV voices, pet sounds, keyboard clacking, footsteps over hardwood floors, and more? The specially curated Household Collection has it all (almost), including someone "handling a wallet," "peeling a rubber glove off," and "opening a bedroom door." There's also Household Collection 2.

Perhaps this could even offer a glimpse of some emerging new form of spatio-acoustic therapy: prescription sound effects for people dealing with loss or depression.

Or download the Kitchen Collection, including its own part 2, and make it sound like someone is cooking dinner in the background as you read a novel, home alone on a Saturday night, disappearing into a world of sonically reinforced self-isolation.

You can soundtrack your next dinner party with the sounds of another dinner party. You can work out to the sound of farm animals, cruise the streets of Los Angeles listening to someone clipping their toe nails, fall asleep to the relaxing tones of "flesh moves."

Find more at Airborne Sound (including an Airports and Train Stations pack and one exclusively for Subways and Els).

Advanced Style Videos

Thanks to everyone who helped make our Advanced Style/NOWNESS video a huge success. My goal is to inspire people to look at aging in a new light. I hope these videos help people get over their fears of getting older, and embrace the wisdom and strength that comes with age. Lina Plioplyte and I plan to make a grand documentary about age and style.Here are is some more great footage from Lina and me. I hope you enjoy and feel free to email me with your feedback to Advancedstyleinfo@gmail.com or find me on Twitter AriSethCohen .

Advanced Style: Tziporah Salamon from teenage peanut video productions on Vimeo.

Advanced Style presents: Maryann from teenage peanut video productions on Vimeo.

Advanced Style: Debra goes thrifting! from teenage peanut video productions on Vimeo.

Advanced Style Presents: Malcah Zeldis from teenage peanut video productions on Vimeo.

Advanced Style Presents: Ilona Royce Smithkin from teenage peanut video productions on Vimeo.

Here is some of my Flip Camera footage of some of our favorite Advanced Style Fashionistas.

The Idiosyncratic Fashionistas

Jenny

Iris Apfel

Alice Carey

Debra Rapoport and Ari Seth Cohen

Looking Great At 80

Victoria MacKenzie-Childs

Mary

Jackie Tajah Murdock

"I Love Style, I Love Style, Can't Live Without It"

I loved this spirited woman's response to my question on style, "I love style, I love style, can't live without it. Even when I'm sleeping I must have it." I met her and her,"sweetheart" on the Upper East Side after admiring their matching green hats.They gave me some invaluable advice about fashion and style.Her fashion advice, "Be aware, have a good sixth sense" His advice, "Don't be a Sucker".

CHECK OUT THIS MUST SEE VIDEO

The Cloud Tent

[Images: "Artificial clouds" designed at Qatar University under the direction of Saud Abdul Ghani; images from a video hosted by the BBC].

"Artificial clouds" driven by solar-powered engines might be deployed at the 2022 World Cup in Qatar to help keep the stadiums from overheating. Each cloud, as a short video hosted over at the BBC explains, "is constructed from an advanced, lightweight, and strong carbon-fiber material."

The interior of the cloud is injected with helium gas to make it float. The cloud hovers like a helicopter and is remotely controlled. In this way, the cloud hovers over the football ground, shielding it from direct sunlight and providing a favorable climatic environment. The cloud is also programmed to continuously change its shielding position according to the prevailing east-to-west path of the sun.

So much for roofs, then, if you can simply deploy artificial meteorological events in the form of robotic clouds at an estimated cost of $500,000 each...

[Images: "Artificial clouds" designed at Qatar University under the direction of Saud Abdul Ghani; images from a video hosted by the BBC].

After all, I suppose it makes sense that the next step in temporary event architecture will be a remote-controlled swarm of rearrangeable horizontal and vertical surfaces, forming ceilings, roofs, walls, floors, ramps, and stairways.

However, justifiable skepticism aside, there is something fantastically interesting in the suggestion that a regional architecture, whose formal and technical history includes several centuries' worth of portable tent design, would—and I exaggerate—leapfrog past the idea of stationary, permanent construction altogether and instead go for something like an on-demand spatial robotics, such as the "artificial clouds" seen here.

Are instantly deployable, remote-controlled sun shielding surfaces—unmanned aerial architecture, perhaps—a kind of unexpected next step in the evolution of tent design? Nomad caravans wander through the desert with strange, helium-filled wireless air pillows whirring quietly overhead. Perhaps they could even be Wifi hotspots. The ErgNet.

(Thanks to a tip from Wired's @rawfileblog. Earlier: Spatial Gameplay in Full-Court 3D).

Soundscape Ecology, or: An Archive Fever of the Ear

[Image: Photo courtesy of the Purdue College of Agriculture/Tom Campbell, via ScienceDaily].

Bryan Pijanowski of Purdue University is hoping to start a new research discipline that he calls soundscape ecology; it will "use sound as a way to understand the ecological characteristics of a landscape," as ScienceDaily reports.

Sound, Pijanowski suggests, is a kind of ecological indicator: an audible symptom of other, sometimes literally invisible changes in a living network or ecosystem. Sound, for instance, can "be used to detect early changes in climate, weather patterns, the presence of pollution or other alterations to a landscape." As Pijanowski explains one example of this approach, "The dawn and dusk choruses of birds are very characteristic of a location. If the intensity or patterns of these choruses change, there is likely something causing that change. Ecologists have ignored how sound that emanates from an area can help determine what's happening to the ecosystem."

So far, unfortunately, it seems that a great flattening of the acoustic field has been the primary discovery: "One of the most significant findings was that as human impact in the landscape increases, the natural rhythms of sound created by the diverse wildlife population are replaced by low and constant human-produced noise." The great machine-drone of human life fills forests once ringing with birdsong.

Of course, this is at once slightly redundant—there is already acoustic ecology, for instance—and fantastically cool, throwing the door wide-open for future acoustic research (and institutional funding).

[Image: Sound artist Stephen Vitiello makes a field recording; photo by Turbulence].

However, one point of immediate limitation, I'd suggest, comes with Pijanowski's apparent focus on sounds produced by animals. Indeed, I'm reminded of an old essay by Francisco López, called "Environmental Sound Matter," from La Selva: Sound Environments From A Neotropical Rain Forest.

There, López seeks to remind listeners that "there is also a type of sound-producing biotic component, present in almost every environment, that is usually overlooked: plants." He then makes one of my favorite sonic observations of all time, which is that "what we call the sound of rain or wind we could better call the sound of plant leaves and branches." Quoting at length:

If our perspective of nature sounds were more focused on the environment as a whole, instead of on behavioral manifestations of the organisms we foresee as most similar to us, we could also deal with plant bioacoustics. Furthermore, a sound environment is not only the consequence of all its sound-producing components, but also of all its sound-transmitting and sound-modifying elements. The birdsong we hear in the forest is as much a consequence of the bird as of the trees or the forest floor. If we are really listening, the topography, the degree of humidity of the air or the type of materials in the topsoil are as essential and definitory as the sound-producing animals that inhabit a certain space.

So, add the sounds of plants, molds, and root networks, of soil itself and groundwater, of shifts in air pressure and humidity and even the underlying deep geologic structures that support all that living terrain in the first place, and an intensely interesting sonic portrait of terrestrial ecosystems takes shape, mutating through complex blurs and inflection points over time, its parts weaving in and out symphonically.

Again, this is functionally identical to acoustic ecology—with equal parts acoustic geology thrown in, perhaps—but it will nonetheless be interesting to see if a slight change of name (and some news buzz) results in more opportunities for funding and research.

[Image: Students from Field Studies 2010 (N.b. link auto-plays sound) explore London; photo by Marc Behrens, courtesy of The Wire].

On a slightly unrelated note, meanwhile, Britain's superlative music and sound art magazine The Wire reported on something called Field Studies 2010 in an issue published last autumn. Field Studies "provide[d] an environment for architects, artists and urbanists to explore the relationship between architecture and sound, and to 'see' sound not as a scientific, acoustic event, but as a sometimes inexplicable, poetic and place-specific phenomenon." In a sense, then, specifically in terms of the discipline described above, Field Studies was a kind of urbanized anti-soundscape-ecology: more emotional and poetic than scientifically diagnostic.

But one of the workshop leaders, Marc Behrens, makes the interesting point that there is "a tech version of Moore's Law," quote-unquote. "In other words, as recording devices get smaller, more sophisticated and cheaper, opportunities increase and the art of sonic field studies evolves accordingly."

This seems to resonate well with Pijanowski's work, that, as acoustic sensors and deployable sound-capture networks become easier and cheaper both to install and to monitor (which, of course, includes for surveillance purposes), we'll hear, at the very least, a massive quantitative increase in the amount of archived sonic information available for later study. An archive fever of the ear.

(Just FYI, there is a whole chapter on sound in The BLDGBLOG Book).

Style Secrets From The Countess Of Glamour

At 78 Lynn Dell,The Countess of Glamour, looks and feels better than ever. Lynn is the owner of Off Broadway Boutique , a place where glamour reigns, and woman go to feel good. For over 40 years Lynn has helped dress customers of every age, every size, and every budget. Enjoy some of Lynn's wonderful style secrets in the video below, and if you are in New York make sure to check out Off Broadway Boutique.(They have a great vintage department too)

"Don't take your self too seriously."

"Dress for the theatre of your life."

"You get one chance around so go for it"

Advanced Style Film for NOWNESS

Advanced Style: Age and Beauty on Nowness.com.
Here is the complete Advanced Style short film for NOWNESS.com . I hope you enjoy these fabulous ladies as much as Lina and I do!