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[Best of 2014] The Year in Sound

2014 was a loud year for sound art.
Dominic Wilcox's giant Binaudio listening cones. Photo credit: Emilia Flockhart, via

With so much visual stimulation constantly flashing, spinning, and bursting before our eyes, it's easy to forget to listen. As a result, our visually dominated culture often unceremoniously reduces audio art to background noise. This year, however, a swarm of scientists, researchers, and artists fought back, and we were consistently blown away by the new territories being charted in the field of audible art.

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This is the Year in Sound:

+ We watched symphonies for and by robots.

+ Danish scientists lit Dubstep on fire.

+ In February, we decided not to test our luck with the most lethal sound system in the world.

+ Music visualization projects inspired a succession of mind-bending cymatic videos with dancing bubbles, pulsing ferrofluid, and liquid landscapes.

+ Dominic Wilcox collected the chaotic clamor of the city through the cone-like contraption of his Binaudios.

+ Jacqueline Kiyomi Gordon guided us through her aural architecture and Bora Yoon talked to us about her life as an architect of sonic environments.

+ Electronic music producer Max Cooper created an alternate reality through a 4D sound system designed to show “how much information you gain about your surroundings from hearing alone.”

+ April was all about Kayne West’s audio DNA:

+ In May, we listened to the sound of the internet.

+ Walls literally spoke to us.

+ Claudia Robles sonified sweat through a Galvanic Skin Response interface in her project SKIN.

+ Sound wavelengths found their IRL soulmates in a series of beautifully unique nature photography.

+ In June, we we hugged the future of sound art.

+ In Mira Calix’s installation of paper streams and musical movement, Inside There Falls, the walls literally spoke to us.

+ CalArts cultivated an enhanced cybernetic garden of instruments and realized the importance of irrigation: “when they’re watered correctly, it will sound better. If the soil is dry, it will be repetitive and stagnant.”

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+ We tripped out to RedXPoison’s psychedelic audio-reactive digital particles in October, and watched Mark Wheeler paint Los Angeles with sound.

+ We entered the lyrical labyrinth of QVALIA’s interactive music video game.

+ Machina’s MIDI Jacket translated our funky grooves into music.

+ In August, we learned the secrets behind a successful sounding movie trailer and the underwater origins of Darth Vader’s death rattle.

+ We gained access to NASA’s new SoundCloud library, tuned in to talkative space spatulas, and re-mixed an extensive planetary playlist from Comet 67P’s sonic oscillations.

+ Traditional instruments became larger than life through human harps.

+ We got lost in the eerie acoustics of new instrument, the Yaybahar.

+ We also pretended to be a synth-pop version of Tom Hanks in BIG with this gigantic drum machine.

+ Non-traditional instruments also had their respective time to shine, from the hacked sushi of MIT Media Lab’s “Makey Makey,” to the "Musicletta," courtesy of the “all-in-one musical invention kit,” Ototo.

+ Finally, this past November, glitch art sang its heart out.

Sound, we hear you loud and clear: it's been a great year.

This is the second part of our end-of-the-year series. Stay tuned as we continue to look back on 2014 and collect all of our favorite examples of modern creativity, fantastic innovations, and important trends.

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