Taiwan Soundscape

New Lunar Year has arrived!
Congratulations to everyone! Hope you all have countless blessing, happiness, achievement and healthy in the year of rat!!!
What sounds remind you of new year, something makes you over excited? hehe!
The website of the Keelung City Fire Bureau is very impressing! There are sounds of fireworks that I like very much! Lets enjoy them together!
Nevertheless, when listening, please remember to protect your ears! Further details about protecting ears from firworks, please visit this link.

Are you over twenty years old?
It is said that people over twenty years old are less sensitive to high-pitch sounds!
As I mentioned before in the blog that the mosquito machine invented by British follows this principle. Today, it's your turn to experience a touch of it!
Please listen and see how high the pitch you can hear!
Here we go!
Thank Chen-Hsiang for providing this piece of informaiton.

061019修理紗窗紗門換玻璃.mp3

To respond to James Ho's message, here I have a recording of 'Fixing glasses and door mesh (Xio1 li3 buo1 li2 sha1 chuan1 sha 1 men2)'-- a typical megaphone call from a kind of street vendors who do their business by driving a van around streets. However, it was not a close up recording. I am afraid that it might dissapoint Mr Ho. Nevertheless, I've found this sound interesting as a good example to reflect the recent social phenomenon. I thus post the sound here to share with you all.

The sound was an ambience collected from the 11th floor of a tall apartment in Danshui, Taipei. In the recent years, this town is developing rapidly with constructions going on in every corner. The long-term existence of the vendor's service of fixing glasses and door mesh poses a question-- As long as there is a house, there is a need of his service. However, since people are moving to higher and higher floors, how should he run the business?

To the local residents, his megaphone call is filled in the air of the community. However, where is he? No one knows!

This is an every day sound, but no one can locate its physicality precisely. As a result, the call always sounds very lonely and the broken glasses and door mesh of the local residents remains broken...

Crane

Allow me to post the sound I owed Cheng-Hsian here so people can share it, too!

It was recorded in a factory in Tamsui, Taipei. Following a governmental regulation, cranes on move in factories need alarms singling. However, because there had been the b-b-b sound in the factory, the owner went to the manufacturer to order a different musical tone. Believe it or not, it was... My Home Sweet Home!

As the crane moved with interruptions, so did the played music. The sweet home was very much pieced... The sound surely created some amusement. However, after listening to it for a long while, I could not help sympethising the workers. They had to listen to it EVERYDAY!

The market for designing sonic signals for industrial usages should be large! Hope we can do something to transform factories into high-quality sonic spaces!

A few days ago, TV news mentioned about a released CD album-- The Sound of Railways in Taiwan. It is not only the first Taiwanese CD album focused on Taiwanese railway sounds but also received the Judges' Prize of Golden Song Awards. This is a very great achievement!

To be honest, I really envy these railway enthusiasts and hoping that I can record sounds of Taiwan with similar enthusiasts to release an album, too!

What is the sound you hate most? Bad Vibes researches on people of differet gendres and ages around the world (except Taiwan!) to produce this website. It's quite entertaining! However, when waiting for downloading, there is a sense of excitement as well as worry-- there are sounds that I dare not to hear!

Arteradio has many kinds of interesting sounds to listen! Here I would like to follow Pouldon's e-mail for phonography yahoo group to recomment two recordings of Anthony Carcone:
One is a soundwalk with R. Murray Schafer in the Parisian streets. Schafer's comment on the link between women and high heel sounds is very interesting and entertaining!
The other one is sounds of Icelandic geyser.
Enjoy listening!

Hosted by Peter Cusack and Isobel Clouter, the programme Vermilion Sounds in Resonance FM104.4 will broadcase Taiwanese cicada sounds recorded by the French sound artist Yannick Dauby! In the same programme, sounds of lemuridae of Madagascar will also be played. The show time is 1:15am on 16 Dec Taiwan time.

What is Soundwalk? When we were doing soundwalk in Hon-Shu-Lin last Saturday, I had a brief explaination about it. Here I display some websites that contain basic definitions of Soundwalk for references. After reading them, you might have different views about the term? For example, do we have to walk slowly during soundwalk? ^_^ You are welcome to discuss about it on the blog.

Sound Walks and Journals

Listening (Kitchener Soundwalks)

Sound Walk definition and tips

Soundwalking Interactions

Composing

Soundwalk (eContact! 4.3)

Soundwalk (Handbook of Acoustic Ecology)

How to do a soundwalk? (Magnetic Spirit)

Soundwalking in Queen Elizabeth Park

SilenceRadio.org is a listening space. It offers different genres of audio works, including radio art, documentation, sound poetry, drama, phonography etc. As long as you think your work is creative, you too can submit works to the website!
e-mail your ideas to courrier@silenceradio.org
and post sounds in CD to:
acsr / SilenceRadio.org
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