Everyday Infrasound in an Uncertain World | Brian House
Gruen 228 | Vinyl (+ Digital) | Digital > [order]
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Everyday Infrasound in an Uncertain World
Even though you can’t hear it, infrasound fills the air. And because the atmosphere doesn’t absorb it like regular sound, infrasound comes from hundreds, if not thousands, of miles away. If humans could perceive frequencies lower than 20 Hz, then changing ocean currents, wildfires, turbines, receding glaciers, industrial HVACs, superstorms, and other geophysical and anthropogenic sources from across the planet would be part of the quotidian soundscape of our lives, wherever we might be.
I made this recording in the small town of Amherst, Massachusetts. I sped it up by a factor of 60: 24 hours becomes 24 minutes, raising the pitch by almost six octaves and making infrasound audible. Although we might think we hear something familiar when listening to this album, only its very highest sounds could have been detected with an unaided ear.
Since ordinary microphones cannot pick up frequencies this low, I constructed infrasonic “macrophones.” If a microphone amplifies small sounds, a macrophone brings large sounds with long wavelengths into our perceptual range. Each consists of a wind-noise reduction array leading to a microbarometer and a data recorder. I based the design on what the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization uses to detect distant warhead tests. In this case, however, we’re listening to a planet in transition.
This work germinated in Oregon amid an unprecedented season of wildfires. It developed along with my chronic illness, Lyme, a tick-borne disease that has become more common as a result of warming winters. My young son watched over the recording process; our ancestors mined coal. For me, it’s not just a matter of hearing what is novel to the human ear, but of encountering those agencies greater than our own that connect us through the atmosphere.
Side A – Day, 6am–6pm [12:00] | MP3
Side B — Night, 6pm–6am [12:00]
2 Tracks (24′00″)
Vinyl (300 copies)
3 macrophones placed equilaterally at 100 ft
Pressure range: +-25 Pa (0.001 Pa / 0.01 s)
Recording samples per second: 100 Hz
Wavelengths captured: 28.12–4,658.79 ft
Measured frequencies: 0.25–40 Hz
Playback frequencies: 15–2,400 Hz
Lon/lat: -72.506248333,42.367743333
Concept, construction, programming, and audio production: Brian House. Mastering: Jon Cohrs. Design: Partner & Partners. Illustration: Lincoln Nemetz-Carlson. Studio assistance: Zac Watson, Andrew Kim, Ziji Zhou. With support from: Creative Capital, Amherst College, J & K Altman Foundation. Thanks: Ethan Clotfelter, Ben Holtzman, Leif Karlstrom, Theun Karelse, Lucia Monge, the art department at Lewis & Clark, and the Columbia Center for Spatial Research.
Field Recording Series by Gruenrekorder
Germany / 2025 / Gruen 228 / LC 09488
A.D. Amorosi | SPIN Magazine
MACROPHONE FIEND – Brian House recorded Earth’s deep sounds
With a PhD from Brown, museum exhibitions, and field recordings made for the Nat Geo Network, Brian House is a sound artist legend. His studies in the rhythms of human systems have led him into „entanglements with the nonhuman world,“ via self-devised technologies. „I’m trying to communicate sounds that are all around us, but which we cannot ordinarily hear – sounds equally geophysical, anthropogenic, and, on some level, disturbing in the sense that they may shift our worldview.“ Inspired by Roger Payne’s Songs of the Humpback Whale recordings which transformed how we view animals and conservation, Brian is going for something similarly appropriate to climate change with his new album, Everyday /nfrasound in an Uncertain World, and an accompanying art installation. „It’s more or less a straight 24-hour recording sped up by a factor of 60,“ which becomes 24 minutes, 12 minutes each side, with its pitch raised 6 octaves in order to hear super low sounds. „My project is about atmospheric infrasound, low-frequency sounds traveling through the air, such as storms, gas flares, meteors, wind over the ocean, glaciers cracking, wildfires, etc.“ In order to do this accurately, House developed „macrophones,“ rather than microphones, to go beyond the norms of the „field recording“ genre for something more deafeningly epic. „Macrophones are my design, but they’re based on infrasound arrays used by the [Comprehensive] Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization to monitor for nuclear testing,“ he notes. „Microphones let us hear small sounds. Macrophones enable us to hear big ones … When I listened to the results, hearing all this crazy shit, I’m realizing that what I’m hearing are the sounds of climate change. „I’m not sure about calling it ‚music‘ as it’s not a composition or something. It’s sound that is always here. It’s unlike anything else I’ve ever heard – atmospheric infrasound, nothing else. „What ii does is act as a kind of witness to what is happening with our planet. If you could hear these wild booms, whistles and crackles as you are walking down the street, you would intuitively understand the scale of the planet in a different way. It is not a passive planet, things are happening, big things. I don’t understand them, and that’s part of the point – in our human hubris, we think we have it all figured out, or at least that it’s all up to us, but in actuality there are agencies larger than our own at work. And either we figure out a humbler role to play within all that, or we’re gone.“
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Creaig Dunton | Brainwashed
Infrasound, or frequencies of sound that exist beyond the range of human hearing, are omnipresent but cannot be heard, nor recorded using traditional equipment. Captured over a period of 24 hours in Amherst, Massachusetts (coincidentally, a town adjacent to mine, and that I drive through multiple times per week), Brian House captured infrasound via custom built macrophones, speeding the recordings up 60 times to render them into the range of human hearing. The outcome is an expansive, at times terrifying, pair of compositions that are as sonically enjoyable as they are scientifically fascinating.
With the sides split between day and night, the differences are audible dependent on the time of recording. The day side (6AM through 6PM) leads in with silence that is soon blended with distant, heavy rumbling and other low frequency, submerged like sounds. Slow passages of sound whiff over like clouds, offsetting unconventional echoing sounds. Through the 24 minutes of the piece, House captures higher frequency tones, indistinct rattling, and guttural textures. The overall structure is a consistent one, however, even with all of these disparate layers mixed with a strong compositional structure.
The night side is comparably more active in comparison. With a ghostly opening, sputtering noise and buoyant tones enter the mix. The piece is busier, but also more unsettling when compared to metaphorical light of day. The moments during the day that drifted more towards silence are filled with more aggressive outbursts and shrill segments that sound like nothing we would perceive as naturally occurring.
One of the most fascinating aspects of this album is how these otherwise unheard sounds are interpreted (for me, at least) into familiar touchstones that are obviously not represented. For example, I could hear subtle musical tones and sounds that were quite similar to chirping birds weaved throughout the day side of the record. On the night side, there were ghostly chimes, revving engines, and monster movie-like roars amidst the ambience.
While technically falling under the genre of field recordings, the source material recorded by Brian House and the means in which it was captured results in something entirely different. I am not sure how much processing was employed by House beyond the time compression, but no matter what, just the knowledge of these being sounds that exist every day just a few miles from me makes it all the more captivating. Everyday Infrasound in an Uncertain World is interesting from a conceptual and academic perspective, but the results presented are just as engaging from a purely audial standpoint as well.
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Jesús Quesada | National Geographic España
Un artista ha creado la ‚banda sonora‘ de la Tierra a partir de los ruidos imperceptibles de la naturaleza
Brian House es un maestro de la sonificación que ha usado los «infrasonidos» del mundo para crear su nuevo álbum, ‚Everyday Infrasound in an Uncertain World‘.
A Brian House no lo verás en lo más alto de las listas de Spotify, Apple Music y otros servicios de música en streaming, ni tampoco en las radiofórmulas de las principales emisoras, pero no por ello su trabajo es menos especial o interesante. De hecho, la obra de este artista contemporáneo resulta fascinante, porque utiliza el sonido como una herramienta para hacer audibles procesos abstractos o invisibles. House es un maestro de la sonificación.
La sonificación es una técnica que consiste en convertir conjuntos de datos complejos en sonido, utilizando variaciones en tono, intensidad y timbre para representar información. Es la contrapartida de la visualización, y permite analizar datos astronómicos, médicos o biológicos mediante el oído, facilitando la accesibilidad y la detección de patrones. A través de la sonificación, House invita a escuchar la información, ya que para él el ritmo es una forma de entender el tiempo y los sistemas que nos rodean.
Del amplio trabajo de House, su obra más conocida quizá sea ‘Quotidian’. En ella, el artista rastreó su ubicación por GPS cada minuto durante un año. Luego, mapeó esos datos en un disco de vinilo de 365 surcos. Cada revolución del disco representa un día en su vida, y cuando el sonido se repite significa que estaba en el mismo lugar a la misma hora. House vuelve a sorprender con su nuevo álbum, titulado ‘Everyday Infrasound in an Uncertain World’.
El inquietante y bello sonido del mundo
En ‘Everyday Infrasound in an Uncertain World’, Brian House usa los «infrasonidos» del estruendo de un glaciar al desmoronarse, el crepitante rugido de un incendio forestal o el rugido de un frente tormentoso; los ruidos de la Tierra viva, que por muy fuertes que sean, emiten aún más energía acústica por debajo del umbral del oído humano, a frecuencias de 20 hercios o inferiores. Tienen longitudes de onda tan largas que pueden viajar alrededor del globo como emanaciones vibrantes de eventos distantes, pero que los humanos nunca hemos sido capaces de oír.
El álbum condensa 24 horas de estos retumbos en 24 minutos de las líneas de bajo más básicas, dándole un nuevo giro a la idea de la música ambiental. Como el sonio, realmente, solo es variaciones en la presión del aire, construyó un conjunto de tres «macrófonos» (tubos que canalizan el aire hacia un barómetro) capaz de tomar lecturas 100 veces por segundo.
Luego, el artista acelera la grabación por un factor de 60 para que sea audible para los oídos de los humanos: “Estoy realmente interesado en las capas de percepción a las que no podemos acceder. No es solo sonido bajo, sino también sonido distante. Eso me voló la cabeza”, dijo House.
Los barómetros registraron la erupción del volcán Krakatoa, en el Pacífico Sur, en 1883, en lugares tan lejanos como Londres. Y a día de hoy, una red global de sensores de infrasonido ayuda a hacer cumplir el tratado de prohibición de pruebas nucleares. Algunos expertos en infrasonido, como Leif Karlstrom, vulcanólogo de la Universidad de Oregón que lo utiliza para estudiar el monte Kilauea en Hawái, ayudaron a House a configurar su sistema de recopilación de música y a comprender mejor lo que escuchaba.
Está destacando fenómenos interesantes
En los 24 minutos que dura el álbum se puede escuchar una especie de coro sobrenatural, que alterna entre vibraciones bajas y quejumbrosas y suaves susurros fantasmales. House dice: “Para mí, se trata del misterio. Espero que sea un poco inquietante”.
Sin duda, ‘Everyday Infrasound in an Uncertain World’ podría ser la banda sonora de una película o videojuego de terror. Decir que sus sonidos son inquietantes es quedarse corto. Si te interesa escucharlo, puedes hacerlo a través de su perfil oficial de Bandcamp. La obra está dividida en dos pistas de 12 minutos cada una: ‘Day, 6am-6pm’ y ‘Night, 6pm-6am’. Con la compra del álbum digital, se obtiene la descarga en alta calidad 24-bit/48kHz en diversos formatos. Incluso es posible comprarlo en formato vinilo, ahora que está tan de moda.
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Monique Brouillette | MIT Technology Review
Listen to Earth’s rumbling, secret soundtrack
A New England artist makes music from the imperceptible noises of nature—using tools that usually detect hidden nuclear explosions.
The boom of a calving glacier. The crackling rumble of a wildfire. The roar of a surging storm front. They’re the noises of the living Earth, music of this one particular sphere and clues to the true nature of these dramatic events. But as loud as all these things are, they emit even more acoustic energy below the threshold of human hearing, at frequencies of 20 hertz or lower. These “infrasounds” have such long wavelengths that they can travel around the globe as churning emanations of distant events. But humans have never been able to hear them.
Until now, that is. Everyday Infrasound in an Uncertain World, a new album by the musician and artist Brian House, condenses 24 hours of these rumbles into 24 minutes of the most basic of bass lines, putting a new spin on the idea of ambient music. Sound, even infrasound, is really just variations in air pressure. So House built a set of three “macrophones,” tubes that funnel air into a barometer capable of taking readings 100 times a second. From the quiet woods of western Massachusetts, House can pick up what the planet is laying down. Then he speeds the recording up by a factor of 60 so that it’s audible to the wee ears of humans. “I am really interested in the layers of perception that we can’t access,” he says. “It’s not only low sound, but it’s also distant sound. That kind of blew my mind.”
House’s album is art, but scientists made it possible. Barometers picked up the 1883 eruption of the South Pacific volcano Krakatoa as far away as London. And today, a global network of infrasound sensors helps enforce the nuclear test ban treaty. A few infrasound experts—like Leif Karlstrom, a volcanologist at the University of Oregon who uses infrasound to study Mount Kilauea in Hawaii—helped House set up his music-gathering array and better understand what he was hearing. “He’s highlighting interesting phenomena,” Karlstrom says, even though it’s impossible to tell exactly what is making each specific sound.
So how’s the actual music? It’s 24 minutes of an otherworldly chorus, alternating between low grumbling vibrations and soft ghostlike whispers. A high-pitched whistle? Could be a train, House says. An intense low-octave rattle? Maybe a distant thunderstorm or a shifting ocean current. “For me, it’s about the mystery of it,” he says. “I hope that’s a little bit unsettling.” But it also might connect someone listening to a wider—and deeper—world.
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Łukasz Komła | Nowamuzyka.pl
Usłyszeć niesłyszalne.
Dzięki wydawnictwu Briana Housa „Everyday Infrasound in an Uncertain World” wędrujemy w świat infradźwięków, czyli fal akustycznych o częstotliwości poniżej 20 Hz, których ludzkie ucho nie odbiera. Bohater tego wpisu od lat bada ową materię dźwiękową wykorzystując do tego przeróżne technologie, a także bada rytmy systemów ludzkich i nie-ludzkich. Jego prace były pokazywane m.in. w MoMA, Los Angeles MOCA, Ars Electronica czy ZKM Center for Art and Media. House posiada tytuł doktora w dziedzinie muzyki komputerowej uzyskany na Uniwersytecie Browna. Pełni również funkcję adiunkta na wydziale sztuki w Amherst College.
Wydawnictwo „Everyday Infrasound in an Uncertain World” pomieściło dwa dłuższe nagrania: „Day, 6am–6pm” i „Night, 6pa–6am” zrealizowane w miasteczku Amherst w stanie Massachusetts. Jak wyjaśnia badacz atmosfera nie pochłania infradźwięków tak jak zwykłego dźwięku, zatem infradźwięki dochodzą z odległości setek, jeśli nie tysięcy kilometrów. – „Zmieniające się prądy oceaniczne, pożary, turbiny, cofające się lodowce, przemysłowe systemy HVAC, potężne burze i inne źródła geofizyczne oraz antropogeniczne z całej planety byłyby częścią codziennego krajobrazu dźwiękowego naszego życia, niezależnie od tego, gdzie się znajdujemy” – czytamy w opisie płyty.
Ponieważ zwykłe mikrofony nie są w stanie wychwycić tak niskich częstotliwości, House skonstruował „makrofony” infradźwiękowe, które mają przenosić dźwięki o długich falach do naszego zakresu percepcji. Każdy z nich składa się z układu redukującego szum wiatru, prowadzącego do mikrobarometru i rejestratora danych. Doświadczamy tego od pierwszego fragmentu „Day, 6am–6pm”, gdzie bardzo niskie częstotliwości przyspieszone przez House’a sześćdziesięciokrotnie i podniesione tonalnie o prawie sześć oktaw dały finalnie taki efekt, że infradźwięki stały się słyszalne.
Zarejestrowane tu dźwięki zostały uchwycone w Oregonie w czasie wzmożonego sezonu pożarów lasów. Projekt rozwijał się równolegle wraz z przewlekłą chorobą House’a – boreliozą, chorobą przenoszoną przez kleszcze, którą doskonale znamy w Polsce, a jej nasilenie wzrosło w wyniku ocieplenia klimatu.
To, co dochodzi do naszych uszu na „Everyday Infrasound in an Uncertain World” określiłbym jako pewnego rodzaju smugi dźwiękowego o zmieniającej się amplitudzie natężenia – od bardzo niskich drone’owych rezonatorów, drgań po wyższe pasma przypominające brzmienia akuzamtyczne. Nieco inna materia wypełnia „Night, 6pa–6am”, w sensie rytmiki fal i ich intensywności, wyczuwa się w nocy większą dynamikę meandrujących fal i swoistą harmoniczność.
Finalnie to bardzo wciągający proces słuchania infradźwięków, momentami przypominających tkankę dźwiękową wyjętą niemal z eksperymentalnego studia. I myślę, że najlepszym kluczem do zrozumienia „Everyday Infrasound in an Uncertain World” są słowa samego House’a: „Dla mnie nie chodzi tylko o to, aby usłyszeć coś nowego dla ludzkiego ucha, ale o spotkanie z siłami większymi od nas samych, które łączą nas poprzez atmosferę”.
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Ernesto Aguilar | 10 Great ambient albums of Fall
Brian House’s latest project makes the inaudible startlingly present. Using self-built “macrophones” modeled after nuclear test detectors, House captures infrasonic vibrations. If you are not familiar (me either), those are the sub-20 Hz murmurs that normally pass beneath human hearing. House then accelerates 24 hours of recording into 24 minutes. The verdict is a planetary auscultation of sorts: It’s one where Amherst, Massachusetts (where the album was recorded) is a resonant body, with its atmosphere setting the tone. Insofar as it relates to the recording, that means transmitting signals from oceans, storms, machinery and seismic throes many miles away.
What we hear is both intimate and cosmic. Over two approximately 12-minute tracks, slow-motion pressures become tremulous drones, tectonic tones and surging resonances that feel halfway between field recording and synthesis. Even sped up by six octaves, the music retains its origin’s scale. What you will discover as you listen is how each tone carries the gravity of distance and time compressed.
Context deepens the sound’s weight: conceived amid Oregon’s wildfires and the artist’s own experience with Lyme disease, the work frames listening as ecological awareness, a reminder that the planet’s pulse runs through us whether we notice or not. It’s a humbling document. The album is scientific in method, yet spiritual in impact. It’s also one where data becomes elegy and atmosphere becomes an instrument.
Albeit brief, listening through Everyday Infrasound is like standing inside a musical nervous system. As the final tones recede, what remains is awareness itself. House creates a sense that the ground beneath us hums with stories too vast for melody. In this outstanding recording, he transforms geophysics into hymn, turning vibration into revelation.
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textura
Interestingly, while Brian House’s Everyday Infrasound in an Uncertain World is a mere twenty-four minutes (two twelve-minute vinyl sides), an entire doctoral dissertation in Philosophy could be built around it. The sound artist’s field recordings project offers a perfect illustration of the Kantian principle that the world we experience using our regular modes of apprehension is but one representation. Stated otherwise, the German philosopher contended that we don’t experience the world as it is “in itself,” even though we act as if we do; instead, the world assumes the shape that it does because of how we’re equipped to experience and represent it. Reminding ourselves that other species—dogs an obvious example—experience the world differently than we do, even though it’s physically the same one presenting itself to both, goes a long way towards convincing us of Kant’s position.
And what, you may ask, does that have to do with House’s recording? Well, in presenting the earth and its atmosphere to us in a way that’s inaccessible under normal conditions, he too reminds us that the world is not as we take it to be. In his own words, if humans were able to “perceive frequencies lower than 20 Hz, then changing ocean currents, wildfires, turbines, receding glaciers, industrial HVACs, superstorms, and other geophysical and anthropogenic sources from across the planet would be part of the quotidian soundscape of our lives, wherever we might be.”
Admittedly, House made one critical adjustment that merits mention. The sounds on each vinyl side were collected in Amherst, Massachusetts over twelve-hour periods—six am to six pm for side one, six pm to six am for two—and then converted to twelve-minute segments. Accelerating the originating recordings raised the pitches by almost six octaves but more importantly made infrasound audible. Regular microphones aren’t capable of picking up frequencies so low, so House constructed three infrasonic “macrophones” to bring long wavelengths into perceptual range. Illustration and photo images on the deluxe gatefold sleeve (300 copies) allow the listener to better appreciate how House gathered the data.
How does it sound? The “day” side unfolds as an uninterrupted, visceral flow of subterranean rumblings, convulsions, creaks, shrieks, and dive-bombing whistlings. The “night” side is even more active, with myriad creature noises adding to the soundtrack of the daylight hours. It’s hard to resist hearing the sounds as ghoulish spirit vocalizations coming to us from the earth and air, their presence rendered audible through the medium of House’s gear. That the physical realm outside our bodies “talks” won’t come as any surprise to geologists and meteorologists who in their professions are naturally aware of and sensitive to its sounds. House’s gripping sound portrait of a “planet in transition” captivates for being so unusual, unfamiliar, and thought-provoking. Had Mahler not beaten him to the punch, House could have called his recording Das Lied von der Erde for being, literally, a song of the earth.
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Holger Adam | skug – MUSIKKULTUR
Nüchtern betrachtet, lässt sich, was als Musik zu Gehör kommt, auf mathematische bzw. physikalische Grundlagen zurückführen. Klang besteht aus Frequenzen, Schallwellen im für Menschen hörbaren und nicht hörbaren Bereich. Infrasound wiederum besteht aus Niedrigfrequenzen, die uns alltäglich umgeben, wir aber nicht wahrnehmen können – es sei denn, sie werden aufgezeichnet und anschließend in den Frequenzbereich übersetzt, der dem menschlichen Ohr zuträglich ist. Wie dies genau vonstattengeht, ich kann es nicht wirklich erklären. Weder in Physik noch in Mathematik war ich besonders gut in der Schule. Aber Brian House hat sich mit einer entsprechenden Versuchsanordnung darangemacht, Infrasound einzufangen, hörbar zu machen und als Musik zu veröffentlichen. Im Begleittext zu »Everyday Infrasound In An Uncertain World« erläutert House sein Vorgehen und kontextualisiert seine Experimente, sodass auch nicht naturwissenschaftlich geneigten Menschen einleuchten kann, was das soll. Die Veröffentlichung kreist um eine paradoxe Situation. Die physikalischen Phänomene können in ihrer eigentlichen Form zwar dokumentiert, aber (ästhetisch) nicht rezipiert werden – zumindest nicht mit den Ohren. Die zugrundeliegenden Datensätze können aufgenommen und gelesen, aber nicht gehört werden. Was im Anschluss an die Bearbeitung dieser Daten tatsächlich gehört werden kann, ist eine veränderte, an den menschlichen Wahrnehmungsapparat angepasste Form dieser geisterhaften Schallwellen. Die Übersetzungsarbeit von House dient, so könnte man sagen, der Ermöglichung der Erfahrung einer ansonsten nicht wahrnehmbaren Realität. In eigenen Worten spricht er von »encountering those agencies greater than our own that connect us through the atmosphere«. In diesen Gedanken berühren sich sozusagen Physik und Metaphysik; Gottesbeweise werden ja schon lange nicht mehr nur von gottesfürchtigen Mystiker*innen oder Religionswissenschaftler*innen unternommen, sondern die Frage, was die Welt im Innersten zusammenhält, motiviert auch experimentelle Physiker*innen – oder Klangkünstler*innen. Idealerweise eint alle diese Forschenden eine gewisse Demut vor der Schöpfung bzw. dem, was der Fall ist, eine wissenschaftlich-ethische Haltung, die logisch fundiertes und spekulatives Denken mit einem grundsätzlichem Respekt vor allem, was ist und nicht (oder noch nicht entdeckt) ist, verbindet – denn man weiß ja nie (alles)!
Angesichts fortschreitender globaler Umweltzerstörung und sonstiger weltweiter Ausbeutungs- und Unterdrückungsszenarien ist es nicht die schlechteste Übung, zurückzutreten, innezuhalten und zuzuhören. Aber diese vornehmen Gesten sind oft leider nicht besonders wirkungsvoll gegenüber dem ignoranten und machtvollen Gehabe all derer, die meinen, sie wüssten, wo es langzugehen hätte. Dem Vormarsch rechter Ideologien sowie der ihnen entsprechenden politischen Ausdrucksformen und gesellschaftlichen Trends im Dienst der Gegenaufklärung fallen täglich Errungenschaften demokratisch-aufgeklärter Gesellschaften zum Opfer – nicht nur in den durch Trump und seine Kollaborateur*innen tyrannisierten Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika. Rücksichtslose Wichte wie Elon Musk geißeln Empathie als Schwäche und auch wenn ich wissen kann, dass solch markigen Sprüche nicht nur dumm und inhaltlich falsch sind, so sind sie zugleich Ausdruck einer um sich greifenden Enthemmung: Die, die meinen, nichts mehr sagen zu dürfen, sind ja genau diejenigen, die in ihrem grenzenlosen Ressentiment das Maul am weitesten aufreißen. Eine eigentlich lächerliche und durchschaubare, aber leider auch erfolgreiche Strategie, Aufmerksamkeit zu erlangen. Demgegenüber kämpft der randständige Sound-Artist auf verlorenem Posten und wird im Verhältnis nur wenige erreichen. Aber in diesem gesellschaftlichen Spannungsfeld, einer Gegenwart voller dummdreistem Getöse und hasserfülltem Geschrei, steht er mit seinen feinen Antennen und anderen Apparaturen, die er zum Einsatz bringt, um Menschen für das zu sensibilisieren, was sie erfahren können, wenn sie sich darauf einlassen. Wenn sie die Gelegenheit wahrnehmen, zuzuhören. Im diesem relationalen Charakter, der das Verhältnis der Menschen zu sich und ihrer Umwelt zur Voraussetzung hat und erforscht, ist die philosophische Bedeutung von Sound-Art aufgehoben. Hierin erfüllt sich auch ihr sozialer Sinn, wenn man so will. Das weiß auch Brian House, wo er darüber sinniert, was uns miteinander verbindet, und so seine Übersetzungsarbeit als Kommunikationsangebot rahmt, als Einladung zum Dialog. Es ist ein Jammer, dass Klangkunst als Bestandteil der Populärkultur an dieser Stelle einen verhältnismäßig schweren Stand hat. In der Literatur oder in Filmen, die thematisch der Science-Fiction zuzurechnen sind, scheint es leichter zu sein, solche Perspektiven zu vermitteln. Vielleicht liege ich da auch falsch, aber das geisterhafte Gebrumme, das sanfte Dröhnen der Aufnahmen von Brian House ist »an sich« wenig spektakulär. Die Hürde, auf »Everyday Infrasound In An Uncertain World« mehr als nur »Geräusche« wahrzunehmen, ist relativ hoch. Das ist in der Auswertung und Betrachtung von Radioteleskopaufnahmen aber auch nicht anders. Die Arbeit, solche Eindrücke verstehen zu wollen und einzuordnen, die muss man sich schon machen. Sie erfordert einige geistige Klimmzüge, aber die Anstrengung lohnt sich. Ich habe in der Besprechung versucht, vorzuturnen. Jetzt sind Sie dran.
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Colin Lang | Musique Machine
Brian House has put together something of an album, the contents of which really pass over anything resembling the possibility of a critical appraisal (more on this in a sec). The concept of Infrasound –– the auditory information that exists below the threshold of human perception – is a topic closely wed to larger concerns of situatedenss, environmental awareness, and the like. So when Brian House, a professor of such things, set out to construct microphones capable of capturing such phenomena, the die was essentially cast. In other words, House, fully cognizant of this fact, had no real control over what it is said microphones would relay. In order to render these findings perceptible, House used an old chestnut of tape recording: speed things up, which will de facto pitch things up to a frequency range that our little lugs can hold onto.
Now the point about being beyond the purview of any critical apparatus (I’ve been called worse) should begin to come into focus. How is one to make a judgment around the breeze in a forest, or the sound of waves crashing? „Ah, nice enough, but I prefer the way air moves through a more dense arrangement of trees.“ I am walking through the open door, I realize, but it is all to say that what is left to talk about here is House’s concept, and perhaps its implementation. Split into two, 12-minute tracks, each comprised of a sped-up segment of 12 hours, where each minute is roughly equivalent to 1 hour of the day in question. Much to my surprise, without knowing it, the nighttime portion sounded much more night-y than the former, though pitch shifting will do funny things to your perception. It made me wonder why speed and pitch still had to be married to one another, given so much in the world of electronic composition that has worked to separate them? Finally, given the hallucinatory nature of these phenomena, why not keep going with their manipulation into the realm of the audible? There is not much truth to material anyway, but I digress.
Fans of field recordings, passive microphonics, and other niche listening experiences, will certainly find a bizarre, if familiar world of acoustic phenomena on Everyday Infrasound in an Uncertain World.
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The Wire Magazine (The Wire 502)
In Amherst, Massachusetts, more than 150 years ago, Emily Dickinson wrote of her appetite for silence. Brian House, on a visit to the poet’s home town, made recordings of low frequency noises pervading the air yet ordinarily inaudible to the human ear. These pulsations of infrasound may have originated in remote events: wildfires; turbulence in oceans; some distant glacier receding. For Dickinson, all would have been subsumed into her consciousness of silence. But House sped up his recordings, condensing a day into 24 minutes, rendering infrasound audible in the process. Everyday Infrasound In An Uncertain World is a notable document in terms of its conceptual and technological ingenuity. The title also registers House’s sensitivity to pressing ecological issues that reverberate through our lives. Dickinson, habitually focused on that interface where sensory awareness melds with a world beyond its apprehension, would surely have found poetry here.
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Rigobert Dittmann | Bad Alchemy Magazin (131)
Zitat: Wenn der Mensch Frequenzen unter 20 Hz wahrnehmen könnte, wären Veränderungen der Meeresströmungen, Waldbrände, Turbinen, zurückweichende Gletscher, industrielle Klima- und Lüftungsanlagen, Superstürme und andere geophysikalische und anthropogene Quellen auf der ganzen Welt Teil der alltäglichen Geräuschkulisse unseres Lebens, wo immer wir uns auch befinden. BRIAN HOUSE legt damit die Basis für Everyday Infrasound in an Uncertain World (Gruen 228, LP). Mit in Amherst, Massachusetts, mit ‚Macrophones‘ eingefangenem Infraschall bei Tag – ‚Day, 6am–6pm‘ [12:00] – und bei Nacht – ‚Night, 6pm–6am‘ [12:00]. Wobei er die 24 Stunden auf zweimal 12 Minuten gerafft hat. Das ergibt eine wie geträumte Phonographie aus schlurchenden Schüben von dumpf dröhnenden Klangwolken, glissandierenden Strichen und flötenden Lauten mit einem Anklang von EVP, von ‚paranormalen Tonbandstimmen‘, oder von Walgesang. Eine heimliche und merkwürdig zarte Musik, die die Welt da für sich macht. Dabei geht es House, der am Amherst College Kunst lehrt, um den Climate Change, der auch da stattfindet, wo man es nicht ’sieht‘ und ‚hört‘. Mit „Animas“ (2016) hat er den katastrophalen ‚2015 Gold King Mine waste water spill‘ thematisiert, mit „Terminal Moraine“ (2021) die Gletscherschmelze und unser fehlendes Zeitgefühl, mit „Post-Natural Pastorale“ (2022) New Yorks Freshkills Park als renaturierte Mülldeponie. Man sollte auf ihn hören.
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framework radio | #948
phonography / field recording; contextual and decontextualized sound activity
presented by patrick mcginley
Everyday Infrasound in an Uncertain World | Brian House
Broc Nelson | Everything Is Noise
We are music nerds at Everything Is Noise, each of us geeking out weekly, if not daily, about some obscure band or another, and this enthusiasm and passion is what has built and maintained this website. Some of us are musicians, but all of us have opinions on music regardless of our level of understanding music. I am not much of a musician, but I have become fascinated with how music works, or more specifically, how sound works. When I started learning about synthesizers, I took a step back from years of listening to music to appreciate that the building blocks of every sound, whether the strum of a guitar, the pop of a snare drum, the notes from a vocalist, or literally any other sound, musical or not, are just waves. Synthesizers allow you to shape and warp and modulate the wave length, shape, frequency, etc., of a relatively simple sound wave into potentially any sound you can imagine or wish to replicate. Thinking about sound this way can be overwhelming, but also kind of simplifies our music obsession into boiled-down clichés, like, ‘music is just wiggly air,’ or ‘Everything Is Noise.’
What I had not initially considered, and I imagine many people don’t, when thinking about the science of sound, is that just like the light spectrum, or our sense of smell, is that humans cannot hear every sound. There are frequencies that move around us all of the time that we are oblivious to. Think of a dog whistle (the object, not how public figures try to shine up their bigotry). The high pitched tone is unique in a way that dogs’ ears can hear it, while ours cannot. Dog whistles produce very high frequency sound waves. but there are also very low frequency sound waves that are outside of our hearing range, as well. This is called infrasound (again, think infrared, the light wave frequencies below our lowest level of perception), and it is produced by many things, slowly covering vast distances with its long and low waves.
This is where Brian House comes in. House is an artist and a professor, holding a PhD in computer music, utilizing interdisciplinary research and modern technology to create internationally renowned sound exhibits that have been displayed from MoMA to Los Angeles to Stockholm and beyond, gaining recognition from WIRED, The New York Times Magazine, The Guardian, and even a listing in TIME Magazine’s Best Inventions issue. He is an assistant professor of art at Amherst College and has been published in numerous scholarly and scientific journals. His recorded output, so far, includes improvised acoustic instruments merged with field recordings, but he is on the cusp of releasing a new project on November 7th, on Gruenrekorder, entitled Everyday Infrasound In An Uncertain World that documents recorded infrasound, using devices called macrophones to record and then speeding up the recordings by a factor of 60, allowing for these novel sounds to become audible.
‘Infrasound is an anthropocentric term,’ Brian says. ‘It just means sound below the frequency range that any human can hear, typically defined as sound lower than 20 Hz. ‘Sound’ in this case is periodic vibration in the atmosphere (seismic infrasound is also a thing, but I’m only dealing with what is moving through the air).’ This in and of itself is fascinating, but Brian’s interest is much more robust and detailed than mine:
‘There are two qualities of atmospheric infrasound that I find fascinating. The first is that infrasound is not only low; it is distant. That is, these long wavelengths (like a mile long) can travel vast distances through the atmosphere—even all the way around the globe. Knowing that, I feel that hearing these sounds changes my relationship to planet as a whole. I’m not imagining that I’m looking at the globe from outer space, in some disembodied way, I’m stretching out my sense of what’s around me where I stand. The second is that atmospheric infrasound comes from sources that are at the threshold between what is anthropogenic and what is geophysical. Changing ocean currents, wildfires, turbines, receding glaciers, industrial HVACs, superstorms … this is where climate change is literally happening. And these things make noise. So at the same time that we’ve changed our sensation of the planet, we’re also witnessing what is happening.’
To capture these sounds, Brian has developed bespoke recording gear:
”Macrophones’ is my term for the instruments I’ve put together that encompass a sensor and wind-mitigation manifold. There’s been a few iterations, some focused on portability, others on low-frequency fidelity, and others on the sculptural aspect. The primary form of this project is an installation artwork where visitors can listen to the infrasound happening right where they are. While I’m looking for the right exhibition opportunity for that, I wanted to release this album, because I just found the sounds so compelling’
Everyday Infrasound in an Uncertain World is more than compelling; it is awe inspiring. The sounds slip in and out, like some mysterious interdimensional wraith cutting in and out of our shared reality in some sci-fi/horror film, but for as ominous as these sounds can be, they arrive with an immense sense of beauty and wonder, like witnessing some new, uncharted journey into somewhere we were never supposed to go. It isn’t all low rumbles, either. There are high pitched whistles and pings and fluttering warbles, but only the highest sounds on the recordings are barely audible to us in nature. Brian elaborates:
‘…the Macrophones have a sample rate of 100 Hz as well as some additional filtering, so 40 hz is about the highest frequency they capture, which is audible sound, but just barely. Single digit frequencies are the sweet spot, and it goes down to a quarter of a Hz. Speeding the recordings up by a factor of 60 raises the pitch by ~6 octaves. And I should say that that ratio is a subjective choice. To me, it made sense because it maintained the weight of these sounds while raising them just enough to be audible.’
In a way, listening to this record is like listening to a noise album: you have to let the sounds happen and surprise you. With each new sound, one cannot help but wonder where it came from. For the time being, however, identifying the sources of each sound is elusive. ‘I can say that I’ve gained some intuition about which sounds are anthropogenic and which are geophysical,’ says House, ‘But much of what is there, I have no idea where it’s coming from, and the scientists I’ve worked with have not had answers either. Part of my motivation for getting this out there is to learn more about what I’m listening to.’ Knowing those sources could help provide greater context to Earth’s cycles, environmental degradation, and man’s indifference, but Brian says, ‘the sources don’t ultimately matter to me, it’s about the aesthetics of this usually inaudible world.’
Brian House has traveled far and wide with his macrophones, yet Everyday Infrasound was recorded in Amherst, Massachusetts. Besides being Brian’s home, he adds:
‘…it is purposefully not a charismatic space—we’re talking about suburban/rural Massachusetts. I’ve also recorded on Svalbard, and in old growth forests in Oregon, etc etc. But what is remarkable to me is that infrasound is everywhere. You don’t have to be in an exotic location to capture it. It’s all one atmosphere. So I think being in Amherst helps make that point. If I said I was in Antarctica or whatever, you’d receive it very differently, and honestly I am also very tired of Western sound artists extracting sound from the global ‘elsewhere’. Wherever we are, we’re listening to the planet.’
This album seems more like a science project than what people usually think of in terms of music. ‘I want this record to be understood as documentary as opposed to composition,’ Brian says. Yet it is in this document that the art arises. Like a photographer, Brian House is changing how we understand the world around us by exposing us to perspectives we haven’t considered about how we connect with our surroundings, but ultimately what he is doing isn’t solely about the science, either. ‘My macrophones are tuned for aesthetic purposes,’ he says, adding that geologists and vulcanologists use infrasound to learn more about the seismic and structural elements of the earth while the Comprehensive Test Bad Treaty Organization uses infrasound to monitor nuclear weapons testing.I know I am still sorting out how listening to these recordings make me feel, and I am certain their impact will linger, For Brian House, the impact is more defined and profound:
‘They’ve taught me to listen in a new way. That sounds cliché, but when you’re not sure what the sound is, or even what sound is, you have to follow the lead of signal and coax it into being on its own terms. I say that in regard to the mixing and mastering process. At the end, I feel like I have an intimate relationship with all these whistles and booms, whatever they are. So, now I’m walking around the world, and I know something more is there. Everywhere. Many sound artists treat listening as a kind of sacral act, and I get that, but I’ve always been more interested in the poetics and politics of everyday life. I’m a fan of Henri Lefebvre, for instance—also, after being out with NatGeo recording lions and being at a loss with those recordings, I decided to record urban rats instead (https://brianhouse.net/works/urban_intonation/), point being, it’s not about the elsewhere, it’s about the right here. If sound is special, it’s because it’s good at making our dynamic interdependencies accessible to the senses. You can’t get out of sound. The fact of planetary, atmospheric infrasound just makes that acute.’
All of this is truly one of the most amazing things I have run across in my decades of music obsessiveness, and I feel absolutely honored to get to cover such an innovative and unique artist. Brian House isn’t letting his curiosity slow down, either. ‘I’ve been working with the astrophysicist Jeff Hazboun, who’s part of the NANOGrav project that tracks cosmic gravitational waves via pulsar triangulation,‘ he says. ‘It’s wild. What I’m interested in there is the problem of ‘groundlessness’—that is, in a universe without absolute reference points, how do we situate ourselves and act with purpose? In many ways, it’s an extension of the thinking in the Macrophones project.’Be on the lookout for more from Brian House, whether it is musical or more of a documentary; he has a knack for finding the most interesting ways to capture and manipulate sound, and maybe through that, we can all come to appreciate sound and our home planet with more empathy and grace than we have ever given it. Like the David Attenborough of sound, Brian House is leaving an unparalleled love letter to planet earth in the liminal space where science and art collide, bridging the gap between what we can witness and what we stand to lose.Check out more from Brian on his website, Instagram, and Bandcamp pages!
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Gruenrekorder @ Textura – TOP 20 AMBIENT / ALTERNATIVE
Sound of the Wetlands | Various artists
Everyday Infrasound in an Uncertain World | Brian House