Gary Edward "Garrison" Keillor is an American author, singer, humorist, voice actor, and radio personality. He created the Minnesota Public Radio (MPR) show A Prairie Home Companion, which he hosted from 1974 to 2016. Keillor created the fictional Minnesota town Lake Wobegon, the setting of many of his books, including Lake Wobegon Days and Leaving Home: A Collection of Lake Wobegon Stories. Other creations include Guy Noir, a detective voiced by Keillor who appeared in A Prairie Home Companion comic skits. Keillor is also the creator of the five-minute daily radio/podcast program The Writer's Almanac, which pairs poems of his choice with a script about important literary, historical, and scientific events that coincided with that date in history.
Ambient music is a genre of music that emphasizes tone and atmosphere over traditional musical structure or rhythm. It may lack net composition, beat, or structured melody. It uses textural layers of sound that can reward both passive and active listening and encourage a sense of calm or contemplation. The genre is said to evoke an "atmospheric", "visual", or "unobtrusive" quality. Nature soundscapes may be included, and the sounds of acoustic instruments such as the piano, strings and flute may be emulated through a synthesizer.
Gong are a psychedelic rock band that incorporates elements of jazz and space rock into their musical style. The group was formed in Paris in 1967 by Australian musician Daevid Allen and English vocalist Gilli Smyth. Band members have included Didier Malherbe, Pip Pyle, Steve Hillage, Mike Howlett, Tim Blake, Pierre Moerlen, Bill Laswell and Theo Travis. Others who have played on stage with Gong include Don Cherry, Chris Cutler, Bill Bruford, Brian Davison, Dave Stewart and Tatsuya Yoshida.
A recording studio is a specialized facility for recording and mixing of instrumental or vocal musical performances, spoken words, and other sounds. They range in size from a small in-home project studio large enough to record a single singer-guitarist, to a large building with space for a full orchestra of 100 or more musicians. Ideally, both the recording and monitoring spaces are specially designed by an acoustician or audio engineer to achieve optimum acoustic properties.
Machine Head is the sixth studio album by English rock band Deep Purple. It was recorded in December 1971 at Montreux, Switzerland, and released on 25 March 1972 on Purple Records.
Pauline Oliveros was an American composer, accordionist and a central figure in the development of post-war experimental and electronic music.
A soundscape is the acoustic environment as perceived by humans, in context. The term was originally coined by Michael Southworth, and popularised by R. Murray Schafer. There is a varied history of the use of soundscape depending on discipline, ranging from urban design to wildlife ecology to computer science. An important distinction is to separate soundscape from the broader acoustic environment. The acoustic environment is the combination of all the acoustic resources, natural and artificial, within a given area as modified by the environment. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) standardized these definitions in 2014.
Nicholas Robert Turner was an English musician, best known as a member of space rock pioneers Hawkwind. Turner played saxophone and flute, as well as being a vocalist and composer. While with Hawkwind, Turner was known for his experimental free jazz stylisations and outrageous stage presence, often donning full makeup and Ancient Egypt-inspired costumes.
Deep Shadows and Brilliant Highlights is the third studio album by Finnish gothic rock band HIM, released 27 August 2001. The album was produced by Kevin Shirley, T. T. Oksala and HIM. The record had a troubled production, which lasted approximately eleven months. The prolonged recording process was partially due outside influences within the music industry hoping to repeat the success of HIM's previous album. As a result, Deep Shadows and Brilliant Highlights features a sleeker and more pop-oriented sound. It is the first HIM album to feature keyboardist Janne "Burton" Puurtinen.
The Deep Listening Band (DLB) was founded in 1988 by Pauline Oliveros, Stuart Dempster and Panaiotis. David Gamper replaced Panaiotis in 1990.
Paiste is a Swiss musical instrument manufacturing company. It is the world's third largest manufacturer of cymbals, gongs, and metal percussion. Paiste is a Finnish and Estonian word that means "shine".
Sound art is an artistic activity in which sound is utilized as a primary medium or material. Like many genres of contemporary art, sound art may be interdisciplinary in nature, or be used in hybrid forms. According to Brandon LaBelle, sound art as a practice "harnesses, describes, analyzes, performs, and interrogates the condition of sound and the process by which it operates."
Sound studies is an interdisciplinary field that to date has focused largely on the emergence of the concept of "sound" in Western modernity, with an emphasis on the development of sound reproduction technologies. The field first emerged in venues like the journal Social Studies of Science by scholars working in science and technology studies and communication studies; it has however greatly expanded and now includes a broad array of scholars working in music, anthropology, sound art, deaf studies, architecture, and many other fields besides. Important studies have focused on the idea of a "soundscape", architectural acoustics, nature sounds, the history of aurality in Western philosophy and nineteenth-century Colombia, Islamic approaches to listening, the voice, studies of deafness, loudness, and related topics. A foundational text is Jonathan Sterne's 2003 book "The Audible Past", though the field has retroactively taken as foundational two texts, Jacques Attali's Noise: The Political Economy of Music (1985) and R. Murray Schafer's The Tuning of the World (1977).
Sonic Syndicate was a Swedish metalcore band from Falkenberg. They were originally influenced by Swedish melodic death metal bands such as In Flames and Soilwork, as well as American metalcore bands like Killswitch Engage and All That Remains.
Jesse Glass is an American expatriate poet, artist and folklorist.
Brenda Hutchinson is an American composer and sound artist who has developed a body of work based on a perspective about interacting with the public and non-artists through personal, reciprocal engagement with listening and sounding. Hutchinson encourages her participants to experiment with sound, share stories, and make music. She often bases her electroacoustic compositions on recordings of these individual collaborative experiences, creating "sonic portraits" or "aural pictures" of people and situations.
Afternoon of a Georgia Faun is an album by American jazz saxophonist Marion Brown recorded on August 10, 1970 and released on ECM later that year. The sextet features fellow saxophonists Anthony Braxton and Bennie Maupin, pianist Chick Corea, and vocalists Jeanne Lee and Gayle Palmore, backed by two percussionists on one side and five on the other.
The Sugar Factory is a 2007 collaborative album by English experimental musician Fred Frith and Scottish percussionist Evelyn Glennie. It comprises material drawn from improvisations by Frith and Glennie recorded during the making of the 2004 documentary film Touch the Sound about Glennie, who is profoundly deaf. The album was released in 2007 in the United States by Tzadik Records as part of their "Key Series".
In music production, the recording studio is often treated as a musical instrument when it plays a significant role in the composition of music. Sometimes called "playing the studio", the approach is typically embodied by artists or producers who favor the creative use of studio technology in record production, as opposed to simply documenting live performances in studio. Techniques include the incorporation of non-musical sounds, overdubbing, tape edits, sound synthesis, audio signal processing, and combining segmented performances (takes) into a unified whole.
Always is a solo album by saxophonist and composer Matana Roberts. Consisting of an untitled 33 minute track, followed by a 10-minute encore, it was recorded on May 6, 2014, at Park West Studios in Brookyln, New York, and was released in 2015 by Relative Pitch Records.
