This hour we’re coming to you from inside the Third Coast Institute of Sound — a fictional museum we’ve dreamed up where all of the exhibits and artifacts are dedicated to things that make sound and noise.
The Cat Piano
By Victoria Ferran with Sound Engineer Chris O’Shaughnessy for Soundproof (ABC RN, 2016)
The history of the cat piano goes back centuries and raises unanswered (and perhaps unanswerable) questions about the relationship between music and noise, human and animal.
Vox Ex Machina
By Delaney Hall and Roman Mars for 99% Invisible
In 1939, an astonishing new machine debuted at the New York World’s Fair. An operator sat at the organ-like device’s curved wooden console with a giant speaker towering behind her. She faced an expectant audience, placed her hands on a keyboard in front of her, and then played something the world had never really heard before — a synthesized voice.
Mr Pumpernickle's Musical Gas
By Victoria Ferran with Sound Engineer Chris O’Shaughnessy for Soundproof (ABC RN, 2016)
In the 1830s, the French were imagining a delivery method for music long before the radio was invented, all thanks to gaz musical .
Roald Dahl's Sound Machine
By Victoria Ferran with Sound Engineer Chris O’Shaughnessy for Soundproof (ABC RN, 2016)
Roald Dahl's short but slightly disturbing story tells of a man named Klausner who invents a machine that can hear sound the human ear cannot hear.
Gone With A Trace: The story of lost items on the US/Mexico border
By Joan Webber for The Current (CBC, 2015)
Every year, thousands of people try to secretly cross into America by foot. It is a brutal, daunting trip. Some make it, some are caught and sent back, and still others die in the effort. And along the way the landscape is littered with objects left behind, testaments to the struggle people endure trying to get here. Photographer Richard Misrach and composer Guillermo Galindo have been collecting these objects left by migrants and transforming them into musical instruments, in the hopes of giving voice to statistics.
Khlebnikov's Radio of the Future
By Victoria Ferran with Sound Engineer Chris O’Shaughnessy for Soundproof (ABC RN, 2016)
‘The Radio of the Future—the central tree of our consciousness—will inaugurate new ways to cope with our endless undertakings and will unite all mankind.’ — Velimir Khlebnikov, 1921