Hii celebrates our human experience by exploring the use of sound in film+tv, music, art, the internet, and culture at large.

The print magazine + interactive audio-first site offer inclusive stories aimed at making concepts of audio accessible and connecting our global community.

It is edited and founded by One Thousand Birds, a leading design studio for audio. Hii is published and headquartered in NYC, with audio production studios in LA, Lisbon and Bogotá.

Info

Madeleine Fisher

PROFILES - Sonic Identity

Read

Conor Kenahan

PROFILES - Sonic Identity

11.7.2023

Read

Taking A Moment To Listen Helped The Josh Craig Make The Right Decision

COMMUNITY - Wish You Were Here

11.2.2023

Read

Musical Pedagogy: Musical Knowledge Production Across The Centuries

MUSIC

10.19.2023

Read

Songs That Melt, Flow, and Freeze Into Shapes: Karen Juhl on SILVER

SCIENCE+TECH - Synesthesia

9.26.2023

Read

This Clearance Bin Find Hooked Paul Maxwell On Music Making

PROFILES - Sound Catalyst

9.19.2023

Read

Laura Brunisholz's New York in Grey

SCIENCE+TECH - Synesthesia

9.12.2023

Read

Pouch Envy Took Tracking Down This Jungle Record Into His Own Hands

MUSIC - Favorite White Label

9.5.2023

Read

Magic and Pasta: DJ Tennis on Cooking & DJing

PROFILES

6.22.2023

Read

Mel Hines Isn't Afraid To Try New Things

COMMUNITY - Water Cooler

6.15.2023

Read

Exploration & Pursuit: Parallel Creative Processes in Music and Science

SCIENCE+TECH

6.8.2023

Read

What Does Death Sound Like? How to Listen at the End.

SCIENCE+TECH

5.25.2023

Read

Scott Lazer Believes The Best Ideas Are Right In Front Of You

COMMUNITY - Water Cooler

5.18.2023

Read

Exploring Animal Vocalizations & Communication: Moos & Oinks Have Meaning & Birds Are Karaoke Champs

SCIENCE+TECH

5.17.2023

Read

We're Hearing Flowing Melancholy In This Photo by Eponine Huang

HII FREQUENCY - Call-N-Response

5.10.2023

Read

Sex, Candy, and Sage Green

SCIENCE+TECH - Synesthesia

5.5.2023

Read

A Decade Later, Jacob Gambino Can't Stop Listening to Kowton's 'F U All The Time'

MUSIC - Favorite White Label

4.25.2023

Read

CALL FOR PITCHES: Issue 3 "PUNK IN THE POST-APOCALYPSE"

HII FREQUENCY

3.14.2023

Read

Hi-Tech Therapy: AI's Arrival In Sound Wellness

SCIENCE+TECH

3.2.2023

Read

Sounds of the Peruvian Andes: A Musical Cosmology (ft. Tito la Rosa)

SOUNDNESS

1.10.2023

Read

Jesiah Atkinson

PROFILES - Sonic Identity

11.23.2022

Read

Michael Lovett (NZCA LINES)

COMMUNITY - Wish You Were Here

11.11.2022

Read

Beneficios de Hablar en Voz Alta

SOUNDNESS - Translations

11.9.2022

Read

Parenting & Surveillance

CULTURE

11.4.2022

Read

Sarah Weck

PROFILES - Sonic Identity

11.1.2022

Read

MAY I TOUCH YOU?

HII FREQUENCY

10.28.2022

Read

Experiencing the Unseen: Tangible Impacts of Infrasound and Ultrasound

SOUNDNESS

10.24.2022

Read

AI Music Optimism in the Face of Dystopia

MUSIC

10.14.2022

Read

Call-N-Response: 8-Ball Community

HII FREQUENCY - Call-N-Response

10.11.2022

Read

29 Speedway and Laser Days @ Pageant

COMMUNITY - Wish You Were Here

10.7.2022

Read

Food Sounds

HII FREQUENCY - We Love

10.5.2022

Read

Breathing, Laughing, Snoring: Your Personality Sounds

SOUNDNESS

9.26.2022

Read

Sleep Trackers: The Unsound Recording Devices Disrupting Our Sound Sleep

SCIENCE+TECH

9.23.2022

Read

Respirar, Reir, Roncar: Soundtrack Personal

SOUNDNESS - Translations

9.20.2022

Read

Crystal Guardian 'Savory Silence' Interview

PROFILES - Hii Interviews

9.19.2022

Read

Noise as the Enemy: Anti-Noise Efforts in the Early 20th Century

CULTURE

9.16.2022

Read

Tone Deafness & Melody

SCIENCE+TECH - Phenomena

9.13.2022

Read

O Som Dos Bailes: Brazil’s ‘Cook Out Music’

MUSIC

9.9.2022

Read

Then Who Was Phone? Phones In Horror

FILM + TV

9.7.2022

Read

Jaimie Branch: A Life in Sonic Communication

COMMUNITY

9.2.2022

Read

Audio As Evidence: The January 6 Hearings and Watergate

CULTURE

8.31.2022

Read

Amy Claire (Caring Whispers ASMR)

PROFILES - Hii Interviews

8.24.2022

Read

Nyshka Chandran

PROFILES - Sonic Identity

8.19.2022

Read

The Language of Music

MUSIC

8.16.2022

Read

Loading ...

Blindfolded Sonic Trips with The World According to Sound

Listen

Contributor Jennifer Waits travels back in time to the early 20th century & faces once-normal pastimes, like coughing in a crowded lecture hall, courtesy of The World According to Sound’s Winter 2022 Listening Series, an at-home audio experience where listeners are encouraged to create a distraction-free listening environment.

While it might seem weird to put on an eye mask and headphones and sit in a dark room to listen to hair clippers buzzing, the whirring of dental equipment, and water lapping through PVC pipes, I’ve been enjoying these sorts of sonic trips while tuning in to The World According to Sound’s Winter 2022 Listening Series.

As is the case for so many people, my world has shrunk in the past few years. Whereas the months prior to March 2020 were filled with theater, art openings, museum visits, and live music; much of my cultural consumption now takes place from the privacy of my own home. But that’s often a distracted, noisy place, populated with fellow humans, Zoom calls, pets, ringing telephones, and cell phone alerts; not to mention the urban audio collage seeping in the windows. Pre-pandemic, it was a more typical experience to push pause on all of this noise by escaping into a live, in-person performance away from one’s dwelling. And while that is certainly happening again, there are also more shows working to approximate the live experience for listeners remaining at home.

The World According to Sound’s 12-week series includes live events streamed online utilizing spatialized audio. Shows take place every Thursday at 6pm Pacific, followed by a live Q&A. Producers Chris Hoff and Sam Harnett describe the audience experience as being akin to the early days of radio, when all listening was synchronous. And there’s something to be said for the opportunity to listen with others and then come together after to share thoughts and reactions. This project is an outgrowth of in-person shows that Hoff and Harnett used to produce, in which they toured around in a van hosting multichannel performances that made use of 8 speakers and 2 subwoofers. Although that experience is hard to replicate online, they were up for the challenge and started doing listen-at-home shows in 2020. Harnett said that they soon realized the possibilities with both binaural recordings and with the intimacy facilitated by headphones.

Chris Hoff and Sam Harnett (Source)

Beyond the simultaneous, shared live experience that’s key to the series, Hoff and Harnett’s vision also calls for a distraction-free listening environment. A few days before the first show, I received an envelope in the mail containing an eye mask and a program with explicit instructions on “how to listen with pleasure.” The 12 steps include finding a comfortable place, eliminating interruptions, turning off lights, using headphones, putting one’s phone on airplane mode, and wearing the enclosed eye mask. I dutifully followed the guidelines and readied myself for “Centennial Sounds” on January 6 and came back for more the following week for “Outside In.” I eagerly anticipated both shows, as there was a promise of vintage audio the first week and COVID sounds the next week. These back-to-back, contrasting presentations proved to be an interesting combination and an inviting preview of what the entire series has to offer.

Program + Eye Mask (Source)

WEEK 1: CENTENNIAL SOUNDS

With an emphasis on pre-1923 material (the most recent of which entered the public domain on January 1, 2022), the first World According to Sound show this year, “Centennial Sounds” was perfect for an audio technology history nerd like me. Incorporating sounds dating back as far as the 1800s, this was a fitting beginning to the series, as it truly transported the listener back in time to the earliest remaining recordings. I especially appreciated the audio timeline that included recordings made using a variety of early technologies, including sounds preserved on paper, foil and wax. I love hearing scratchy old recordings and as the evening went on, I found them increasingly haunting, like sonic ghosts speaking to us from the past. This is especially true in a segment where we hear audio letters that a family recorded on their graphophone home cylinder machines and mailed to each other across the miles from Omaha, Nebraska to Oakland, California and back. Other recordings made by everyday folks included diary entries and audio of howling dogs, crying babies, and barnyard animals. Perhaps most amusing to me were some 1916 recordings of sneezes and snores.

Educational recordings also crop up in the show, with various “how to” records, including language lessons, exercise narrations, and a scoutmaster doing scout patrol calls like loon cries and calls used by woodsmen. In 2022, we may marvel at all that we can learn from a YouTube video, but it’s incredible to hear these audio-only ancestors.

Amid these archival sounds is the only surviving recording of a castrato, which truly makes the mind wander back to a time when such practices were allowed for the sake of art. Every time I heard the term “only surviving” uttered, it made me think about all of the lost or perhaps yet-to-be-discovered audio from days gone by. As the show went on, I lost track of time and was startled when narration alerted me that there were 20 minutes remaining. The conclusion of the show was an interesting, more experimental mixture of the new and the old, as the producers blended vintage with modern recordings and editing treatments. My sense of dread grew as the show moved into the dots and dashes of Morse code, the scratches of handwriting, and unsettling radio recordings from numbers stations, in which male and female voices are heard reciting numbers in different languages to unseen spies. It was a dreamlike, spooky end to this evening of time travel. Reluctantly, I removed my eye mask, turned on the lights, and returned to the present day and my computer to listen to a live Q&A and see typed audience reactions in the chat. As the creators and listeners came together, we learned more about the sounds that we heard, some of which we may have only guessed at while listening.


WEEK 2: OUTSIDE IN

In contrast to “Centennial Sounds,” which focused on audio from a century ago and beyond, “Outside In,” places its emphasis on the recent past by presenting “a sonic representation of the pandemic’s early days.” Produced and originally presented in May 2020, this show was the kernel of the idea that led to the entire listening series. The first part includes material recorded at home in April 2020 and it’s a recognizable time capsule that immediately brings to mind my own memories of suddenly sheltering in place as COVID-19 spread. One of the main tenets of the World According to Sound is to let sounds tell the story, so there’s often no verbal explanation of what we are listening to. As I listened throughout this episode and the last, I would play a guessing game with myself, trying to decipher the sounds. At times it was obvious, like the whistle of a tea kettle and the clinking of dishes or the opening of a can and the subsequent satisfyingly fizzy sounds of a carbonated beverage. Occasionally we’d be treated to sounds for an extended period of time, like the tension-filled stretching noises of a balloon being twisted, before the source of the sound is explicitly revealed through spoken clues (“balloon crown!”).

The second section of “Outside In” presents sounds from outside of the home, describing them as “things we used to do.” While this show was produced in 2020, many of the sounds in this portion of the show were recorded pre-pandemic and it’s meant to evoke aspects of daily life that we were missing in early 2020. We hear the hustle and bustle of a busy San Francisco restaurant: patrons chatting about the menu, eggs being cracked and the sizzles of food being cooked. I know this restaurant and can call upon an image of it in my mind as I listen. Suddenly there’s a buzzing near my ear and it feels like I’m getting a haircut. Now things are getting very interesting, as the binaural microphones that Hoff and Harnett have in their arsenal of audio gear are being used to full effect. We hear the uncomfortably high pitched whir of cleaning tools alongside thin sprays of water and intermittent suction amid remarks by a familiar-sounding dentist (who turned out to be my own). We then travel to a jam-packed lecture hall in 2019 where 1000 students are tapping away on their laptops. Most notable to me and to my fellow listeners was the coughing that seemed to popcorn throughout the room. Once a regular aspect of many live recordings, these sounds telegraph something quite different today.

My eyes start to water beneath my eye mask. I feel thirsty, but don’t want to break the spell of the experience by searching for a glass of water. Like with the previous week, I’ve lost all sense of time and begin to wonder if the show is ending soon. The concluding section of “Outside In” takes the listeners “far away from home” and we venture to space where interpretations of electromagnetic data confuse and distort my understanding of what I’m hearing as I wonder what is natural and what is synthesized. Things get more disorienting and I’m reminded of the blizzard-like rush of air on the Matterhorn roller coaster at Disneyland and this makes me feel like I’m in danger, with a creature lurking in the shadows. Just like the week before, I’m a bit on edge before turning the lights back on and drifting out of the extended audio-induced hallucination. As my eyes start to focus, I get excited about convening and debriefing with fellow travelers. Did they hear what I heard? Did they see what I saw?

The World According to Sound at Gray Area, San Francisco, on August 26, 2021 (Source)

TUNE IN TO WINTER 2022 LISTENING SERIES

The World According to Sound presents its Winter 2022 Listening Series on Thursday nights at 6pm PT through March 24, 2022, with season passes and single event tickets available for purchase. As with the shows that I heard, future performances will include a range of sounds, including music, sound sculpture, quadraphonic recordings, archival material, and nature. Collaborations with Kronos Quartet (February 3), ornithologically-minded BirdNote (February 10), sound artist Bill Fontana (February 24), electronic musicians Matmos (March 17) and comedic dramatists The Firesign Theatre (March 24) will round out the series.

Hearing is Believing: Audiobook Narration, AI, and the Art of Translation

Listen