After investigating The Sounds of Making in East London, we were inspired to undertake a project of our own. Tom Bills creates custom guitars in his basement shop near St. Louis. Hear the sounds of the guitar-making process as well as stories of his most famous client, his family’s woodworking legacy, and the mighty Gorlok.
Guitar care and maintenance from Tom Bills:
The Gorlok – Credit: Susan Polgar
Bernie Krause grew up loving music and fearing the natural world. Following his influential career in music and composition, Krause decided to leave it behind and devote his efforts to studying the sounds of the natural world as a bioacoustician. Through his research, recordings, and his book, The Great Animal Orchestra, Krause is trying to raise awareness about how natural soundscapes have influenced our lives and how our actions can impact habitats all over the world.
This episode makes use of the following audio from FreeSound.org:
‘bird tweet.aif’ by tigersound, ‘Frogs’ by lepolainyann, ‘crickets.wav’ by Christoff45, ‘Forest Ambience Danish.wav’ by gim-audio, ‘BatWalk.wav’ by acclivity, ‘robin2.wav’ by reinsamba, ‘bus.aif’ by nextmaking, ‘Helicopter Landing’ by Mings, ‘Jet004.wav’ by weebrain, ‘AMB_Siren_Police_Pass_003.wav’ by conleec, ‘buttons02.wav’ by FreqMan
Featured Music:
The Chemical Brothers – “The Salmon Dance” from We Are The Night
The Meters – “Chicken Strut” from Struttin’
US Army Band – “Flight of the Bumblebee” composed by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov
Baha Men – “Who Let The Dogs Out?” from Who Let The Dogs Out?
Stan Shaff has been interested in the relationship between sound and space for well over 50 years. His Audium installation in San Francisco is an ever-changing sound art project that involves a control console forged from dozens of pages of schematics and a dome-shaped room with speakers placed everywhere from floor to ceiling. Find out more about the Audium experience and its development in this episode.
You can find more photos of Audium on Flickr.