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Web Sites
Sound Junction (Scout Report). It’s hard to learn about music without listening to it closely, and this multimedia website created by a group of organizations in Britain (including the Royal Academy of Music), provides a surfeit of music from all genres. Through interactive games, musical excerpts, interviews, and other such devices, the SoundJunction site is a great way for anyone to learn about music. A good place to start is the “What can I do on SoundJunction?” overview feature, which walks users through the layout of the site. After that, visitors may wish to look at the left-hand side of the homepage and click on through such areas as “Explore Music”, “How Music Works”, “Music in Context”, and “Composing and remixing”. For budding Beethovens, there is the “Composer Tool”, which allows users to create their own music. Music educators and those who are just generally curious will find that this site merits numerous return visits, and it may prove to be quite habit-forming, in the best possible sense of the phrase.

Recordings
Soundscape Vancouver 1973 and 1996. This is a 2-CD set of sounds recorded around Vancouver, B.C. (Canada) in 1973 and again in 1996.
    The 1973 CD contains recordings of the ocean, harbor, music of various city quarters, all excerpts from a 2-record set originally published by the World Soundscape Project. R. Murray Schafer, director of that project, wrote: "The aim of the World Soundscape Project is to bring together research on the scientific, sociological, and aesthetic aspects of the acoustic environment. The Vancouver Soundscape is our first field study of an actual environment ... "    The 1996 CD contains Vancouver soundscapes created by 4 artists (Sabine Breitsameter and Hans-Ulrich Werner from Germany, and Darren Copeland and Claude Schryer from Canada). It's not only fascinating aural history, it's wonderful art.
     All four compositions were composed during the Soundscape Vancouver '96 project at the Sonic Research Studio of Simon Fraser University from May 6 to June 5, 1996. A final concert (June 7, 1996) presented these works to the public. An 8-channel computerized diffusion system, developed by Barry Truax at Simon Fraser University using hardware and software developed by the Harmonic Functions group, transformed the conventional concert hall environment into an electroacoustically enhanced place for soundscape listening. Source: Cambridge Street Publishing  and CDemusic.

Publications
Alain Corbin
Village Bells The Culture of the Senses in the Nineteenth-Century French Countryside
ISBN: 0-231-10450-2
Columbia University Press
October, 1998

Village Bells, Alain Corbin's exploration of the “auditory landscape” of nineteenth-century France, a story of lost sensory experiences and forgotten passions. In the nineteenth century, these instruments were symbols of their towns and objects of both ecclesiastic and civic pride. Bell-ringing served practical purposes of communication, marking both religious and secular time, as well as calling citizens to pray, assemble, take arms, or beware of danger. As Corbin shows, the bells also reflected the social, political, and religious struggles of the time. To control the bells was to control the symbolic order, rhythm, and loyalties of French village and country life.
    Using church archives and local documents, Corbin forges a unique history of the role of bells from the aftermath of the Revolution to the dawn of the twentieth century. He charts how the First Republic (1792–1804) moved toward a more secular society, turning many bells into coins and cannonballs and seizing others as property of the state. A gradual return to the religious use of bells occurred in the nineteenth century, even as their new secular roles were maintained. Corbin describes the battles over the marking of religious versus secular time, as calls to prayer, the celebration of religious feasts, and the marking of rites of passage—baptism, marriage, and death—competed with tolls indicating the passing hours or marking assemblies, elections, or republican holidays.
    Thoroughly documented and recounted with intriguing narratives, Village Bells provides an original approach to nineteenth-century French cultural, social, and political history. As Corbin notes, the bells are no longer essential to our lives—their qualitative, sacred time and space replaced by the quantitative, secular measures of the clock—but by understanding their lost symbolic and practical importance we open a window onto the age in which they rang. (Source: Columbia University Press)