ABSTRACT
Since 1990, sound artists Bruce Odland and Sam Auinger, O+A, have been working on urban sounds, such as those of rain and traffic noise, altering them with mechanical devices and making music out of them. The first important project of O+A was Garden of Time-Dreaming, presented at 1990 edition of Linz's Ars Electronica Festival. That noise was elaborated and modified through several effects such as morphing and vocoding and then mixed with other sounds, water, wind and traditional instruments, amplified and broadcasted on the top of the hill. When working on the transformation of noises into music, Odland and Auinger refer to the researches on aural perception developed by Oliver Sacks. According to Sacks, noise and harmonies are decoded by different parts of our brain. The harmonic sounds produced by Odland and Auinger's works could be perceived by a different part of the brain from the one decoding the dissonant magma of untreated noise.
