Showing 2 items matching "acoustics"
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Sound in Space
... ...acoustics......With possibly the finest reverberant acoustics of any space in Melbourne, the magnificent Palladian architecture of the Long Room at the Customs House provided a direct counterpart for musical performances. Astra’s first concert here, on July 10 1981, combined the Astra Choir with leading Australian contemporary ensemble of the time, Flederman to present an important new work by Australian composer Graham Hair. ...Music always interacts with the architecture in which it is heard.
Melbourne has some wonderful acoustic environments. Often, these spaces were built for other purposes – for example the splendid public and ecclesiastical buildings from the first 100 years of the city’s history, and more recent industrial constructions.
Exploiting ‘non-customized’ spaces for musical performance celebrates and explores our architectural heritage.
For 30 years, the concerts of Astra Chamber Music Society have ranged around Melbourne’s architectural environment. Each concert has had a site-specific design that takes advantage of the marvellous visual qualities, spatial possibilities, and acoustic personality of each building.
The music, in turn, contributes a new quality to the perception of the buildings, now experienced by audiences as a sounding space - an area where cultural issues from music’s history are traversed, and new ideas in Australian composition are explored.
In this story take a tour of some of Melbourne’s intimate, hidden spaces and listen to the music that has filled their walls.
For further information about Astra Chamber Music Society click here.
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Museums VictoriaTime Flies in Museum Collections: Ornithology in Victoria
... Field techniques have changed dramatically since the early days to accommodate new research methods: genetics, element analysis, scanning, acoustics, geospatial data, high speed digital photography and videography. Hand-written field notes of old are replaced with iPads which record data directly into the museum catalogue, which in turn have been developed into free field guide mobile apps for the general public. ...Natural science collections are vast treasure troves of biological data which inform current research and conservation.
Alongside bird skins, nests, eggs and DNA samples sits a magnificent collection of rare books, illustrations and images which charts the history of amateur and professional ornithology in Victoria.
Whilst the big names such as John Gould (1804–1881), are represented, the very local, independent bird observers such as John Cotton (1801-1849) and Archibald James Campbell (1853–1929) made some of the most enduring contributions.
The collections also document the bird observers themselves; their work in the field, building collections, their efforts to publish and the growth of their ornithological networks. Captured within records are changes in ornithological methods, particularly the way data is captured and published.
However the data itself remains as relevant today as it did when first recorded, 160 years of collecting gives us a long-term picture of birdlife in Victoria through space and time.
