Stand still for a moment and close your eyes. Notice that splash! clink, clink! drip, drip, drip. chirp, chirp! pop! beep, beep! ding!? That was your summer holiday at the beach. With our smart phones, we snap tons of photos and shoot them out into the ether via instagram and pinterest, thinking we’ve saved our memories. But who thinks to capture these sound souvenirs, much less to consider them elements of fine art?

Now, Hear, This: Sound is getting huge attention in the art world. Experimental sound projects are proliferating with the rise in technological tools available to artists. As I write, MoMA is gearing up for its first-ever exclusively sound art exhibition, Soundings: A Contemporary Score (open August 10-November 3). The show’s renowned curator Barbara London believes it’s time to acknowledge that sound is the new frontier for contemporary art. Soundings encompasses the usual field recordings, along with sound scores, visualizations and architectural interventions. Stephen Vitiello, our next Fresh TALK guest, presents his 2010 A Bell for Every Minute in MoMA’s sculpture garden.

Sound art is not only finding new popularity in New York, but also around the globe. Untitled, at TETEM art space in the Netherlands, is the collaborative kinetic project of Zimoun, a swiss artist and sound architect, and David Sheidler, a German artist (July 4-September 1). The Electric Eclectics Festival (August 2-4) in Ontario, Canada, just featured an installation by Peter Bradley. Bradley, AKA Scrutineer, repurposes the old-fashioned cassette tape and walkman to create a completely unique sensorial encounter for each listener.

For Fresh Art International, an interest in the field of sound is not just a recent trend. In November 2012, Cathy Byrd spoke with with Sarah Oppenheimer in Fresh Talk: Sarah Oppenheimer, examining the artist’s new commissions at the Baltimore Museum of Art and how they engage new relationships to other work from the collection, including a lyric 2010 sound art piece by Turner Prize winner Susan Philipsz, who is another one of the 16 artists in the upcoming MoMA exhibition. Our ambient recording of Susan Philipsz’s The Shallow Sea is a special feature of this podcast. Listen up for our next Fresh TALK podcast with Stephen Vitiello in a couple weeks!