Inspired by the recent bodyadvertising craze (the concept of auctioning advertising space on your body to the highest bidder) Floyd Hayes - a Brooklyn resident - came up with a new ad-dimension called 'voicevertising'.

Floyd Hayes put his voice up for sale on eBay, promising to shout out a brand name as loud as possible every fifteen minutes for an entire week, no matter what location or situation.

Quite fittingly, the highest bidder turned out to be 'HALLS Fruit and Breezers' - a company selling throat drops.

• video of Hayes in action

SoundAds is a telephonic advertising campaign where people, in contrast to traditional advertising, have to pay to get full access to the ad.

The campaign - which resembles the service you sometimes find at selected cultural landmarks - consists of a series of intriguing images that are tagged with a 0900 number, meaning that you have to pay via your phone bill to get the audible dimension of the ad.

The visual ads are made by Dutch photographers and illustrators and printed on posters, postcards and in publications. The audio-layer that comes with each ad, offers a short narrative story and/or sound composition that compliments the image.

The campaign was running in various Dutch media during March 2005 but if you missed it, you can see and listen to the ads (for free) at the SoundAds website.

• SoundAds

'Whispering Pillow', by Dutch product designer Endry van Zwam, is a pillow with wireless integrated speakers.

A sender connected to a TV or sound-system transmits the sound in a radius of 80 meters. The volume control is integrated in the pillow, that needs to be recharged every 8 hours.

Besides extending the functionality of ordinary sound speakers, the pillow is especially suitable for those with a hearing disability, according to van Zwam.

• Whispering Pillow

Reposado is a Mexican Hotel / Lounge / Restaurant that has become internationally known for its music.

But unlike the hip Paris concept Buddha Bar, the people at Reposado do not produce anything themselves. Instead, they are running an online radio station that streams a blend of Mexican, Bossa Nova, Salsa, Jazz, Tango, Funk, House etc. 24 hours a day.

Unfortunately, due its success Radio Reposado is often fully booked by global listeners.

• www.reposado.com.mx

The Dark Side of The Cell is an audio-visual event staged by media artist Anne Niemetz and nano-scientist Andrew Pelling that utilizes a recent discovery within nano-biotechnology: cellular sounds.

A special instrument called Atomic Force Microscope (AFM) is being used to extract sounds from yeast cells thousands of times thinner than a hair. Comparable to a record needle “feeling” the bumps in a groove on a record, the AFM 'feels' oscillations taking place at the membrane of a cell and the electrical signals can then be amplified and distributed by speakers.

Manipulating the cell with chemicals will result in a change of oscillation. Isopropanol will change a 'singing cell' into a 'screaming cell' and a chemical such as sodium azide will kill the cell, causing the emitted frequency to die away, leaving only noise.

• www.darksideofcell.info • www.npr.org

The Ringtone Society is an initiative by Dutch Muzieklab Brabant and SubmarineChannel that aims to liberate the world of ridiculous ringtones by inviting artists to compose original ringtones.

In order to contribute, you must accept the rules of the Society's manifesto, such as this one: "Ringtone musicians must always enlarge and enrich the field of sounds more. That is, they must respond to our needs of sensibilities."

You can download and listen to the contributions at the Ringtone Society's website.

• Ringtone Society

AudioShaker by Interaction and Product Designer Tom Jenkins, is a project that explores our perceptual understanding of sound.

The object can be used to record conversations (or other sounds) and subsequently mix the input by shaking it.

The conversation will be split into words that are poured out of the AudioShaker separately.

• audio shaker

"Alert" is an artwork by Austrian artist Barbara Musil, who reprogrammed the alarm systems of ten
vehicles from the region of Cluj in Romania and replaced the alarm signal with songs and texts relating to the theme of "theft".

The work received an honorary mention at the Ars Electronica Festival 2004.

0.K. Centrum

Instant city is an interactive music-building game by Swiss artists Sibylle Hauert and Daniel Reichmuth.

Participants - or players - are invited to create architectural compositions using semi-transparent building blocks and in the process make different modular compositions audible. What can be heard thus depends directly on how high the structures is and, many blocks are used and in which order.

Instant City neither has a winner or loser nor an ending - instead it is shaped as an endless collaborate social space.

• www.rosen-spademan.net