of sound echoes through the room: metallic pings, rattles, and clatters, some sharp, some soft. At the base of the wall, white text scrolls up the screen of a computer monitor, revealing the names of the audio files producing the sounds—among them "44 Magnum Bullet Casing Concrete Drop"; "Bullet Cartridge, Ball M9, drop to wood"; and "multishell barrage for liquid bullet effect"—some 200 sounds in all. Walsh created the piece with her then-husband, artist and sound designer Chris Kubick. Along with 100 sounds already in the couple's vast sound effect library, they recorded 100 new sounds using an enormous bag of bullet casings collected at a local gun club, dropping them against different surfaces around their Oakland home. Walsh views the piece as a taxonomy of sorts, "reading the world as an archive of sound." Issue 2 (2007) Issue 2 is a rubber doorstop, or wedge featured in The Thing Quarterly. On the top surface of the wedge, set into the surface of the wedge, was a note from a young Anne Walsh, written in 1973, to the tennis star Billie Jean King. The note was a fan letter sent to Billie Jean King, just after she had beat Bobby Riggs in the Battle of the Sexes Tennis Match. Room Tone (2007) 4-channel audio installation, variable duration A room tone is a recorded element of sound design, often employed in the movie industry, to impress the sonic ambience of a depicted environment. It is the sound of “silence” in a room, though never quite silent as each room tone is inflected by different characteristics such as sonic reflections bouncing off physical architecture, the absorptive presence of bodies, and other kinds of technology present (i.e., the subtle hum of air-handling systems and lights). Room Tone is run by a computer program that generates sounds drawn from a database of approximately 1,000 room tones through four separate channels. The program may layer, cut up, and combine these room tones, varying in duration and volume, to create a new, dynamic, and visceral room tone for any particular space. Constantly changing and evolving, the aural experience of Room Tone humorously plays with the oft-cited adage of John Cage: “There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot.” Books Hello