Pet Sounds

What struck me most when I read Yoshiharu Tsukamoto’s article on pet architecture was the idea of affect. I love the playfulness of pet architecture, its appeal to an irrational, emotional something that represents rather the opposite of traditionally rational, predictable approaches to city planning and design. Its playfulness is resourceful; if necessity is the mother of invention, the need to make use of leftover urban space has spawned pet architecture as a clever approach to design. Its demonstration of lighthearted creativity in the face of imposed and imposing structure makes it a very endearing concept.

I’ve been keeping an ear out for pet sounds. It might be hard to pick out one specific example--especially since sound itself is often presented as something willful and rule-flouting. Are all sounds pet sounds? Maybe not. There are sounds—clocks, train whistles, school or church bells—that uphold institutionalized temporal and spatial structures rather than playing in the liminal spaces those structures neglect. Sound marks rhythms, both cyclical and linear (Lefebvre, 2004).

As it happens, I do have a pet sound candidate in mind. Walking to the LRT, I like to cut through the legislature grounds, taking the underground pedway to Grandin station. The legislature building is designed in an imposing Beaux Arts style presumably meant to inspire feelings of awe and reverence towards what it houses and represents—the seat of provincial politics and site of important debates and decisions. Being such a place, there is a constant ‘murmur’ of surveillance in its atmosphere: security cameras, guards in booths above ground, and a hollow echo in the pedway that amplifies voices and their words.

Walking in the pedway one recent morning, I came to a set of doors where the visual identity of the legislature grounds proper—bricks and concrete in varying shades of brown—changes to the seafoam green and turquoise of the tunnel leading under 109th street to Grandin. The acoustic identity changes here as well; once through the doors, the echo recedes a bit and sound takes on a more muted character. The set of doors present a liminal space between the two underground sections.

Just before I approached the doors from the legislature side, I heard an eerie, swooping wind noise:



It seemed to approach the pedway through an opening above ground, sweeping down from above the left door to the lower corner of the right door. It moved downwards and forwards at once, like a playground slide set along the doors. It gained and lost strength, but broke off entirely only when one of the doors was opened. Entering the green pedway section, I noted that the sound persisted there once the door had closed. It was unsteady, dipping and soaring like a bird on an air draft, and changing its overall pitch from high to low to high again. Its playful quality (which might not come through in the above clip), its changing characteristics, and its occupation of a liminal space made me think of pet architecture. The sound immediately elicited an affective response from me—it made me smile. It was not a sound of surveillance, not the rhythmic footstep of a government employee; it had an irregular rhythm all its own. It felt like an animal, or a friendly ghost—a playful and winking aberration in an environment representing control and order. To play on a quote from Bull and Back (2003) in their Introduction to The Auditory Culture Reader: while this sound may have been no respecter of space, it certainly felt like a (re)spectre.

Sound itself might be playful as a rule (oxymoron?), but it was the affective nature of this sound, its “sense of presence” (Tsukamoto, 2003, p. 249), that makes me inclined to think of it as pet sound.