Starting conversations

(Note: I thought I'd pressed the "publish post" button on this one a while back ... in fact, I had pressed the "save now" button, and here we are. I wonder: would outfitting the buttons with different sounds help prevent such situations from occurring? It's nice to think so ... Anyway, I've updated my thoughts to reflect some newer posts on City of Sound, as well as my previous post about the boundaries--or lack thereof--between sound, noise, and music.)

I'm really enjoying this project. It's been very helpful to think about sound in the context of writing about it: "what does this sound tell me about cities"--or "what does the city have to tell me today about sounds?" And it's changed the way I interact with urban space. For example, a while back, exhausted and on my way home from a tedious but necessary outing to a big-box store, I was held up in traffic by a passing train--and I realized that I was excited by the opportunity to be stopped by a train, because I got to record it. (I'm going to have one more crack at this html mystery tomorrow; hopefully I will be able to update this post with a neatly embedded sound file ...)

Edit: no luck on the embedding front ... but here's a link.

I want to keep the blog alive after this seminar ends, and this thought, plus feedback I received on the project, makes me think I should explore other blogs about sound and cities. So here I go ...

First stop: Google. Search: "sound blog." Hits: 261 000 000. I was curious to see what would come up with such an open-ended search term; interestingly, on the first page--along with music blogs, which I expected to dominate the list--there's this blog, City of Sound. Dan Hill has some fascinating musings about sound in urban environments and architecture. (He also has a killer instinct for punning.)

In terms of my own project, Hill also has impeccable timing. Yesterday's post about multitalented multimedia artist Steve Roden is really juicy. Among other things I've written about for this project, Roden, as he's quoted by Hill, touches on the neglect of sound in design (specifically architecture) and--indirectly, but nonetheless--the (constructed) differences between noise and music. Writes Hill:

Then to a piece composed for the Alvaro Siza pavilion at the Serpentine Gallery in London. This used contact mics on the surface of the building, such that the sound of the building itself was tapped and sent through guitar pedals. He also used the architect’s drawings to generate scores - he shows an image of beautiful Siza sketches, coloured pencil drawings. He performed an electronic and acoustic piece in the space, and then mapped the space in sound based on readings from particular points within the building.

With this, he thought “maybe you can hear what the space looked like”. Then, claiming that “I’m not a musician”, he performs the Siza pavilion on a small glockenspiel, reading from his own graphical notation...

Not a musician--that is interesting. Here's another example of the employment of the sound/noise/music categorization on an individual level, interpreted in terms of the aims of a specific project or artist. And this post throws the idea of urban noise as an uncontrollable opponent into question. Working in concert (sonic metaphor intended) with the built environment to produce desirable soundscapes makes just as much sense to me as tilting at windmills of sanitized, quantified silence. Hill mentions the Positive Soundscapes project, which I've come across before, as an exemplar of this idea.

I wonder, though, why the blog--whose interests in the scope of urban design and environments seem to be very broad--is called City of Sound? I've left my two cents ... hear's hoping. Yeah, I can pun, too.

The Sound of Music?

It seems strange, I guess, that I haven't really addressed music yet in my posts. A couple of comments I received from our peer review session touched on this, and asked different versions of a really good question: how would I differentiate music from sound? For example, asked one person, "does music wafting out of an open window become a city sound, or is it still firmly music?" Another person wondered about the possibility of defining more sound typologies, like pet sounds. It seems to me that these two ideas have something to do with each other, so I'll try to discuss them together here (the sound typology idea is something I'd like to expand on further in other ways too).

From what I've read about sound in urban environments, it seems like the words "noise" and "music" are most often used to denote (pun intended) types of sound; sound seems to be the umbrella term under which noise and music reside. Sound seems like a reasonably neutral term, but music and noise usually come attached to value judgments. Whereas noise is pejorative or negative (as in "noise pollution," which, as of the time of writing, pulls in 1 660 000 hits on Google versus 140 000 for "sound pollution"), music is usually used to describe something pleasing--hence "music to my ears."

Of course, the music wafting out of your neighbour's window--or, as I experienced a few months ago, pounding so loudly in an adjacent apartment that it rattles the dishes in your cupboard--could provide you with a highly unpleasant experience. Here, though, music becomes reinterpreted as noise; you don't file a "music complaint" with your landlord or the city bureaucracy.

Music is associated with control, order, purposeful creation. As an art, as a creative pursuit, it's assumed to be premeditated to some degree. Even improvised jazz usually occurs within some kind of structural framework (a key, a mode, a time signature). But as I outlined in my previous post, sound in cities, and noise in particular is often presented as something uncontrolled, an inevitable fallout of urban life that has to be muzzled through regulations based on quantitative measures.

In a privately printed publication called The Book of Noise, Murray Schafer writes: “The modern city has become a sonic battleground. Man is losing” (1970, p. 2). But city sound is made by people. People make music, people make noise ... the connection may be more or less direct depending on the situation, but ultimately it's people that drive cars, operate machinery, turn on sirens, or what have you. So where does that leave us? I'm not sure. It seems as though we pin down our ideas about sound to suit our purposes in a given situation. Like so many systems of categorization, the sound --> music/noise framework is constructed in a somewhat arbitrary fashion, and it shows its seams when it's considered in terms of urban environments--hence the uncertain status of music drifting out of a neighbour's window. It's music, but it's also sound--and it could very well be noise, depending on who you talk to.

Wind chimes

Apparently there are wind chimes on the southeast corner of 109th Street and Jasper Avenue. Who knew? Not me--at least not until they were mentioned in our seminar--and not many of the friends I've talked to (or, as with some of them, they know of the chimes' existence but had never thought to actively take note of them). The chimes, a public art installation designed by ID8 Design Group, won an award from SEE Magazine--for "Most Perplexing Public Art" in 2004.

Appropriately enough, the magazine with the visual moniker focuses largely on vision in its evaluation of the chimes. The writer sarcastically suggests alternate projects that seem to have a visual focus: staircases, a balcony, disco balls--things that would improve or provide a different view of the landscape, making up for the visual shortfalls of the "ugly downtown corner." In the process, the review misses the point; although the wind chimes are clearly designed with a certain aesthetic outcome in mind, they are wind chimes. I agree that this particular intersection isn't much to look at, but it seems like prettying up the visual environment would be secondary to their acoustic mandate. If ID8's explanation of the project is any indication, this would seem to be the case. The chimes, ID8 claims, are meant to take one aspect of place-based identity--the distinctive prairie wind--and harness it to create a new kind of identifying marker, a "gateway" whose "soaring landmark ... speaks the language of the wind."

However, I wonder if the chimes themselves miss the acoustic point, at least in that spatial context. I visited the site three times this week, and at none of these times could I discern a contribution from the chimes in the soundscape of that street corner. Granted, it wasn't unusually windy at the times I visited; maybe I'll have to keep going back. But it seems like the very fact of its location at a busy intersection, where its visibility is at its highest, will ensure that its audibility is at its lowest. The more vehicles rushing by, the more growling motors will cover any potential sounds the metal pipes have to offer. One also wonders how much relevance an installation whose inspiration is "wind as one of the defining elements of the prairies" has in a busy urban intersection surrounded by tall buildings that affect wind patterns. While the idea is a nice one, it's perhaps a bit nostalgic ... In the end, I agree with SEE: this is a somewhat perplexing project. My reasons for coming to this conclusion, however, are very different.

So, a question to consider ... how could a sound installation capitalize on the "soundmark" (Murray Schafer's term) of that specific urban environment? What would the public reception be like for an installation that used the sounds of traffic? Would it be understood as glorifying undesirable city noises, versus the implicitly superior noises of nature?