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.