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?

RJDJ

For my Project 1 book review, I wrote about Michael Bull’s book Sound Moves: iPod Culture and Urban Experience (London: Routledge, 2007). Bull argues convincingly that sound in Western culture has followed a trajectory of increasing privatization and mobilization, which can be traced from Odysseus’s sailors using wax to block out the sirens’ song to the present proliferation of white earbuds in urban centers (and non-urban places) the world over.

In Bull’s view, the sonic privatization of public space through iPod use allows users to exert control over increasingly chaotic urban soundscapes and the oppressive rhythms of capitalism. Users claim a sense of power over their individual soundscape, which is often likened to a personal soundtrack to the film of one’s life. This control, though, is at least partly illusory, taking place as it does within a highly structured framework of consumption and branding.

Both Bull and Paul Virilio (as cited in Matthew Tiessen’s essay “Uneven Mobilities and Urban Theory”, in Steinberg and Shields’s What is a City?, Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press) discuss the complex interactions between mobility, power, and technology. Both find deep faults with the increasing digital mobility of society and the power that it promises to bestow. Virilio warns us of the possibility that mobility is, “in fact, breeding physical inaction and willed disability (i.e., immobility)” (Tiessen, p. 119), and Bull cites denial of the “ ‘physicality’ of urban relations” (p. 28) and “fear [of] unmediated experience” (p. 155) as two undesirable outcomes of the spread of musical mobility.

I have a feeling this nifty iPhone application might cast those arguments in a new light (oops—visual metaphor!):



This video also brings up questions of control in design. Yes, the experience of walking in the city listening to (or through) RJDJ is still mediated experience, absolutely. But it seems to me that getting your iPhone to spit out re-interpretations of your acoustic surroundings is a different matter than attempting to cushion your experience of grating urban noise with a soundtrack of your choosing. RJDJ prompts you to cede some control of your personal sonic bubble to a predetermined framework; after you choose the “scene” through which the application filters the sounds of urban (or non-urban) space, the rest is up to the urban environment that surrounds you.

The soundtrack it creates might not foster a feeling of invulnerability, like Bull identifies among iPod users. Rather than feeding sound from your iPod to block the city from your ears, RJDJ constructs a porous filter for urban sound that feeds the city to you through one of many possible acoustic fun-house mirrors. As the gentleman in the video explains, this connects “the outside world to your acoustic perception” rather than protecting you from it entirely, albeit in a manner that’s still structured, still tied to the rhythms of consumerism.

There’s a lingering strangeness about RJDJ that I can’t quite put my finger on. Maybe it’s the tension between spontaneity (the unexpected and unpredictable nature of the urban surroundings that determines the sound in your earbuds, and that may have prompted you to insert them in the first place) and structure (the preprogrammed “scene”, the iPhone interacting more intimately with the urban environment than a standard iPod would). In terms of design, it sits in an interesting place: the application was designed to let the (urban) environment design your personal soundscape. Maybe it’s the slightly eerie comparison drawn in the clip between RJDJ and a “digital drug.” RJDJ opens up a fascinating way to experience urban environments, but hopefully not at the expense of listening, unmediated, to the sounds that make this experience possible in the first place.