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.

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.