Week 3

Feb 19

METHODS FOR MAPPING SOUNDS

Class 3

• R. Murray Schafer, Part 3: Analysis, Part 4: Toward Acoustic Design, Appendix I In The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (Destiny, 1977/94): 123-267.(personal libary)

Links:

• Acoustic Ecology research, including discussion of methods
• Andra McCartney's Soundwalks
• Around Radio Road Movies
• Darren Copeland's Ten Questions for a Listener
• Hildegard Westerkamp's and Andra McCartney's Soundwalk in Queen Elizabeth Park
• Jon Drummond's Sydney Sound Walk
• Justin Bennett's Noise Map
• Mapamp: "uses existing structures and systems (architecture of a city, navigation and radio systems) to layer an artificial acoustic space over the original one"(website doesn't work, description found here)
• Some Quiet American audio documentarians discuss their methods
• SoundTransit: "SoundTransit is a collaborative, online community dedicated to field recording and phonography. On this site, you can plan a sonic journey through various locations recorded around the world, or you can search the database for specific sounds by different artists from certain places."
• Soundwalks 
• Studio 360 program on mapping

Toronto Island Sound Map

R.Murray Schafer’s Soundscape, the Tuning of the World is an interesting locus from which to view online and experimental approaches to phonography today. The book takes a sociological approach to understanding human relationship to sound across cultures and time. Schafer seeks to understand the history of sound preference, from Virgil’s dislike of saws to the modern Swiss’s love of bells.  Specific qualities of place are taken into consideration, such as the effect of living on an island and how that might influence a people's relationship to sound.

In continuation from the readings last week, it is clear that Schafer, as opposed to Oliveras and other composers like Cage, privileges natural sound over industrial or human sound.  In a passage that he seems to write in spite of himself, Schafer admits that certain sounds, for example jet travel, are embraced by people living in isolation or who have a love of mechanics. This made me wonder how far we can expect people to begin to prefer digital sounds, such as power buttons and the typical repetitive bleeps of video game music.

I wondered how sound preference might show up in some of the contemporary phonographic examples listed for exploration this week. Sound archiving websites like Soundtransit provide a kind of collage of located sounds. Users can plug in location names and take a trip around the world in sound, listening to clips that artists have uploaded into the archive. My trip went from Portland to Switzerland. In answer to my question, in Portland I heard the local nickel arcade, a vibrating fencepost on a London stopover, and a train rush by in Basel. The sounds are uploaded by various artists, and while it is curated, the artists appear to have total control over the content. Despite the offer of a trip around the world, this website provides a more general phonographic experience than a catalog or map of unique sounds around the world. Preferences, however, can be discerned from place to place.

Some of the other soundwalks and soundmaps fell a little short for me in terms of a developed relationship to place. While pleasant enough, Around Radio Road Movies and Jon Drummond’s Sydney Sound Walks felt similar to what I heard on Soundtransit- an archival gesture rather than an engaged document. From other classes, I found Angus Carlyle’s Some Memories of Bamboo and Terri Reub’s Core Sample represent more developed approaches to phonographic listening and sound mapping.

Darren Copeland’s 10 questions for a Listener and Some Quiet American’s advice from sound documentarians was a useful part of this week’s resources. Instruction in listening and recording environmental sound is not easy to come by, and is an important first step to learning how to visualize, map, and archive sound.

In the end, I felt that Schafer's book provided the best introduction to mapping and visualizing sound that I  encountered. It seems advanced even in today's world of Flash players and GPS enhanced audio maps. Simple but effective reformulations of X and Y axes such as Amplitude/Frequency quickly reveal how biased our paradigms of sound truly are.  Discussion of attack and gain with corresponding illustrations provide new ways of understanding how quickly we classify (and often dismiss) familiar sounds. Through inventing new keys and new notations, Schafer's focus on the composition of sound in place reveals new relationships and new effects.