Week 4

SOUND SPACE

Class 4 – Feb 26

*Assignment 1 Due!

We explore how sound plays a critical role in defining space and how techniques such as binaural recording emphasize the critical union between sound and space. What is the difference between space and place? Sound map show and tell.

FURNITURE MUSIC:

·       Francisco Lopez. Buildings (New York). 2001.

READ:

·       Excerpts from Janet Cardiff. The Walk Book. Walther Konig, Koln, 2005. (not found)

·       Aaron Ximm. Recording in the Field. www.quietamerican.org

·       Iain Chambers. “The Aural Walk.” Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music. 2004. (class files)

·       Michel De Certeau. “Spatial Stories.” The Practice of Everyday Life. University of California, 1984.

LISTEN: (personal library)

·       Excerpts from Janet Cardiff. Her Long Black Hair. 2003.

·       Aaron Ximm. Annapurna: Memories in Sound. 2002.

FURTHER EXPLORATIONS

• Quiet American, Field Recording Art Resources
• 6Villages: acoustic environments in change
• Acoustic Ecology: "works to increase personal and social awareness of our sound environment"
• Acoustic Space
• Acoustic.Space.Set: "a series of programmes that will include made sound works that are using the material gathered at the VIRAC radiotelescope in Irbene, Latvia"
• Earth Ear: environmental sound art galleries
• "Eavesdropping on America's National Parks," 8/23/05 NPR program
• "Geography and the Sound of Place," 11/14/04 NPR program

 Robyn Ravlic, "On the Raft, All at Sea": soundscape radio piece -- 2002 UN Association of Australia Media Peace Prize for Best Radio   


 Links to sound walk project: 
 A sound map of places along the Columbia river, real and in memory.

• Mapping Project:
  Energy, Environment, Columbia

            I have been practicing soundwalks for a few months in preparation for my upcoming thesis. This project for this class became an exercise for a larger project around narratives that swirl around energy, the environment, and the Columbia river. Over thirty dams populate the river, which begins in eastern Washington and drains into the Pacific near the port of Astoria.

            I wanted to capture the sounds of the dams, the electrical grid, and the changing landscape of power and energy in the area. The intention is create a portrait of the sound-place of this corridor of activity. While the dams provide “clean” energy, the river has paradoxically become a transport zone for new coal mines in Montana and Wyoming. Protest has sprung up over the importation of the fuels throughout the region, and the final sound in the series speaks to this. In the last piece I also used radio alerts and noise, weaving them between excerpts from an interview with a former merchant marine who speaks about environmental degradation and how that is connected to  the shipping trade.

 

Notes on this weeks readings and listenings

Buildings-Furniture Music

Air conditioning. Something that does not feature in my sense of sound and architecture, but that for most of the industrialized world plays a role. The sense of being inside a wind tunnel, the rattling of aluminum; a shell around air.

Quiet American

3 Trains

This work reminded me of John Cage’s comments regarding music and sound, as he sought to remove the distinctions between the genres. The rhythmic interplay of the three trains was accompanied by sounds of ringing, hissing and friction that were inherently musical, and I could not distinguish the sources of the sound, which continued to sound like gongs, guitars, and cymbals. The voices of the Vietnamese floated through the piece like a small chorus ritually drowned out by the orchestra of mechanized sound.

Stuck

The recording did not relate to my own experience of waiting out storms, wherein there is often a hushed quality and a lack of mechanical sounds because of a lack of power. Repeated jump cuts of media rich sound give the recording of waiting in the storm a clipped, mechanized quality. I was left wondering about the intention of the piece. So often I expect sound works to be interpretive, or illustrative, while this was not. Perhaps the piece is focused on a microscopic aspect of the storm experience. It becomes about a momentary destabilization, a repetition of the glitching of human activity that occurs when we are trapped.

Annapurna

This piece recalled Gordon Hempton’s conception of silence. Annapurna is surely a place where little noise from the industrial world can penetrate, and these recordings attest to that reality. Ironically, there is little true silence on this piece, and the ambient sound feels three dimensional around the narrator’s voice. Does industrial sound cause a certain retraction and internalization of our sense of sound? If the sounds that surrounded us consisted of voices, bells, bird calls and water, would we feel ourselves becoming integrated into the fabric of the soundscape? I felt this as I experienced the sounds of Annapurna.

I was impressed with the variety of sound that the Ximms gathered: from a warped Hindi tape to Yaks sleeping in the moonlight. Theirs was a very practiced approach to phonography.

Her Long Black Hair

We are led on an outward journey that is at the same time an inward journey, expressed in the metaphor of one foot back and one foot forward, as the narrator says, we are never at home in the present. A here and a there, according to Certeau. The story starts and stops as if the narrator begins to remember pieces in the telling, yet this work has an overwhelmingly pedantic quality. She is in control, and in control of us. We are told what to see, think, and even what to do. Still, what we are told to do is often a surprise- like walking backwards. In this case, is the foot that was going towards the future being dragged into the past? I remember a Japanese friend telling me that walking backwards with your eyes closed is a cure for insomnia. This piece has the opposite effect, despite its dips into reverie I feel I am being led into wakefulness. But whose wakefulness? The narrator’s or mine? Again, from Certeau, "the story tirelessly marks out frontiers. It multiplies them." Perhaps this is simply a function of story that I have never noticed in quite this way.

Do we explore her internal world only or are we meant to experience a sense of real place- the zoo, Central park in winter. Boundaries like these seem more mutable in the world of sound art after listening to this piece, perhaps not even as important as they first appear. I was surprised to find how much Ian Chamber’s Aural Walk provided a context for the piece. In particular, “The ingression of such a privatised habitat in public spaces is a disturbing act. Its uncanny quality lies in its deliberate confusion of earlier boundaries, in its provocative appearance 'out of place.” Yet Chambers’ speaks about the experience of walkmans, while Cardiff’s piece reminded me more of a play, wearing binaural headphones. I am left again with the sense that artificial boundaries color my experience of sound.