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Monday, April 19, 2010
Above is the spectrogram to this richly textured five-minute sound file of space dust particles hitting Earth's ionosphere as they are received and recorded on Thomas Ashcraft's forward scatter radio array. We could probably listen to it over and over, replace our CADing music with an extended version lasting hours. All night long eavesdropping on the earth infinitesimally accruing new terrain expelled by extraterrestrial landscapes. It's like Haydn's The Creation re-composed by Ligeti.
Is Eyjafjallajökull producing similarly marvelous soundscapes?
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
Another installation at this year's International Garden Festival at Jardins de Métis/Reford Gardens is Soundfield by Doug Moffat and Steve Bates.
According to the brief, this avant-garden is “an intervention that frames and presents this experience by creating an electronic sound field amidst the poplar trees – building on it, transforming it, and ultimately creating a woven fabric of sound.”
As visitors wander through the site they will become aware of slowly shifting and changing sounds that are familiar but not clearly identifiable – the buzz of insects, perhaps, or white noise from a radio. Five sensors capture changes in wind speed and direction that are then translated into subtle changes in the sounds broadcast through a grid of small speakers and amplifiers that are distributed throughout the site. A conversation develops as the trees whisper back and the electronic sound field changes in response.
But consider, meanwhile, Alex Metcalf's Tree Listening Installation, in which you listen in to the “quiet popping sound that is produced by the water passing through the cells of the Xylem tubes and cavitating as it mixes with air on its way upwards. In the background is a deep rumbling sound that is produced by the tree moving vibrating.”
Consider, as well, Markus Kison's touched echo, a site specific sound installation attached to iron railings on a hill overlooking the city of Dresden. There, the public can hear the recreated aural landscape of Dresden during a nighttime bombing raid in 1945. But to listen in to the sounds of airplanes droning and of sirens wailing and of bombs whistling as they fall to earth and then exploding, you have rest your elbows on the iron railings and cup your hands over ears.
As explained by the artist, the sound “is transmitted from the swinging balustrade through the arm directly into into the inner ear (bone conduction) and cannot be heard by anyone else. Visitors suddenly get an idea of what it must have felt like that night; they travel back in time to this situation. Everyone by dealing with this terrifying event becomes a kind of 'memorial' of it. In their role as a performer they put themselves into the place of the people who shut their ears away from the noise of the explosions.”
Combining these two other installations, perhaps one could imagine a re-working of the first so that rather than the recording and listening devices scattered about the place, they are implanted into the trees. And instead of sitting on a bench or just standing there having reconstituted ambient noises blasted at you, there is a more direct, physical engagement: you cup your hands and let elbow and bark touch. Or you press your ear against the trunks to hear the soundtrack.
And yes, you can even hug them, letting the vibrations course through your body — reverberating through your bones and echoing through the chambers of your lungs until they hit an ear drum, much changed and re-sampled by your own body. It's a Forestry and Anatomy mashup.
To hear the sunless interiors of their roots, you'll have to lie down flat on the ground, on your stomach, your ear pressed against the soil.
And who knows, perhaps the sound emanating from the earth and then filtered through a certain body type may sound incredibly like the otherworldly harmonics of Jupiter.
Saturday, January 17, 2009
For a few seconds this week, in between the live feeds of the spectacle in Washington, D.C. and on the Hudson River, CNN went silent. When reports of possibly another round of shelling in Gaza, its anchors and reporters had the bright idea to stop talking and let viewers simply listen in on whatever that could be heard from yet another live video feed, this one peering into the war zone from afar. No international journalists are allowed inside, so it was the best that CNN could do at breaking news reporting from the trenches.
“Is that some kind of a humming noise?” the anchor asked the foreign correspondent, breaking the silence.
We didn't hear a humming noise; we heard something droning. But was it from a surveillance UAV or the movement of tanks sonically reverberating through holy bedrock? Or was it something coming from our heating vent? Could it have been the running motor and refrigerator fans of the delivery truck parked outside our HQ? Was it coming from here or from thousands of miles away?
This apparent and quite accidental conflation of sonic and physical space led us to imagine a temporary sound installation, which would go something like this:
1) Overlay a scaled map of Gaza City on a map of Chicago.
2) Set up microphones throughout Gaza City.
3) Network these microphones individually to their own speakers in Chicago.
4) The locations of the microphones and speakers should match on the superimposed maps.
When the next major conflict erupts, turn them all on, and Chicagoans will eavesdrop on the aural landscape of another city: the whirring blades of helicopters, the whistling of mortars as they streak across the sky, the roar of burning buildings, metal grating on metal grating on rocks and dirt, the sorrowful cries and vengeful wails of widows and orphans, the crackling statics from a speaker disconnected to an obliterated mic.
Of course, where Chicagoans might listen in will depend on the orientation of the maps.
Perhaps this twinning results in one speaker getting sited on a school playground, and so the joyous screams of children there will mingle with those of telepresent children playing during the brief lulls in the fighting.
How about a speaker on Federal Plaza, right on the same block as Obama's Miesian HQ? Its counterpart in Gaza is actually on a prime location to pick up the thundering shockwave of Israeli jets crossing the sound barrier. The plaza would thus come under similar sonic attack, turning it into a battlescape. Moreover, as there is no way of knowing when it gets blasted again, the plaza becomes an anxious landscape, wherein, after several exposures, federal employees acquire post-traumatic stress disorder.
Will one of the city's Olmsted parks be serenaded by the natural soundtrack of war?
Of course, most speakers will likely be on the streets and inside buildings, embedded into the sidewalk pavement and office walls, adding to the ambient noise of the city. Is that a mortar explosion or a car backfiring? Is that a malfunctioning siren humming in B-flat or the hum of the HVAC system?
Two soundscapes melting into each other.
