The sound of a city hasn't changed that much since the industrial era. Most of what we hear in urban environments are primarily the sounds of machinery and traffic, the sound of tires on pavement and the squeaking of brakes. In long time scales, the 1920s was about 10 minutes ago, so we can't expect marked differences.
Most traffic noise is comprised of tire noise, also called "cupping". Until the tire/pavement relationship is changed (materials, size, etc.) the sound of an urban environment won't change much. If you tune into the sound of tire noise, it is neither compelling nor annoying, but nobody would miss it if it weren't there. It is interesting to also consider what sounds the white noise is masking: there may be lots of interesting urban sounds that are hidden by tire noise drones.
(See The Roaring Twenties project by Emily Thompson, an exhaustive exploration into the history of urban noise.)
Noise/Music Layers
Very seldom can a place have distinctive musical attributes, either in cities or in nature, as the ambient sound is more random, unexpected and sometimes obtrusive.
Sound recordist and composer David Dunn explains this experience while doing field recording in Africa:
"As I put on my headphones, I immediately heard the sound of a kerosene-driven pump used to bring water up from the aquifer to the watering hole. This, I was later told, was the rule and not the exception. These pumps are a common feature in many game parks because of the artificial boundaries imposed on wildlife by humans."
Flat-line sounds (such as the continuous drone of machines) closed the gap (or destroyed the boundary) between antiquity and modernity and are now commingled, for better or worse.
In my experience as a composer, writing music for places takes into account how flat-line sounds and other soundmarks may blend with the foreground in interesting ways, in which musical and extra-musical sounds can become one experience, and serve as an encoding process for memories of the place on first hearing. For example if you attended a concert in the forest, returning to that spot and listening to the recorded performance would reactivate memories of that event, much like a photograph.
The visual analog is the superimposition of old photographs over new, contrasting the changes that have taken place.
Google Street view now has a Time Machine mode that does exactly this.
Listening to music (or other audio) with headphones while in the field, allows for the mixing of variegated background sounds (nature) and the fixed foreground (the "built environment") of sound. These "natural" sounds now include the flat-line sounds of machines.
In David Dunn's experience, the sound through the headphones represents both the foreground and background. Listening to the field recording years later at the original location would reactivate the memory of it, even if the location was drastically different. The foreground is the present experience and background is the past experience. Another example would be to listen to a concert performance staged in a large field through headphones, in the same location 10 years later, perhaps now occupied by a strip mall.
Sountracked Soundmarks
Places might not have any sound at all, and creating one artificially is entirely a compositional process, not unlike the scoring of a film. One could go to that location and play that music and the experience would be similar to a film montage. Ideally it is nice to have an existing sonic backdrop (such as the Sea Organ or Lukas Kuehne's Tvosongur sculpture in Iceland) where there is a keynote to work from.
In the piece Ridge A I am using the coldest and quietest place on earth as a sonic backdrop. How does one write a piece of music for such a place? What are the ambient sounds? There are base camps there and most likely one would hear the hum of machinery, and jets taking off and landing.
Soundtracks are always artifice, the complete opposite of what places really sound like and the emotions we experience in them. The expectation is that if we are are on an African Safari all we will hear are the sounds of nature, but are surprised that there are the sounds of modernity mixed in. The aural experience (including the obtrusive sounds of machines) is diegetic, meaning it exists in the real world, as opposed to one imagined or romanticized.
I was in a store once where there was a squeaky escalator that had the pitch of D#, and I wrote a piece of music that used the pitch as a harmonic pivot. Each time I played an E major chord, an E major 7th chord resulted. You could go to that store and listen to the recorded piece under earbuds as the "figure" and the squeaky escalator as the "ground". In Chicago the elevated trains squeal around each corner of the Loop approximately every 10 minutes. These are places that have music embedded in them, and like the store with the squeaky escalator, have a perpetual pedal point to work from.
In this recording, taken in 1975 by the World Soundscape Project research group, the auction barker in the French fishing village Lesconil is rapping so fast as to produce a drone at a D natural. If still a persistent type of sound in that environment, it is a perfect place to write music for because you always have that "background vocal" singing a D natural.
Persistent phantom sounds, such as the earworm and tinnitus are yet another layer of aural experience. Sounds that have piquancy, such as car alarms, have a tendency to "burn" into memory, similar to visual after-image effects.
Car alarms in particular are one of the most annoying additions to the urban sonic landscape in terms of after-image, yet they can provide useful keynote pitches. It is ironic that we have become increasingly deaf to car alarms, prompting new ways for car security that doesn't use sound at all, such as immobilization.
The most important layer, however is attention to ambient sound, which sadly gets less and less attention. Given that our experience of the sonic environment is becoming more atomized through private listening, it is an interesting exercise to attempt to layer them.
Most traffic noise is comprised of tire noise, also called "cupping". Until the tire/pavement relationship is changed (materials, size, etc.) the sound of an urban environment won't change much. If you tune into the sound of tire noise, it is neither compelling nor annoying, but nobody would miss it if it weren't there. It is interesting to also consider what sounds the white noise is masking: there may be lots of interesting urban sounds that are hidden by tire noise drones.
(See The Roaring Twenties project by Emily Thompson, an exhaustive exploration into the history of urban noise.)
Noise/Music Layers
Very seldom can a place have distinctive musical attributes, either in cities or in nature, as the ambient sound is more random, unexpected and sometimes obtrusive.
Sound recordist and composer David Dunn explains this experience while doing field recording in Africa:
"As I put on my headphones, I immediately heard the sound of a kerosene-driven pump used to bring water up from the aquifer to the watering hole. This, I was later told, was the rule and not the exception. These pumps are a common feature in many game parks because of the artificial boundaries imposed on wildlife by humans."
Flat-line sounds (such as the continuous drone of machines) closed the gap (or destroyed the boundary) between antiquity and modernity and are now commingled, for better or worse.
In my experience as a composer, writing music for places takes into account how flat-line sounds and other soundmarks may blend with the foreground in interesting ways, in which musical and extra-musical sounds can become one experience, and serve as an encoding process for memories of the place on first hearing. For example if you attended a concert in the forest, returning to that spot and listening to the recorded performance would reactivate memories of that event, much like a photograph.
The visual analog is the superimposition of old photographs over new, contrasting the changes that have taken place.
Google Street view now has a Time Machine mode that does exactly this.
Listening to music (or other audio) with headphones while in the field, allows for the mixing of variegated background sounds (nature) and the fixed foreground (the "built environment") of sound. These "natural" sounds now include the flat-line sounds of machines.
In David Dunn's experience, the sound through the headphones represents both the foreground and background. Listening to the field recording years later at the original location would reactivate the memory of it, even if the location was drastically different. The foreground is the present experience and background is the past experience. Another example would be to listen to a concert performance staged in a large field through headphones, in the same location 10 years later, perhaps now occupied by a strip mall.
Sountracked Soundmarks
Places might not have any sound at all, and creating one artificially is entirely a compositional process, not unlike the scoring of a film. One could go to that location and play that music and the experience would be similar to a film montage. Ideally it is nice to have an existing sonic backdrop (such as the Sea Organ or Lukas Kuehne's Tvosongur sculpture in Iceland) where there is a keynote to work from.
In the piece Ridge A I am using the coldest and quietest place on earth as a sonic backdrop. How does one write a piece of music for such a place? What are the ambient sounds? There are base camps there and most likely one would hear the hum of machinery, and jets taking off and landing.
Soundtracks are always artifice, the complete opposite of what places really sound like and the emotions we experience in them. The expectation is that if we are are on an African Safari all we will hear are the sounds of nature, but are surprised that there are the sounds of modernity mixed in. The aural experience (including the obtrusive sounds of machines) is diegetic, meaning it exists in the real world, as opposed to one imagined or romanticized.
I was in a store once where there was a squeaky escalator that had the pitch of D#, and I wrote a piece of music that used the pitch as a harmonic pivot. Each time I played an E major chord, an E major 7th chord resulted. You could go to that store and listen to the recorded piece under earbuds as the "figure" and the squeaky escalator as the "ground". In Chicago the elevated trains squeal around each corner of the Loop approximately every 10 minutes. These are places that have music embedded in them, and like the store with the squeaky escalator, have a perpetual pedal point to work from.
In this recording, taken in 1975 by the World Soundscape Project research group, the auction barker in the French fishing village Lesconil is rapping so fast as to produce a drone at a D natural. If still a persistent type of sound in that environment, it is a perfect place to write music for because you always have that "background vocal" singing a D natural.
Persistent phantom sounds, such as the earworm and tinnitus are yet another layer of aural experience. Sounds that have piquancy, such as car alarms, have a tendency to "burn" into memory, similar to visual after-image effects.
Car alarms in particular are one of the most annoying additions to the urban sonic landscape in terms of after-image, yet they can provide useful keynote pitches. It is ironic that we have become increasingly deaf to car alarms, prompting new ways for car security that doesn't use sound at all, such as immobilization.
The most important layer, however is attention to ambient sound, which sadly gets less and less attention. Given that our experience of the sonic environment is becoming more atomized through private listening, it is an interesting exercise to attempt to layer them.