Urban parks generally always have quite a lot of sirens, helicopters and planes at regular intervals in the background. The ubiquity of them makes them imperceptible, except when you tune into them. Here it is interesting to contrast helicopters with the calls of blackbirds. There are no keynotes, except for the prosody of passing voices.
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The track announcements ("Track No. 5", "Track No. 6") that repeat ad infinitum at train stations tend to produce a composite keynote of an F#.
Here is a clip with the F# keynote as well as some other errant pitches of E and D# on the periphery, evoking either F# Dorian or Mixolydian. https://app.box.com/s/mzt1hi7il3mu64j51rjh Most places that have some continuous flat-line sounds like HVAC systems (which can also produce rumble) can evoke pitch or you can easily add one. It would be an interesting exercise to ask people what pitch they hear if in fact there is a keynote from continuous brown noise. The sound of the future (at least from an ambient perspective) is both about sound intensity and sound character. Cities will always have the same kind of noise soundprint, comprised of the various sound elements that typify a city. New materials will make different transient sounds, like the close of a door. There are the future-retro sounds that we already know, and that might be a part of it; but the sound of the future will probably be much quieter, at least from an intensity perspective. The new SF trends in film have the future looking similar to now or perhaps five years into the future. The films Her and Transcendence use this approach. There may be a burst of innovation at some point, at which time we'll experience a 1950s redux that will resemble then1950s in the 2030s as much as the 1950s resembled the 1870s. But this could simply be the trope of continuous progress. Perhaps progress only has so much steam to propel it into the future, or once you arrive at a future you decide that it is good enough. Booktrack has some interesting possibilities for ambient backgrounds in books. www.booktrack.com Some abstract digital images associated with this track.
A city can have many architectural layers. Similarly, there can be many sound layers that appear and disappear over time. Field recording can preserve sonic history layers to jog the memory of place and experience when listened to years later, in the same location or other locations. Sound can function like the framed photograph--a reminder of people and places in our lives. Soundtrack for a place romanticized by a film, that romanticizes a place that was in many other films. When you see the actual place in Memphis, it is as common as thousands of other places. Here I am using the track "Complex City" as a possible "soundtrack" for a slideshow of stills from the film Mystery Train by Jim Jarmusch. The actual Arcade Restaurant featured in the film is here. 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. An excerpt from an interview with film/sound editor Walter Murch on infrasound created by bodies of water. A possible place music, the Zadar Sea Organ in Crotia. The tonal center appears to an E minor pentatonic scale. |
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