Jaume Plensa's sound sculpture for the lobby of the Burj Khalifa is music for 196 places, "cymbalized" by cymbals, performing in one place. Unfortunately this a terrible video of it. Why mask the sound of the piece with stock music?
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Sometimes it's the quiet things that wind up making all the noise. The process of erosion is a continuously silent event that results in things that look like they were made by the loudest sounds. The moon looks silent and peaceful, but is made of millions of years of loud sounds, as would be experienced on earth. Metaphors play with our minds. Sounds are loud then "soft". Continuous soft sounds can shape hard objects. Accumulated time makes soft sounds loud, if loudness is equal to force. It is in some ways, the shape of time. "Take a stick and rub it with a stone and almost nothing happens— a few scratches are the only visible sign of change. Rub it a hundred times and there is still nothing much to see. But rub it just so, for a few thousand times, and you can turn it into an uncannily straight arrow shaft. By the accumulation of imperceptible increments, the cyclical process creates something altogether new."--Daniel Dennett, "Cycles" [Brockman, John. This Will Make You Smarter: 150 New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking (p. 171)] Here is a photo that evokes a loud scraping sound: What kind of force could gouge so deeply into a piece of granite? Or was it the stridulating effect of softer sounds over time?
Our sonic umwelt is so tiny, not only by the range of hearing but by the world itself. We are made to hear a tiny speck of imaginable sounds that occur in the universe. Yet, there are experiences happening in all matter of being that is beyond our sensory thresholds happening on vast time scales and ostensibly making no sound. Just as light has a physicality to it and has mass, so does sound, and extends as far as its energy can take it. The artist James Turrell (who creates volumes of light) used to talk about the "thingness of light". The simple analogy in sound is the feel of bass, that might not have a defined pitch, but propagates and travels through materials instead of reflecting off of them, and extends out of the spaces in which they are produced. Sounds can define places as well: The outer isobels can define the circumference of a town and/or tribal boundaries. In medieval times, The town limits are where the church bells begin to be audible with normal hearing. |
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