It must be "place cells" that affect auditory memories, such as song you had listened to in a particular place, reminds you of the place when you relisten to it. If sound is a navigational device it is logical that this happens.
In the African Forest area of Brookfield Zoo they have embedded speakers hung in the trees and on the ground that run loops of bird calls. I thought that it would be interesting to actually use pitched elements along with it. Animals probably don't perceive sound patterns as music as we do, but over time they would perceive it as a part of the acoustic ecology, even if artificial.
To be strictly literal, music that is played in stores is Music-For-Places. It is in stores that we can hear music we haven't heard in a long time (or never want to hear again), and it commands our attention.
While shopping in a hardware store, they were playing "Shine On You Crazy Diamond", and I stuck around a little while just to listen to it. Pink Floyd has nothing to do with hardware, but is forced upon it through serendipity. An ironic lyric for a hardware store: You wore out your welcome With random precision Rode on the steel breeze... 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? 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. Some abstract digital images associated with this track.
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. A possible place music, the Zadar Sea Organ in Crotia. The tonal center appears to an E minor pentatonic scale. |
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