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. 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. 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. |
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