Bone Conduction

There is something appealing about the way that a tiny piece of technology can radically alter your experience of listening. Bone conduction - just the name sends a slight chill down my spine. It sounds like a metal spike tapped straight into my skull, conducting electrons beneath the skin. The very idea of bone conduction forces me to become conscious of the calcium structure that holds my flesh upright. 

The technology uses your skull to transmit vibrations to the inner ear all the while leaving your ear canal unobstructed. You can hear the environment around you in addition to the sound playing through the headset. Music, a podcast, or whatever it is - bone conduction casts sound as a layer over your experience. 

Bone conduction has been used in hearing implants for decades, but we're now seeing a lot of commercial bone conduction headphones coming out, making the technology popular for everyday listening. I just picked up a set of bone conduction headphones, and I find myself walking around listening just for the sake of listening. Listening to two worlds overlapped on each other.

We are used to donning headphones and tuning out the environment in order to listen to a piece of music or a podcast. That requirement, to eliminate the surrounding environment, actually prevents me from enjoying a lot of digital content. I simply don't want to tune out my immediate environment. I like being available to people, even on a crowded train full of strangers. 

Furthermore, the city is full of interesting sounds. Could the soundtrack you walk with be an augmentation of those found sounds, rather than a replacement of them? Much the same as driving while playing music in your car with the windows rolled down, the soundtrack of moving through the city is a multi-layered experience with bone conduction.

I'm also fascinated with this grafting of technology to the skull, as an augmented ear. These cross-sections from a Chinese company's audio site seem to suggest that a tiny device can hack into the inner ear and re-program what we hear.  Audio parasites.

Also: this creepy photo which recalls a David Lynch film...

The way bone conduction works is most clearly exhibited by plugging your ears while listening with bone-conducting headphones. It's almost magical. Fingers blocking the ear canal, you can still hear the sound coming clearly through the bones in your head.

Bone conduction offers a way forward for me in the coming onslaught of virtual reality. Don't get me wrong, I love the feel of full immersion in the VR that I have experienced so far. But I'm more interested in how a virtual experience can successfully be layered over our analog experience. Bone conduction allows a co-mingling of real and virtual sound that itself is a largely unexplored, undesigned experience.

The Cave

Devlog 2.2.16

Soundscrapers are forming.
Dreaming of glaciers, they are mere ice crystals dancing in a dark cave.

This room diffuses 13 channels of sound. Controls are via a handheld gamepad, routed through Max/MSP.

An LED cross marks the locus of sound diffusion, where the spatiality of the virtual acoustic room is rendered at its sharpest.

The room is a simulation chamber for imagined and real architectural spaces. Building upon the  SPAT module developed by IRCAM in France, we are able to reproduce architectural spaces convincingly. We use both Ambisonics and VBAP as techniques to render sound sources.

Sound sources can be moved by the gamepad. It is not accidental that we use a gamepad, for gaming is the mode which has synthesized development in the room thus far. We are building small games to test how we perceive sound.

The speakers and insulation materials are concealed by acoustically transparent fibrous sheets. The lack of a visible sound source enables the visitor to be fully immersed in the sound. Sound is treated as a material itself, rather than just an effect projected by a loudspeaker. Ears can be easily deceived.

The cave is formless; those who enter make their own architecture.

(this is an ongoing project by 52-Blue, a collaboration between Nick Sowers and Bryan Finoki, and DEMILIT, a collaboration between Nick Sowers, Bryan Finoki, and Javier Arbona)

What Design Sounds Like

In two days I will be presenting at Design Observer's What Design Sounds Like conference, held at the School of Visual Arts (logically!) in New York.  I am excited to be a part of a great group including Nicola Twilley who will be talking about sound and food in "Sound Bites", Alexander Chen who will be presenting his work on music and code, and numerous others with presentations that sound fascinating. I'll be talking to Geoff Manaugh of BLDGBLOG in the afternoon of the conference about a whole range of topics related to sound and space. On the docket: silent cities, ancient ninja defense systems, quasi-forensic acoustic testing of space, and kitchen sinks that sing.

Although What Design Sounds Like will not be cast live on the web, you can follow along with @DesignObserver .

Relatedly, I have also just started a series of sound walks with Bryan Finoki titled (in)Fringe.  We'll be walking along, over, under, and through the varying edge spaces of San Francisco. Our line of inquiry runs like this:

We're intrigued by what constitutes a sonic fringe physically, culturally, and experientially. Questions we’re asking include: Can the shifts in power of a place be heard, and how (if at all) should we listen to them? How can a place be defined by an edge, or a lack thereof? What do these fringes suggest about the cultural dynamics of a given place?

Our first walk takes us to the Mission District, where we encounter forces of change in the historical and cultural center of the city. We walked a number of the streets in alleys in search of evidence of an "edge" condition - simply put, where the new meets the old, and how they mix (or don't mix) together. Have a listen:



Bryan and I will be continuing the exploration in future posts about the Mission, post-military sites such as Treasure Island and the Presidio, and more. Stay tuned!

Virtual Kabul

I had the pleasure of meeting Francesca Recchia last week while she was visiting the SF Bay Area. She is the author of several books which have come out this year. One of them is The Little Book of Kabul, which follows the lives of several artists living in Kabul over the course of a year. Francesca has been based in Afghanistan now for a few years, and she shared some great insights on life in a world where daily tension is quite palpable, and walking around a city, as much as we enjoy it here in the States, is greatly limited. 

We got to talking about sound sooner than later, and I found out Francesca has written a score for a construction site where she spent a lot of idle time, just sitting and listening to the sounds around her. She said the idea came to her while she was "bored".  Boredom, I believe, is where many wonderful creations begin.

I have always been interested in the sounds of construction sites, from the pile driving at massive building sites to the little pneumatic nail guns popping and hissing when stick-built houses are being framed up. These sounds reveal a lot about the culture of construction, the available technology and labor practices, and the larger economic changes that can sweep across a neighborhood. There is a lot to hear in the noise of a construction site, especially if you live next to one!

Francesca's site in Kabul, a restaurant under construction, was fascinating in part because her score was rich with sound that I could easily imagine hearing. What was more fascinating even was the spatial detail, the layout of the "orchestra", from left to right, front to back.

Here is an excerpt from the score:

{The wheelbarrow enters from the left, across the unfinished door, stumbling over the pink hose.  It is old and rusty; it squeaks its way across the courtyard}

Eeeak eeeak Eeeak eeeak Eeeak eeeak Eeeak eeeak Eeeak eeeak Eeeak eeeak Eeeak eeeak Eeeak eeeak Eeeak eeeak Eeeak eeeak Eeeak eeeak Eeeak eeeak

{A shovel lifts the dirt and scratches the bottom of the wheelbarrow.  The worker with broken fingers mixes the mud to plaster the wall}

Shhhtickkkk Shhhhhhtickkkk Shhhtickkkkkk Shhhhhhhtickkkk

{At the far end of the courtyard, the plastic hammer hits on wood: the frame of a window is coming into shape}

Thud Thud Thud Thud Thud Thud

Thud Thud Thud

{Bits of wood fall on the mud floor, like flapping wings of a lost butterfly}

An attempt at performing the score was in order. Francesca came into the Soundscrapers studio in Oakland, and we just started dropping construction sounds into the spatial mix.

In the sound studio, I have command of an 8-channel 3d sound array, which gave Francesca no small thrill when I demonstrated the array by sending WWII planes buzzing overhead, or when I filled the room with a large jazz ensemble. With our mix of sounds for this little site in Kabul, I think we knew it wasn't meant to replicate the actual experience, but rather prove a small point that a real place can be re-imagined, and re-made, into any number of scenarios.

The construction site itself is a place in transition, going from an existing space (an empty site or an old building) to some place new.

This piece has been composed for binaural playback, which means it is best heard with headphones. Listen:




I stayed truthful to things like the Kishore Kumar Bollywood song from 1969, emanating from one of the construction workers "shitty" cellphones. Other sounds we quickly downloaded from freesound.org (thanks to freesound users: Eelke, Good_vibes420, zinzan_101, and monotraum).

I shared an initial mix with Francesca a few days after she left, and she sent a note in reply:

"I like this almost symphonic dimension that this little piece evokes... it is not realistic, but opens to the possibility of imagining Kabul, of thinking about it beyond the sounds of war. This to me is incredibly powerful and fully embodies the spirit of the book."

I feel very much encouraged by this soundscape work, a kind of construction site in itself in terms of a virtual place born out of the fragments of sound left around on the internet, assembled in my 3d sound array. Not quite going the direction of music (see Schneider TM via @subtopes), but staying somewhere in the imaginative world of field recording.

Please visit Francesca's blog and you can follow her on twitter here.

Bits, Books, Buildings

Over the last six months I've been making things behind the scenes, from bits to books to buildings. A sorry excuse for not posting anything on the blog, really. But there is a lot of process here that I am excited to share.

From On the Making of Islands, 2012

I am making things at all scales. Small to Large. Architecture teaches us that the parts must relate to the whole, and that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The small parts give me as much pleasure to work on as the big parts. When it comes to putting together a building, everything from the interface with the building environment (a light switch, a door handle) to the total experience of living/working inside the building must be considered as a cohesive thing.  Not an easy task, given that projects stretch out for years. The office I am finishing up in San Francisco is just under two years in the making.

Meanwhile, little bits can be prototyped in an evening. Using Arduino and Pure Data, I made a useless prototype in which my computer says out loud "The light is on" when I switch the light on in my dining room and "The light is off" when I dim the light beyond a certain threshold. It was just a pure experiment to see if I could get things to talk to each other, and  yet, there is a kernel of something essential in this experimentation.

Architecture is expanding, both toward the small and the large. The traditional building is becoming less and less the vehicle for architecture (in which architecture is defined as an experimental spatial practice, not a service). We are witness to the most staggering scales of development around the globe, and simultaneously architects are getting ever smaller and focused with installations, digital tools, rapid prototyping, etc... as though architecture can live at all of these scales at once. And I do believe it can.

The ongoing experiments here at Soundscrapers:

Bits 1: C / C++ / Python / Pure Data

I have started to pick up a few programming languages, just to gain the basics of how programs are organized -- the software architecture. After reading the standard programming text "K & R" and working through the surprisingly fun "Learn Python the Hard Way", I discovered that the programming environment that seems to have been conceived for specifically me, the sound architect, is Pure Data. It's a visual programming language that among many many things, makes sound, and allows you to change sounds by connecting lines to boxes. About that simple, too.

A musical score composed graphically in Pure Data:

Bits 2: Sensors / Hacking the Home

I got a big box of sensors (detecting flame, humidity, light, magnetic fields, touch, sound, vibration...) plus an Arduino board. Plugging + unplugging, fingers crossed that nothing fries... modulating voltages, cutting and pasting little bits of code to see if the sensors can talk the way I want them to. And then, at a GAFFTA workshop, I got even deeper into the madness trying to get it all to talk to a network and... still working on this.


Bits 3: Hydrophone Recordings

Back in September I made a hydrophone and went "Soundfishing". I then produced an installation of this work in the entry at my office this January. It is a stereo recording of the Oakland shipping channel, in which I pan from underwater hydrophone recordings to above-water recordings.

Sound painting of bits: pushing sonic bits from a landscape we know into another that is unknown, an experience only possible via digital montage.

Book 1: On the Making of Islands - 184 pgs.

This release was long overdue - in December I put out a document of my thesis work and world travels documenting bunkers, former military bases, and current US military bases overseas.

The project zooms in on a fictional jet noise barrier on the island of Guam, where the military built up a colossal landscaped edge to an Air Force base in order to block the sound of its runway. The landscape becomes home to the endangered species on the island, and eventually the military leaves due to internal pressures.  This book is the document of six professionals ranging from a geologist to a sonic archivist who go to the island 15 years after the military has left to examine what has become of it - a tourist mecca, a cave-dwelling bird sanctuary, a monument to military ruin.

From the preface:

In 2009 I traveled the islands of the world. The itinerary included actual islands such as Guam, Okinawa, Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Azores, and Crete. I also traveled to places not normally described as islands: military bases, bunkers and walled cities clearly lodged within a continent. The common denominator of these “islands”, both actual and metaphorical, follows a simple rule: an island is exclusionary. ... The process of an island growing more distinct as an island or, alternatively, dissolving into its surrounding ocean, is fascinating to behold. It is a geologic process compressed into an observable timescale. The process of islands in the making and falling apart drove my travels during the year and continues to shape my perception of landscapes.

The publication is hosted on Issuu and available in print on Lulu. (Also mentioned on BLDG BLOG / Books Received)

Building 1: San Francisco Office

Certainly the most consuming work for an architect is the daily work of bringing architecture to fruition. Architects sketch, draw, make nice pictures, but it all comes down to seeing a project through, reinforcing the decisions made early in the design process. I have been fortunate to see through every detail of this remodel of a 1925 concrete building in the historic Jackson Square district of San Francisco.

I could offer a lot of observations here on the construction process but one really stands out for me. There are moments in the construction of a building when the reasons architects do what they do become absolutely clear. Even in the middle of the construction "mess", or perhaps especially because of the mess, the design intent of a project starts to feel realized. An imagined-reality becomes an ever richer lived-reality. Light comes down through a skylight and it feels as though you are seeing light for the first time. Trees beyond the unglazed skylight rustle in the wind and the stillness in you hears the sound of leaves brushing on leaves for the first time.

Building 2:


Lastly, a different sort of building project. Call it an "interiors" project. Together with the landscape collective DEMILIT (including Bryan Finoki and Javier Arbona) we are building an 8-speaker Ambisonic array - to play back 3-dimensional sound recordings from my Ambisonic mic!




More to come on the Ambisonic array, stay tuned.

Roll, Align, Draw, Record

 "Rolling ruler used by the architect Cedric Price"; Image courtesy of Geoff Manaugh & CCA

A few years ago, Geoff Manaugh of BLDG BLOG shared this photo while he was blogging from the archives of the Canadian Centre for Architecture. It is a rolling ruler used by the late British architect Cedric Price. This pocket tool undoubtedly aided the architect in his sketches, speculations, and visionary projects. Whipping the ruler around, movements of a pencil-poised hand could quickly turn a blank page into a tiny world of ideas, drafted, aligned, exact yet also invitingly inexact.

The pocket rolling ruler is a vestige not only of the drafting days but also the days when architectural visions were best crafted in a sketchbook. Plenty of architects still sketch, but, needless to say, the laptop is the portable tool of choice. And what amazing tools we have there! I feel no nostalgia for hand drafting tools and in a way architects are becoming more crafty by "making" their own tools i.e. designing scripts, simulations, and so on.  Still, there is something to be said of the simplicity of Price's rolling ruler. An architect may have a studio full of tools to render and represent a building, but all the tools needed to craft an idea should fit in a pocket.

Fun Palace by Cedric Price

Price was a paper architect. The ruler assisted Price in drawing lines on a page to represent his ideas. A sound architect is equally engaged in the world of ideas, as opposed to built things. Moving beyond the page, however, the sound architect cannot shape ideas without also shaping sound. A simple analog to Price's ruler is the microphone. It is portable; it has its own metrics (i.e. gain, directionality, frequency response); it can be tracked along an x, y, or z axis just as the rolling ruler slides along (though only in a single axis).

The microphone is good at recording voice, music, or, in my experience with field recording, an ambient scene. I have used microphones in stereo/binaural combinations which allow for a more spatial recording than a single microphone. Yet, the problem is essentially one of representation versus simulation. Both the rolling ruler and the microphone are concerned with representation. The ruler says: "How can I make a legible image that stands in for something else?" The microphone is a painterly tool as the holder of microphone decides what to record, how close, etc. The end result is an audio image, played back on a pair of speakers or headphones, which merely represents the space recorded by the microphone. Little of the "space" is being simulated there. A stereo recording is largely a flat canvas.

Shaping sound, shaping architecture, should be anything but flat. Architecture and sound decay; architecture moves in time; sound reverberates. Why have we (architects) not brought to the complex task of constructing things in four dimensions a tool which is adequate to capture those dimensions? More than capture, more than represent, a tool adequate to simulate four dimensions?

Enter the Ambisonic microphone.

I first mentioned Ambisonics here on Soundscrapers two years ago, while taking part in a CCRMA + Gray Area Foundation for the Arts workshop on spatial sound. Ambisonics is a sound format which permits a full three-dimensional representation of sound--Up, Down, Left, Right, Front, Back, and all directions in between, known as periphonic recording. A good setup, with enough speakers, does the amazing thing of making the speakers disappear. Sound does come out of the speakers, but you don't hear the individual speakers; what you hear is a field of sound, seemingly without a locatable source. At least the artificial source is camouflaged by the mirage of real sounds in space.

To demonstrate Ambisonics during the workshop, the organizers took a pair of keys and jangled them at close proximity around an Ambisonic microphone that was in the other room. While I was sitting in the sweet spot of the speaker array, I felt as though a colossal pair of keys were being shaken all around my head. The idea that the speakers were playing sound disappeared, and I was left with the unforgettable, impossible sensation of a pair of keys larger than the room itself, somehow moving around my head.  That was architecture.

Recently I looked into what it would take to get into Ambisonics, beginning with a microphone. I was thrilled to learn I could build my own Ambisonic microphone! This task would require assembling four microphone capsules into a perfect tetrahedral frame, while making over a hundred soldered joints, any number of which not done right could short out the microphones.  Having only soldered a few times in my life, and despite knowing that so many things could go wrong with the construction of this tool, I felt it necessary to craft the microphone myself. Traditional Japanese carpenters, after all, must shape their own tools, if only for the practical reason that a tool with heavy use will require constant tuning and repair. But for a more spiritual reason too: the tool is to become a part of its maker. I wanted to do more than own a tool. I wanted the tool, the microphone, to be a part of the way I experience the world and consequently give shape to it.

The process began with the construction of a tetrahedral, made from copper wire. Hours turned into days. Measuring, snipping, torching, filing, grinding, cursing, soldering, sighing, sanding. The frame was done. Over the following days, I set in the microphone capsules and wired them up.

Construction of an amibsonic microphone. More photos here.

Next the enclosure, a black box. (I felt it was inevitable that when I finished the microphone would not work, and I would be left with this mute, black box...). I dropped in at a hackerspace, Ace Monster Toys, to use their drill press.

The Black Box.

I soldered dozens of resistors, diodes and capacitors to the circuit boards. Wires with their frayed ends, one by one, found a home. The circuit boards (which amplify the microphone signals) slid into the case. I dropped two 9V batteries in, screwed the frame closed, and flipped the switch.

Tool of Choice: The Finished Ambisonic Microphone.

A tiny light came on. I registered audio signals on each of the four microphone inputs. The microphone is live. And there is a new tool in my pocket.

The Sound of a Dan Flavin

I visited Dan Flavin's Untitled Marfa Project in 2009 on a fellowship studying the spectrum of new uses on former military bases. One such base, decommissioned shortly after WWII ended, is Fort D.A. Russell in Marfa, TX.  The property is home to the Chinati Foundation and contains ammunition sheds, old barracks, and various other military structures. Some buildings are vacant and some are filled with sculpture by Chinati's founder Donald Judd. In the 1980s, Judd invited Flavin to come and do an installation. His piece opened in 1996, the same year Flavin passed away.

While I was walking around Marfa with a sound recorder, picking up things like the specific resonance of Judd's concrete sculptures, a curiosity entered me about approaching any artwork with a sound recorder, especially a predominantly visual one like Flavin's. What is to be captured with the sound, and how does looking at something change when listening momentarily displaces looking as the primary means of taking in a piece of art?

Flavin's installation, a painting with light, deliberately includes the sources of light, the ready-made fluorescent lamps, as part of the composition.  But the lamps are also participating in the art because they emit a sound.  The faint buzzing sound has a base frequency of about 120 Hz, with several multiples of that frequency also noticeable.This buzzing comes from the ballast which keeps the current flowing through the fluorescent tubes below a safe threshold. The electricity is dampened, and the output is sound.  

Every Flavin piece will sound different. The specific configuration of lights, the number of them, the proximity of the lights to nearby walls--these factors will have subtle yet palpable effects. In addition, the light itself, its color and intensity, must have an effect. Are there certain colors which bring out the buzzing, or conversely permit the viewer to shut away the sound? Do certain colors shift the perception of certain frequencies, i.e. does a blue light point our attention to the lower note, and a yellow light to the higher note? Is there a color which allows all background sounds to melt away? 

Spending countless hours, days, and years to get his installations just right, was Flavin using the buzzing sound to inform his work? Or, how could he not? He would be subjected to it possibly more than any human being that has lived since the invention of the fluorescent bulb. We can no longer ask the artist these questions. Nevertheless, the project continues, a grand experiment to re-draw space with light and sound.  The artist here has presence; his work continually re-configures the interior of this army barracks, each day that the power is flicked on.  Flavin made a place for questioning how we perceive space.

Soundfishing

"the most important thing to understand with regards to human underwater listening is that our ears are mostly useless" via

Introducing Soundfishing, the latest sporting activity in the great outdoors of the San Francisco Bay Area.  In a city that is all about recreation, water activities, fitness, etc., what is there to do for the non-sporty among us? To prove my credentials (in being un-sporty), I have caught exactly one fish in my entire life.

The recreational landscape of the Bay is all about the shoreline. We have hundreds of miles of it. The wrinkly edge (when it's not impenetrable due to industry or freeways) is a varied landscape for interaction between people and the water. We can imagine the soundscape of this edge - wind rustling sails, birds, water surging over rocks when a large boat passes by.  It's predictable. It's also not as clean as that. There often is a freeway nearby, or any number of sounds. But what about sticking a microphone beneath the water's surface. What does this tell us about the urban, watery edge?

Soundfishing bypasses the usual urban soundscape for an entirely new one, in which motor boats sound like angry hair-dryers, and the propellers of cool old ships produce lo-fi drone music for anybody listening in.


I like environments where it is difficult to hear. Difficult, not because it is loud, but because we are not made for a particular listening environment. When a human ear is underwater, the ear drum does not vibrate the same way that it does in air. The ear barely works under water, so the way we hear is actually through bone conduction. Pressure in water is translated to our skull, which transmits the sound directly to our inner ear.

If my ears are useless, then lend me a microphone. In order to listen to this underwater world, we must augment our hearing. I like that, the opportunity to question how we hear sound and what we might do to hear things differently. So I made a hydrophone with about 15 dollars worth of electronic parts and threw it in the water.

The hydrophone as "bait" , coated in silicone

In water, sound travels four times faster than it does in air. It's a thick medium for sound, which means sound travels well and quite far. It also means certain sounds are not able to move far, such as high frequency sounds. Above a few thousand kilohertz, sound dies off shortly after it is emitted.

My first fishing expedition was in the Oakland shipping channel off the shore of Alameda. I saw a couple people pulling out actual fish. I certainly wouldn't want to be a fish in these waters, not just for the fear of being prey but it is LOUD in there. At one point I was listening to five boats motoring around, plus a jet ski. It just sounds like a bunch of mad screaming lawn mowers and pencil sharpeners under there.

But there are some cool, subtle sounds, and a lot more exploring to be done of the Bay.  Stay tuned.

Listening Practice

Fes, Morocco, on a scrubby hill overlooking/over-listening the city. Like the view, the image in sound is dense in detail. Tiny spikes of contrast: a distant horn, sparrows flittering in the foreground, the sharper cry of a child nearby. Emerging from a grey droning sea: scooters, voices, air conditioners, idling buses, the overlapping calls to prayer. Altogether these sounds form the averaged sound of a city.

As the view confounds any understanding of the city’s order (minarets stand out as landmarks, but little else is to be read from the hilltop view), the sound adds to the confusion, the din as blurry as the myriad of flat rooftops cascading up and down the topography of the valley. What is it to listen to all of this sound, within this thickened space overwhelmed by colliding signals?

Listen to the madly twittering sparrows, but the sharp focus on one sound blurs the rest. Try to pick out a revving scooter, but is it the scooter or something else not known, not seen? Part of the fascination is just looking at the city as though it were a model train set, with tiny voices occasionally audible above the averaged sound.

A third alternative: Listen to the averaged sound and forget the names of everything, just appreciate the pure averaged sound. Is listening in this case still listening to Fes, or is the averaged sound of a city just a sound, even a kind of musical assemblage to appreciated for its own sake?

Listening encompasses all of these things: concentration on particular sounds (signals), deference to the shapelessness of background sound, and puncturing the thin divide between music and pure sound. John Cage found music everywhere, in everything. He found music because he wanted to listen, and he listened to all sounds with a devoted practice of listening. 

Recently, not traveling (at least not in an obvious way), I was walking on a lunch break from my office in downtown San Francisco up one of its many hills. I paused at a park looking over the city, and there it was again, that blend of many sounds rushing up and passing over me. If I were to snatch any one of them, say a honking taxi cab or a siren from two miles away, I would know: yes, I am in San Francisco. But I still find that forgetting San Francisco momentarily, digging beneath the language of sound, to really hear the sounds, the averaged sound—this permits a kind of instantaneous travel in time and space. Is this San Francisco or is it Fes, just in a new place at a new time.

 

SF Gravelator 91L

As mentioned here from time to time, I represent one third of the experimental collective DEMILIT. We are a group taking walks, recording sounds, and making connections between militarized spaces and the everyday landscape. Last year we were commissioned by Deutchlandradio Kultur to produce a radio piece on their "Newcomer Werkstatt" program, which aired in Berlin at midnight, June 24, 2011.

As DEMILIT likes to do when presented with an opportunity, we take a walk. With a plethora of former military landscapes to explore here in the Bay Area, we set our sights on Angel Island. The island has a long history as a militarized island, beginning as an Army Post in the Civil War and culminating as a strategic link in a necklace of missile defense silos around the Bay Area in the 1960s. Angel is also notoriously known as an immigrant detention and quarantine island. [More history] What DEMILIT sought to accomplish on our walk, and in the ensuing soundscape presented below, was a means of measuring the spaces embedded in the island, the spaces which cannot be seen but which can be heard.

SF-91L is the name of the abandoned Nike Missile station on Angel Island in San Francisco Bay where we recorded the sounds for this piece. Gravelator refers to the simultaneous process of building up and eroding away the island. We displaced the island's own material to construct a second island, an imaginary island, which is encapsulated in the sound.

In a related fashion, the military severed the island’s crown in order to install the radar system for the missiles. The missiles were made obsolete not long after it was finished and was decommissioned. Decades later, the Gravelator is a means of awakening the sequestered spaces of the silo. Listen:

I call it a "chronoscape" -- between landscape and soundscape, a work of sound both on the geographic scale and on the time scale.  Though the piece has a finite boundary in time, it is intended as an aural window onto an oceanic sonic process.  In a similar fashion the work appears to have a finite geographic boundary; however, an island is not a separate piece of land but a promontory of land which happens to rise above the water level.  There is a continuity in both time and geography which reflects the underlying and pervasive process of militarization which DEMILIT seeks to expose in our work.
More from DEMILIT's tumblr feed: http://demilit.tumblr.com/SFG

SF Lunchwalk: Attack and Decay

Four Recent Lunchwalks

Attack and Decay are technical terms known to sound editors and synth musicians, but the concept is also intrinsic to urban walking.  "Attack" is the initial rise of a particular sound and "Decay" is the falling away of the sound from its peak to a normal or "sustained" volume.   Doors open and the clamor of a restaurant rushes out (attack); someone walks in, shutting the door behind them (decay) but listening closely, the sound of the restaurant remains.

If we think of the city as an infinite sound library, the library is perused by walking through it.  Sounds rise and fall and blend together in the great mixing chamber which is the street.  I am interested in the ability of the city to edit its own sound.  The sound-makers engage in the space of the street, all competing to vibrate air molecules.  Air is resilient; like a spring, it receives the initial burst of sound energy and then recoils (decays) until the sound disappears.

Since my last post with sound, I have recorded four hours of sound from four lunch-hour walks, continuing this series where I take a walk through the city instead of eating lunch.  Listening back through the sound recordings, I am pulled in two directions.  One, I have ideas to snip up the recording and reconstruct the walk as an edited soundscape.  The other direction is to isolate only certain moments where it appears as though the city has done the mixing for me.  This latter case is explored in the following track.  Listen:



The track is unedited.  It is simply what I (or the microphones) heard over a 2 minute time-span, using elements of the city (doors cracked open, hills, different sized streets) to "edit" the sound.

SF Lunchwalk: Smokestack

Walking every week, with every chance I get.  My feet vault me out of a sedentary habit (we are what we repeatedly do) into the unique opportunity of an urban walk, latent with unexpected encounters.  Encounters, such as the sight of this smokestack somewhere north of the lunch hour ground zero.  I marvel at its unlikely location, amid the housing and workplaces.  Surely it cannot still be in use.  Do its neighbors consider it a historic resource, a neighborhood landmark?  What if it is in use, but for a use not originally intended...

The smokestack is a non sequitur, a rather large and prominent form nestled within a residential, low-rise neighborhood.  Surely, some research would tell its story.  But the point is not to know where this smokestack came from or its historical use.  The lunchwalker on the go is all eyes and ears to the sidewalk unfolding beneath the feet; no time to research on a smartphone.  Even the excuse of wanting to just "be there" aside, there is more reason to disregard the histories of structures and spaces along the walk: the forms of the city are opened to fresh interpretation.

Ceci n'est pas un smokestack.  It is a vent for a vast subterranean vault.  A wind pipe for a geological organ.  An observation post to collect ambient neighborhood sound.  Let the city try and preserve all of its artifacts.  I can create and destroy them at will.

The lunchwalker embeds a set of desires unto a set of inert objects.  The set of desires is not alien to the walking environment, not fabricated beforehand, but generated along the walk, activated by the sounds present and alive there.

Do not walk to see what the city is.  Walk to see what the city can be.  Walk, to make the city anew.

SF Lunchwalk: Forty-three Ambient Slices of the City

Why even bother with the names of streets?  In a world of sound, the names of streets ring silent.  They are dwarfed by the din of traffic, overwhelmed by thousands of diffuse sounds from the city hulking above.  Market Street, for instance, beckons to be renamed every time I walk out onto it.  My feet are willing to forget, but my head still wants to know: where am I going today?

East.  The Lunchwalker needs not the guidance of familiar street names.  It's not as though these walks are to be repeated.  Nor could they be.  Tracing the footsteps of a previous day's walk is not possible.  (Although that would make a fascinating walk to attempt to do so, even memorizing the sounds as though scripted by iambic pentameter, and to recite and overlay the previous day's walk upon a new day's walk.)  The soundtrack on a given day, at the same time and with the same route, will capriciously yield an entirely different experience.  So I walk east, and I could walk east every day and still find new things to hear, new worlds of sound to discover even though the world we see appears much the same.

What is that funny thing about an urban walk which enables the feeling: "I've walked here many times and yet I've never seen that before."?  Getting lost in a familiar place is part of it.  We all read the street signs and use them to familiarize ourselves with our whereabouts and communicate to others our experiences there.  Practicality aside, the real advantage of an urban walk is ignoring precisely the need to communicate the location.  Streets should be named instead for the sounds one may hear on them.

I have provided this recurring satellite view of my walkable terrain, but I even question its value other than to give a sense of scale of the walk.  For example, the spaces which continue from the outside to the inside -- how are these sonic continuities to overcome the familiar delimiting of interiors and exteriors?  The satellite photo is blind to interiors and numb to the scale of individual sounds.

But there are unexpected relationships between quadrants of the island which in fact drive me to explore more every time I go out.  Deeper into the grain of the city, similarities between two different spaces in different moments of time could be knitted together by a precise framework.

The spaces of the city could be taxonomized by a host of sonic qualities: loudness, frequency range (Hz), frequency of occurance, breadth, height, reverb, diffuseness, velocity, proximity, timbre, fuzzyness, reproducibility, and even its inaudibility i.e. vibrations which are below the threshold of hearing.  These new names, not just for streets but for all thoroughfares and places for pause, might go this way:

Street of Cars Bowling for People
Garden of Circling Sparrows
Garden of Reverse Waterfalls
Sidewalk Spouting 700 Hz
Cranes Thumping Every 15 Seconds Alley
Muzak's Shortcut
The Street Where I Heard a Strange Bird but Maybe It Was a Machine


For this sixth Lunchwalk, I took 43 slices of sound out of the walk and glued the slices back together.  Each slice is potentially a new entry into the sonic taxonomy of the city.  Listen:

SF Lunchwalk: Taco Truck

On this fifth lunchwalk, where I take a walk instead of eating lunch, I broke the only rule: I ate lunch.  Two shrimp tacos, to be exact.  I also did not walk alone but wandered out with a friend, Marc Wiedenbaum of disquiet  fame.  Our walking discussion ranged across current projects of his, on the reasons we walk and listen, and, as we descended upon a taco truck, the sound of food.  So, here is a lunchwalk that was more of a walk to find lunch rather than a walk to capitalize on the time saved by not eating lunch.  (Indeed this series could be about walks to a constellation of food spots in the city not frequented by the Market Street workers.  Food and sound will be recurring, I am sure.)

The space carved out by the Taco Truck, sitting in the corner of a parking lot off of Bryant St., fits the spatiality produced in these walks.  The truck extends the sidewalk perpendicular to the street, expanding the realm for interaction, disregarding even the separate domains of "sidewalk" and "parking lot".  As I move through the city I too shrug off familiar boundaries.  Neighborhood lines and so-called historic districts do not exist.  Building lobbies and rooftop gardens are as fair game as parking garages and subway tunnels.  Tall fences, open water, and security guards are the only things to keep me from walking somewhere.

The Taco Truck is similarly disobedient to artificial lines, though to be sure, the truck is under a set of regulations and is permitted for certain locations only.  But like me, the truck is gone when lunch is over.  Have a listen:

 SF Lunchwalk: Taco Truck by nicksowers 

The soundscape before the truck is hemmed in by the propped-up metal flap, forming an awning over the space of ordering and eating.  Small, crappy speakers are embedded in the flap, drizzling out the fuzzy sound of a traditional Mexican orchestra.  Inside the truck, pans slide off the grill, carnitas sizzles, a cash register bangs close, and someone's order is called out: 95!  That's me. Shrimp tacos!

SF Lunchwalk: North-northeast

Market, the street I always begin on because my office's front door faces it, is a long street.  It is the only street which bisects the entire island--the island defined by an hour round-trip walk on my lunch break.  At the northeast edge, there is water.  So to the water's edge I aimed my stride, and off I went.

Down the canyon called Market, sirens wail and horns resonate.  The canyon is the city's great collector of sound.  The confluence of transit is witnessed here: footsteps crossing north to south, street cars sliding southwest to northeast, and buses amassing and separating like a caterpillar.  There is a definite meter to the modes of travel, a reliable space in time between each footstep, bus brake, taxi horn, and emergency siren.

Walking down this long cut through the sediments of skyscrapers, I am listening in particular to certain set of footsteps in front of me when a firetruck's blaring horn shreds my attention.  The city walk is full of these moments, where a certain rhythm is suddenly knocked out by shrill interruption of another scale or tempo of  movement.

In the compression of my hour of sound recording down into the sample below, I took a pair of scissors to the moments of dead space between such sounds as heels striking pavement, or the hiss of pneumatic brakes.  Listen:

  SF Lunchwalk: North-northeast by nicksowers

During the track of the walk along Market Street, I also take a step off of the busy sidewalk into a bank, the first interior exploration of many to come.  Applying this same technique of cutting up the space between footsteps, I took the five minutes of wandering around the bank and sliced up its own meted-out moments, starting at 1:37.

At last, I reach the watery edge, but it turns out that wasn't the point.

Reaching the water at the midpoint of the walk is completely anticlimactic.  The rippling surface shrouds a depth I have not the technical means to plumb.  Not yet, at least.

Near the water was a man in a blue jumpsuit working for the city, raking leaves near one of the large waterfront sculptures.  I paused to record the sound of his labor, the metal tines of his rake scratching the concrete over and over.  I would soon return to my own labor, as an architect, at a desk, clicking a mouse over and over.  For me, walking in the city on the lunch hour was pure liberation.  Observing the groundskeeper's labor gave me new-found appreciation for that fact.

Notes from the Desert

1.  I took an overnight trip to Nevada with my brother about two weeks ago.  I was a city dweller in need of a desert fix, an injection of sand, a shower of still air.  My brother had never been to the desert.  So, I picked a spot about six hours by car from San Francisco—a small town that nobody makes a destination of: Hawthorne, Nevada.

2.  To travel to Hawthorne in the winter, when the road through Yosemite is closed, one drives through Reno.  Thankfully, I had a reason to be in Reno: to see two exhibitions at the Nevada Museum of Art.  Even aside from the museum, the city is something fun to pass through, like running one's fingers through a faux fur coat in a thrift shop.  (You know that fur coat has been to Burning Man and back).  The casinos of Reno present a sonic glitter and sensory spectacle at great contrast to the outlying desert.

3. The first exhibition I saw at the museum was Landscape Futures, guest-curated by Geoff Manaugh.  (Hurry to get out there, it closes Feb. 12th)  This room, packed with objects, contraptions, drawings, and dreams at all scales, reminds me of Borges' citation of "a certain Chinese encyclopedia" in which animals are categorized: "a. those that belong to the Emperor, b. embalmed ones, c. those that are trained, .... h. those included in the present classification, i. those that tremble as if they were mad, j. innumerable ones, k. those drawn with a very fine camelhair brush... " and so on.    How is it that all these things exist in a single space? We could say it is testament to the imaginative power of the curator, which is no doubt true.  It is also compelling to look at the atmosphere which allows these things to exist together.

One must hold in suspense a certain scale, say 1:48, when looking at mountains of vegetation and models of drone/ferret hybrids scurrying about.  Swelling to fill a two-story volume immediately adjacent is a Goldbergian machine without scale, standing in for some planetary hydrological system consisting of wind sails, pumps, and a simulator for the moon's gravitational pull on the earth.  On a wall nearby, large images of London and New York are shown as living museums in a world not much more absurd than the one we know.  Then, glossy faceted objects painted in bright colors - things made at a 1:1 scale - are to be worn by human beings in order to experience the sensory kaleidoscope of an ant.  We don't get to try them on, but that's part of the point.

What holds all of these things together is the visitor's willingness to go one step further than the separation already exercised from the city to the museum (the city itself a separation we unconsciously make from the landscape).  If not in a desert, and then if not in a city, and then if not in the building which we call the museum... what is the space of the exhibition but a fictional world swirling inside of my head.  Landscape Futures says to me: Why not imagine all landscapes as infinitely malleable.

4.  The other show at the Nevada Museum of Art is The Altered Landscape, a selection of photography which in a broad swath,  "examine(s) human interaction and intervention with environments".  My brother, on our drive out of Reno, made it clear to me the value of having just witnessed all of these photographs of massive-scale interventions in the landscape--rock quarries, gold mines, river deltas, and Christo.  We were flying past some gravel yard on the I-80 and it was though we were seeing these trucks and mounds of rock as alien interventions.  Who is it that makes piles out of earth, who carves terraces out of mountains and yet, as large as these interventions may seem, how small they are, and how unchanging the earth is.  So, the opposite is also true: when viewed at a large enough scale, a landscape is immutable.

5.  The museum was our threshold to the desert, the vestibule which permitted a shift in atmosphere as we left behind the anthropocentric city.  I gained a new appreciation for the museum as a perceptual acclimatizer, just as it is necessary to physically acclimatize in order occupy the desert (warm clothes for the winter, drinking water, chapstick, etc)  The museum enabled us to see on another level, which, in turn, I am always translating to the world of sound.  What kind of space in a museum might permit an acoustic threshold.  Further, how might we hear in the small space of a gallery a sound at the grand scale of the desert.

6.  Over halfway to Hawthorne, we pulled off the road to eat a lunch of Manchego cheese, salted almonds, and olives.  Foods from some far off, verdant land, preserved by salt.  What a luxury to eat salty things in the desert, for we could quest our thirst with the greatest ease with the water we drove in with.  In that case it wasn't a true desert.  Each town which offered us human comforts negated the desert.  Even the road itself, while beautiful in its simplicity, negates the desert.  It is the string which reminds us we are still tethered to the city.

7.  A lake stretched out below us, its blues shifting into greens superimposed by the reflection of yellow hills on the far shore.  Hundreds of small white objects appeared to float motionless in the lake.  As we scrambled down the rocks, I could see these were not inanimate objects but rather birds, probably Loons.  Here and there, the birds ducked down to get something in the water.  They were a long distance off, probably a quarter-mile away.  And yet, when we stopped rummaging through the bag of almonds and sat silent, you could hear each of the birds make their tiny moves in the water.  The astounding thing was this: the landscape was so massive, and here were these tiny sounds that were almost negligible yet still audible. There would be no way to hear them at that distance if not for the stillness of the air.

8.  T.E. Lawrence said he liked the desert because it was clean.

9.  The United States Navy also liked the desert because it was clean.  In 1930, by order of Congress, a new ammunition depot was opened which would later service the war in the Pacific.  And so Hawthorne, Nevada--our destination--became a bunker city.  There are over 2,400 bunkers containing 600,000 square feet of storage for weapons, bombs, and other such not-so-clean things.  Curiously, the Wikipedia article linked to above lists as "capabilities of the center" both "demilitarization" and "ammunition renovation".

But that's par for the course when it comes to the history of the military and the desert.  The apparent 'cleanliness' of the desert has always provided an excuse to drop bombs and test missiles.  I have witnessed this elsewhere--for example, at White Sands, New Mexico.  The desert does not demonstrate the same malleability when it comes to demilitarizing.

Hawthorne Army Depot via Google Maps

10.  I had recently finished reading Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees, a conversation with the artist Robert Irwin.  He describes visits to the desert outside Los Angeles as incredible sensory experiences that he wished to share with others.  But to intervene in the desert, to add something (or subtract something ala Michael Heizer) so as to signify "PAY ATTENTION" would be pointless.  Whatever it would be, even something as simple as a painted rock or an arrow, would be mistaken for part of the experience itself.  The experience of the desert is already complete.

SF Lunchwalk: North

SF Lunchwalk: North, third in a series exploring the city instead of eating lunch.

I am exploring north along streets mechanized from below. Gears, pulleys, and cables live under the street, humming and clapping, droning and singing, partaking in the communion of automata.

I would begin not listening to machines, but to the bells of the Salvation Army. Passing a giant tree which these islanders clearly worship, my legs took me swiftly beyond the sparkle to the hard, clean edges of less populated terrain. I walked through a tunnel where the city's sound stretched out in long bellowing reverberance. There: on the other side, another world with yet another tunnel leading west. As I had decided to head strictly north with my hour of exploration, I left this second tunnel for another lunch hour walk.

Little boxes under the street are now singing out, easily heard in the calm of the northern streets.  I step off from my sheltered, raised path to get a closer listen.  I stand in the middle of the street, kneeling over the crevices where the heavy cable cars slide, laden with travelers seeking the typical view, those seeking to own the iconic moment.  I am vulnerable here, where walkers should not be, and especially because I am kneeling over these mundane things and, triggering a passerby to think "I see something, should I say something?"

I reach the edge of the map half an hour into the walk.  Returning south to the office, I trace this infrastructure which supports the endless touristic loops of the city.  Surprisingly, even the most cliche of San Francisco icons has a depth to it.  The gear boxes and cable junctures add a constant hum to the background static of the city.   Listen:

 SF Lunchwalk : North by nicksowers

What other machines are driving the city?  The street is not the only place to look for them.  An entire expedition is forthcoming which walks the escalators of the city.  Later, I will explore the elevators.  Then, revolving doors:  an endless loop of machines moving an endless loop of people.

SF Lunchwalk: West

A traveler on this new island, my first forays radiate out from the center.  At 12:36 pm, I start walking due west.

Not a few moments pass before I am pressed up against fellow travelers, compressed in the space of the city, stacked like the bricks around us.  A clicking signal indicates to the blind, such as yourself, that a street crossing is permitted by the local authorities.  Let loose once again up the concrete walk, I slip around pedestrians along my strict course of travel.

This staccato pedestrian pace of long strides along the blocks and standing still at the corners is the dominate rhythm of a city walk.  Giving in to this rhythm does not preclude the variety of encounters--spatial, social, sensorial--which are possible.  The corner of a block leads to collisions between unlikely actors.  The frictionless straightaway, on the other hand, permits a certain isolation, allowing me to observe and record a singular cut through the cityscape.

These blocks of buildings form larger groups of blocks with distinguishable characteristics (tall buildings, hard surfaces, voids of parking garages, etc).  These groups may form called districts or neighborhoods, but I abandon those artificial boundaries.  Look, listen, to the physical properties which unite them.  This walking radius is an island: the order it contains is the order I have given it.  By walking through the heterogeneous clusters of built and un-built space, I produce an organization.  I organize space by walking through it.  Then recording sound and reassembling that sound into a single track, I attempt to illuminate that order, to give clarity to it through a language of sound.  Listen:

 SF Lunchwalk: West by nicksowers

At the beginning of the track, I am compressed on a corner.  Layers of travelers cross over me, vehicles shred the space of the possible, and a man with a cane bends over talking to a woman inside her car with a small dog in the driver's seat.  An open-deck tour bus with the driver's well-beaten narrative, amplified, is momentarily captured by my microphones before disappearing off the edge of the map.  Above my head taps a hand against the stucco face of a building to a beat independent of the street.  Shrill brakes and electric bus straw snapping, the volume thickens.

Cars roar up and down an artery named after Van Ness.  They drown out the layering of space, flattening the sonic sphere momentarily until I cross it.  Walking further up, a slight increase in elevation, and I find a tennis court.  Leaf blowers signify greater affluence.

Later, at a two-block wide park, at the boomerang moment on the walk, I welcome the great depth of field. Hills to the south are visible with their own little orchestras of sirens and cars tinny like the sound from a miniature train model.   At the park, space releases itself from a tight coil.  The aural vista opens wide. The city is out there.