Death by Stereo

Edgar Frog: I think I should warn you all, when a vampire bites it, it's never a pretty sight. No two blood suckers go out the same way. Some yell and scream, some go quietly, some explode, some implode. But, all will try and take you with them.

The Revolution will not be Amplified

A mobile loudspeaker array

Something like what you see above will not be found around the #occupy movements growing in cities around the globe.  An amplified platform, broadcasting a clear and distinct message, is fittingly absent.  It is not permissible by many of the occupied downtown neighborhoods, nor is it even necessary as a technology for these groups to express themselves.

The NYPD requires a Sound Device Application, plus 45 dollars per day, to use amplified sound in a public space.  This includes battery-powered bullhorns.  While numerous groups have applied for permits, it stands within reason that the NYPD is not going to be granting any permits to the Occupy Wall Street movement. How is one to speak to a crowd of hundreds?

Free and requiring no permit is the human microphone. Anyone who has heard one of the celebrities speaking to the crowds will be familiar with its odd cadence and glitchy translations.  The concept is incredibly simple: a group of people who can hear the speaker simply repeat what was said, causing speech to move at a slow and deliberate pace.

Corporate art as sound amplification near Liberty Park, NY  (edited; orginal by Cryptome)

While the human microphone is an awesome, almost church-like display of the power of a group, it is worth thinking about how the built context of a protest group might assist in the un-powered amplification of speech.  We know from stages and well-designed lecture halls that reflective surfaces near the speaker amplify sound.  The same principles can be taken outside.  The above image caught my attention when I realized that corporate art is often made of large, hard surfaces.  This group of activists found a 'natural' site of sound amplification and gathered around it.

In lieu of being approved for one of those amplified sound permits, perhaps Occupy Wall Street or any number of Occupy movements around the country should solicit pro bono advice from an acoustics engineer at the Arup SoundLab.  Or better yet, find a blind person.  Acoustic wayfinding helps the blind use sound reflections to navigate urban space.  There might be hidden sweet spots in some of these parks and plazas that would help amplify the human microphone.

Slavoj Zizek and the Human Microphone (edited; original by Cryptome) 

I was watching Slavoj Zizek's human-microphone-amplified speech and what struck me most were not his words but the situation of my watching the video.  This video, with the recording taken from somewhere in the middle of a giant human microphone, left the impression of the crowd generating the words, and the speaker with his tiny voice becoming anonymous.

To top it off, next to the human microphone video was a google ad for a loudspeaker array, from a company called TVi Audio.  The slogan? "Experience the Revolution".

Listening prostheses

Horn Antenna, Holmdel, New Jersey, circa 1960 (via)

I came across this image by chance, just flipping through images of Bell Laboratories.  The image itself speaks of a colossal effort to listen to something.  Was it a particular sound that was sought out here?  Not sound, but another kind of wave energy would be collected in this ear in the landscape.  This ear with its ability to rotate and point to a particular part of the sky could subtract out all of the radar and radio waves inundating the electro-magnetic landscape.

This engineering effort to eliminate noise led to a most unexpected discovery.  Research at the Bell Laboratories in the 1960s was conducted in concert with NASA's Project Echo using the above pictured Horn Antenna. The antenna was constructed to eliminate noise in order to receive a precise microwave signal reflected by a satellite in orbit.

The Horn Antenna, at the Bell Telephone Laboratories in Holmdel, New Jersey, is significant because of its association with the research work of two radio astronomers, Dr. Arno A. Penzias and Dr. Robert A. Wilson. In 1965 while using the Horn Antenna, Penzias and Wilson stumbled on the microwave background radiation that permeates the universe. Cosmologists quickly realized that Penzias and Wilson had made the most important discovery in modern astronomy since Edwin Hubble demonstrated in the 1920s that the universe was expanding. (via)

Granted, the "noise" was not audible in Penzias and Wilson's microwave radiation, but the concept is directly analogous to sound waves.  Sound mirrors along the UK's southern coast, built to detect aircraft in the decade leading up to WWII, were, like the Horn Antenna, used for a very specific purpose.   These concave concrete shells permitted a listener--or a microphone--at the focal point of the reflection to pick up the droning sound of approaching aircraft before the planes would become visible.  The giant mirrors become outdated before the war, and were effectively replaced by radar.   No great scientific discoveries would be made here, but the project is all the same critical as we turn our attention to new possibilities for listening prostheses.  What other vast engineering efforts with the aim of sharpening signals have potential for other listening purposes?

Anechoic chamber at the Harvard Acoustics Research Laboratory 

An anechoic chamber is also a kind of prosthesis, serving to eliminate sound reflections in a room.  Bell Labs built the first one, and Harvard's Acoustics Research Laboratory also built one.  ( See Beranek's Box  by Laci Videmsky for a short film on the anechoic chamber at Harvard  )  John Cage famously sat in Harvard's anechoic  for a period of time and emerged with a striking observation:

I heard two sounds, one high and one low. When I described them to the engineer in charge, he informed me that the high one was my nervous system in operation, the low one my blood in circulation.

JC's conclusion was that there could therefore be no such thing as silence.  As long as we live, a fundamental, background hum, pervades our experience.

So if silence is not possible, if a pure signal can never be achieved, a counter-project to the one of noise reduction emerges which is to amplify that background sound.  Such is the allure of the Sonic Pavilion by Doug Aitken - a mile deep boring into the earth with microphones and accelerometers at varying depths.  We hear the sounds of the earth, of seismic plates shifting, of a background geologic hum, transposed to the range of human hearing.  This representation is not at all trying to hear anything, to cull any particular signal or data set.  It is simply a project about listening.  Listening for the sake of listening, for the pleasure of recording that which is buried, masked, and otherwise un-listenable.

The listening prosthetic is ultimately about itself, which is partly why that photo of the Horn Antenna is so compelling.  Yes, as a piece of technology, it is out-dated.  Like the sound mirrors, it is a ruin.  It is no longer fired up to listen to the background waves of the Universe.  But the larger project of augmenting the act of listening continues.  Let it be a monument to listening.