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 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: 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.

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.

SF Lunchwalks

Lunch break. Got an hour? Take a walk. Inside of a thirty-minute radius, an infinitely detailed (though finitely bound) landscape is within reach.

SF Lunchwalks: Morsel of San Francisco which I can reach in a one-hour roundtrip from my office.

SF Lunchwalk 01 : Cracks is the first in a series of soundwalks, where I take a walk for an hour instead of eating lunch (or eat lunch while walking). My goal is to record the sounds of a unique slice of the city, to hear the city anew through the stereo microphones of my Zoom H4n recorder.

On this first soundwalk I am looking for cracks between buildings. When I find one, I stick the recorder in there.

 Giant cracks exist too, beneath freeways, where freeways unfold, colliding ever so slowly.  Listen:

 SF Lunchwalk 01 : Cracks by nicksowers 

They took my fork

This Friday I am leading a workshop titled "Decoding Military Landscapes" with Javier Arbona and Bryan Finoki. The aim of this workshop is to find a means for bringing awareness of invisible militarizations of space in the cities we live in.

But what do we mean by militarization of everyday space? A simple example and one which I relentlessly documented as I traveled last year is the baggage screening machine at airports. An airport is a highly militarized space as we are all flying around in potential missiles. We are familiar with the routine of removing metals, isolating liquids, etc etc. so that our bodies may pass through into the sterilized security zone of the airport's interior.

The fact that we have become so neutralized to, and even appreciative of this routine, is bewildering. It is the contemporary 'walled city'. Is the baggage security check our only means of defense? Hardly. Part of the agenda of this workshop is to ask first how far does the military penetrate into our daily lives and then how do we document and archive this?

In this particular example, how is the spatial experience of passage through this 'wall' mediated by this security check? What is the literal experience of the check itself, and does it constitute a military appropriation of private space? It is my desire to archive how these spaces have been militarized through the recording of sound.

In this particular example, a fork which was part of a camping set that I bought at the Kathmandu outfitters in New Zealand is confiscated by security at the airport in Athens.

The recording begins with the mic setup in my bag, and you then pass to the interior of the screening machine, and then you are inspected by the security officer. As you can probably guess, it was a much-loved fork. Listen:

The Sonic Archivist

I'm doing the folks over at the Echo Red conference a quick favor by posting some samples by the Sonic Archivist of Guam. We open with the resonances recorded in the hollows of the jet noise barrier, overlaid with an F-22 flyover. We then descend into some of the boarded-up buildings of the former air base, down into some caves (artificial or natural?) and emerge in the interior of the abandoned base. Listen:

Air Conditioner No. 8

My first commissioned soundscraper has opened tonight at Brussels-based Silence Radio. It is titled Air Conditioner No. 8. There's a blurb in French that accompanies the piece. However, I'd rather offer this email I wrote to Etienne Noiseau, the sonographer-in-chief at Silence Radio.org, to introduce the piece.

Tue, Mar 30, 2010 at 11:19 PM
Dear Etienne,

Thank you for your patience. I have re-worked the piece and uploaded it.

In this latest incarnation, I am trying to do something like what the music box does but as an operation on the air conditioning sound. I am trying to move away from the gimmick for its own sake and towards the effect that I desired in the first place. If the music box was about extracting signals from the air, my new piece is about subtracting signals from the air. Tone, therefore, is less important than the background noise.

I took your advice to play with the dynamics. I thought that was a much more convincing way to make connections between these air-conditioners. I think it is like walking across a soundscape, using stairs instead of ramps to move between the sonic chambers.

I realize there was a large disconnect between what I wrote in the text and the first piece that I sent to you. I'm hoping that this piece brings the written and the aural closer together. You were right that the layer of natural sound as something always mediated by a machine--air conditioner, jet sound, or otherwise--is worth calling attention to.

The piece has grown a bit in length. I felt this was necessary to give space for listening. I felt a lot of my segments in the first take were too short. There was a choppiness to how things came together, which gave too much attention to the transition.

The first thing I say "What is the sound of air?" should really be "It is unavoidable to hear the sound of air. What I desire is to listen to air.

Regards,
Nick Sowers

Desert Obscura

On March 20th, 2010 Soundscrapers took part in the Atlas Obscura/BLDG BLOG expedition to the "Geoglyphs of Nowhere" a.k.a. a bunch of dirt roads northeast of California City in the Mojave Desert. I put up what I call Desert Prosthetics, a series of installations which mediate the experience of listening to ambient sound in the desert. {Please refer to my post at Archinect for the full statement.}

We camped out for three days at Red Rocks Canyon, where I did a test installation and made slight modifications to the pieces at the campground. The boyscouts sure thought I was strange. ("Do I smell spray paint?")

Obscura Day at dawn. Listen:





A small crowd gathers at the cul-de-sac of the unmade American Dream


1. SOMT: A telescoping box for changing the frequency of ambient sound.





I've done some binaural recordings around these things. In this one, your right ear will enter the box. Listen:




2. Fata Morgana: A curved box for trapping heat and producing an audio-mirage.



I pointed a shotgun microphone through this box to record people hanging out in the cul-de-sac. You'll hear the sound of Fata Morgana rotating as I swivel it to test the resonance of different peoples' voices. Listen:




3. Slowscope: A curved, telescoping box for collapsing the audio horizon.



I tested both ears for the Slowscope. Listen:




I have come to realize that even as installations in real space, at least two of these three prosthetics are actually models for something I'd like to produce on a much larger scale.

I have also left some markers on the site which denote the coordinates of a place-less cul-de-sac in a very precise way.

Rubble Mountains

Rubble mountains. One can only imagine the sound of a rubble mountain under 'construction'. Rubble mountains are everywhere, under your feet, under buildings; they are underground mountains. What is anything we call ground but some form or rubble, of various sizes, 'destroyed'particles, aggregates of something else reconstituted as a new landscape.

Berlin's Teufelsberg is the largest rubble mountain in the city. I am walking up to the top and observing the activities found there. Listen:



Skies over rubble mountains. I am listening to the radio. Listen:



Tubes beneath rubble mountains. The U-Bahn. Listen:

Red Sands Boat Trip

As seen on BLDG BLOG, my wife and I took a boat trip out to see these incredible structures leftover from WWII. The day was filled with some unexpected events, such as the lowering of a broken windmill turbine onto the boat, using an old crane arm from one of the towers. On board, in awe of these hulking towers of rusting steel, will be a couple hours of my life that I will never forget.

Here's but a small sample of the sounds recorded out there. Listen:

20: Netherlands Sound Matter

Following after one of my favorite sound artists, Francisco Lopez, as I record sound I am collecting the matter of sound. Lopez writes in an essay titled "This is Not La Selva: Sound Matter vs. Representation":

In my conception, sound recording does not document or represent a richer and more significant "real" world. Rather, it focuses on the inner world of sounds.

Both of the samples presented here are unaltered from their recording. There is only one layer, and that is the recording itself. If you detect multiple layers, that is architecture that you are bringing to the experience of listening.

In the first sample, an escalator outside Rotterdam's Central Station aspires to join an urban drum circle. Listen:




The second sample is from a train station ticket machine in Haarlem. Listen:

19: Cockatoo Island

I'm now over a week deep into the Urban Islands design workshop, working with Geoff Manaugh of BLDG BLOG and 15 other students to devise a tarot card deck and some proposals for Cockatoo Island from that deck. Cockatoo Island is a former shipbuilding facility and convict prison in the middle of Sydney Harbour. Since its closure in the 1990s it has been the subject of much speculation.

I am bringing to the workshop a desire to document and project sonically the environment on Cockatoo. I wish to make architecture out of sound, to build turbine halls and warehouses and glacial canyons out of sound. Cockatoo Island is the first illicit commission to do so.

Four days ago I took the audio tour and I was struck by the simultaneous experiences--one virtual, of the audio tour, and the other real. Often canned sounds of seagulls would intermix with actual seagulls. (are they communicating?) A low hum in the background would be unsettling in that I didn't know if it was the tour or if it was real, until I removed the headset.

I'm interested in audio tours because they suggest alternate realities that coexist with ours. My quest, then, is to produce an audio tour that isn't so prescriptive, yet opens up a dialogue with a place.

This may be where Soundscrapers is trending--to produce audio tours for each place that I visit... A collection of military audio tours.

This is not yet an audio tour. Listen:

18: NZ tanks

New Zealand is a peaceful country, if only because it is so far away no one has bothered with it. Henry Kissinger once called it a "dagger pointed at the heart of Antarctica" but that's about as militarized as New Zealand gets.

Now it is possible to drive a tank while visiting the lovely South Island city of Christchurch. Through this experience, really a boyhood fantasy come true, the land of milk and honey can be sited through a periscope. The sound from the inside of the rolling tank might be a cow pasture in New Zealand or a desert landscape in Afghanistan. You choose. Listen:

17: White Sands

Take a flight out to New Mexico and explore the wonders of White Sands Missile Range, the largest military installation in the United States. I will walk around and point out various missiles in the park, and then let some of the museum video material speak for itself.

Listen:

16: Arlington

The laying of the wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier is pervaded by a sonorous trumpet. I've heard it a million times in movies, but to pick up the resonance, the subtle variation in the tapering off of each note in the live performance is powerful. I feel directed to observe, obey, and to be humble. Needless to say the trumpet call has a high signal to noise ratio.

The Tomb is an axial memorial, looking out over the Potomac. It induces an axial movement, the epitome of military precision. It functions to obliterate the visual and audible noise of the landscape and hone your attention on its grandeur.

Arlington itself is a militarized landscape, gravestones like white pixels coding a neutral green landscape.

The hills once belonged to Robert E. Lee. It is that note that I think is most interesting. Before this was a cemetery, it was a majestic house and estate. To prevent Lee from returning to the estate, the first graves were dug in Mrs. Lee's rose garden. It became an occupation by cadavers.

I walked among the rows and encountered a solemn sound. Bagpipes for me evoke more than anything the open landscape. It is the sound of air itself. It has just enough noise to allow it to absorb into the atmosphere. The trumpet, on the other hand, demands obedience to its signal. Listen:

15: Rolling Thunder

Rolling Thunder, a motorcycle parade in its 22nd year, roars across the Memorial Bridge to make a circuit of the Mall before terminating at the Vietnam Memorial. Vietnam vets ( Desert Storm and Iraqi Freedom vets as well) ride their hawgs to bring attention to POW's and MIA's, and veterans' rights in general.

Curiously though, the noise becomes part of the background. I found a way to tune out the rumbling. The occasional rip of a revving engine breaks out of the background sound profile. Otherwise the sound which seeks a temporary occupation of the space of the Mall just sounds like loud, annoying traffic. The occupation happens physically in the barriers erected by the police to allow Rolling Thunder to pass through.

I am left wondering what the noise is saying. Listen:

14: Gettysburg

Stepping inside the restored Gettysburg Cyclorama is a strange juxtaposition of a 19th century precursor to the cinematic experience with a 21st century lighting and sound spectacle. Looking at the various sections of the battlescene, I am impressed by the painting's extraordinary detail. It is as though you could infinitely zoom into the battle. The illusion is that nothing is hidden from view. The experience is total. This 'total' experience is redoubled by the sound, volleying from all directions. Tactics give way to chaos. I am simultaneously the general and the soldier, in command of the view but completely without control of the scene.

Read more...

and listen:

13: Ricardo Porro's Institute of Art

Continuing to dig back through some sound recordings. This is an amazing building that is being restored on the outskirts of Havana. In the 1960's it was not applauded by the Castro government which viewed the orgasmic curves and laborious brick construction as unbecoming of a young, industrial communist state.

Listen: