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.

 

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.

No contest

The following question comes from a study guide for one of the seven exams required to get an architecture license:

When I saw the question, after getting over my disbelief that this sort of subjective nonsense could even be found on the exam, I put down (D) as my answer. I flipped to the back. WRONG. The answer is (A). Are you kidding me!? It was as though the architecture gods-that-be struck me down on the spot with an onyx hammer.

We needn't be reminded that light and shadow allow us to read geometry and form, that perspective lines help detect distance, etc. etc. Sure, smell doesn't tell us the shape of a room, but in prehistoric times it might have meant life or death. That the texture of surfaces do not affect the quality of space is a hard point to sell. But sound! Imagine walking anywhere without the sound of your footsteps, or of other people moving around, delivering cues to your ears about the general shape and depth of a room. Sound can warm up a space, reflected off of soft, absorptive surfaces; or sound can render space cool and steely.  What visual tyranny that the sense of sound not measure up to sight!

To test this further, consider two rooms where each sense (vision and hearing) is pushed to its limits:

Anechoic chamber at Bell Labs

1.  A room with no sound reflections.  I have been inside an anechoic chamber at UC Berkeley.  It's a maddening sensation when after the massive door shuts and you are left in the space alone, you hear nothing except the sound of blood rushing through your head.  Nothing reflects off of the walls, and there is no sound that is not generated by your body.  If you speak out loud, you are not hearing your voice bounce back to you; you hear your voice resonating in your throat and reverberating in your skull.  It is not pleasant.  Perhaps that is why at this anechoic chamber in Minnesota, a six-pack of beer is given to anyone who can last 45 minutes in there.

Your childhood bedroom

2.  A room with no light reflections.  A theoretical space, a black body room where all the walls absorb all light--so there is light, but the walls are impossibly black and featureless/dimensionless.  It would be cool to look at your hand, perfectly lit up by this imaginary light source (maybe you are bio-luminescent), but nothing else reflects light. I bet you could last hours sitting there, having no trouble looking into a black space.  Maybe you would invent shapes as you did in a dark bedroom as a child.

The absence of the sound qualities in a space, I argue, are more psychologically disturbing than the absence of visual qualities.  Furthermore, heinous visual experiences can be fixed by shutting one's eyes.  A cacophonous sound experience (unless you are a noise music fan) is, well, pretty much impossible to shut out.

Now, all of these imaginations inspired by a licensing exam!  I understand why the question is answered the way it is.  Architects simply haven't been trained to use sound as the primary determinant of form.  I sincerely doubt these exams are the place to instigate change, but I just had to get a little rant off my chest.