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!

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.

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: 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.

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