Project Description
In this project you will work in a team of three to listen closely to the area that surrounds the construction site of what will eventually become the new New School building on 5th avenue. The goal is to begin to listen closely to a complex soundscape and to create a visual manifestation of the sonic experience of your team.

Project Goals

• To work in a team to:
  • manifest through written deliverables a close attention the sonic character of the site
  • develop and utilize a preliminary vocabulary of sonic effects
  • collect quantitative and qualitative information about your site.
  • develop a solution for transforming the sonic site into a visual one.
  • assign tasks within the team.
  • determine solutions to a problem
  • execute a final visual map using the contributions of every team-member.

Stage One – Preliminary experience.
In this stage of the project you will spend time experiencing the
site and then describing it.

In Class (week 3 – 9/15)

• The class gathers at the site.
  • Everyone puts on a blindfold, stays still and listens.
  • Each team then selects a guide for their group.
  • The guide leads his or her team mates from the site to the endpoint of their path (see map for team paths).
    NO TALKING! Be very careful crossing the street.
  • The guide is then led, blindfolded, back to the site by his or her unmasked team mates.
• Back in class, debrief: Try to describe your experience.
  • Level one: baggage.
    Did anything make the experience difficult or hard to relax into? What kinds of cultural, social, media constructs got in the way of your listening?
  • Level two: what did you hear?
    What were your impressions? Feel free to be colorful with  your descriptions this will help your team to build vocabulary for the next step in the project.

Homework for Stage One

1. Repeat your walk a second time.
   Debrief and refine your vocabulary using your Sound Journal to record your notes and make sketches on pages 3 and 4.
   What terminology can help to explain what you heard?
   Be sure to respond to the depth and layers of sound, not just the surface!
2. Repeat your walk a third and final time.
   For this walk, you should utilize methods to measure the sound that you are hearing.
   This can mean a number of things. It can include quantity (how many times did you hear a particular sound), it can include time (how long does a particular sound last), it can include volume (how soft or loud is a particular sound).
   This can be done subjectively with your own comparisons, or you can use tools that you might have at your disposal, for example an decibel level reader to read how loud sounds are, or a a stopwatch to time things.

Stage Two – Turning Sound into Sight
In this stage of the project, you work as a team to turn your
observations into visual soundmap that records aspects of your listening experience.

Goal of Stage Two

• To create a visual representation of your team’s listening experience.
  This “visual soundmap” must be a translation of your data, vocabulary and measurements.
  It should communicate the complexity of the sonic environment through visual means.
  

Possibilities and limitations

• The visual soundmap can be two-dimensional; a relief (meaning two-dimensional with three-dimensional elements); or fully three-dimensional.
• material choices are open with the exception of digital. No digital work may be included in the final map.
  
• Color may be used, but only to signify the different properties suggested by your collected information and observations.
  

Process

1. Review the notes, sketches and data that your team collected in your sound journals.
   Discuss ways in which the qualities and quantities that you documented can be made visual.
   
2. Create sketches that describe your ideas for making the soundmap. (due week 5 – 10/06)
   • 3 sketches per team-member, these must be based on conversations between your team members.
   • The goal is to have a multitude of different design options.
   • Format: sketches must be on 8″ x 10′ bristol paper.
   • All of your team’s sketches must have the same orientation: determine as a team whether all the sketches will be vertical or horizontal.
   • material for the sketches is open.
3. Create first drafts of your Visual Soundmap (due week 6 – 10/13)
   • draft maps can be rough, mocked up in cardboard, newspaper, paint, whatever can get your ideas across in a form that will best communicate the visual direction you intend to take in the final.
   • the draft map should take advantage of the feedback you received on your sketches and should represent a new iteration of your team’s idea.
     • “Iterative design isn’t design by trial and error. Iterative design is a process
       of continually improving not just the design, but also the problem your
       design is trying to solve.“
       – Aza Raskin
       Toward the perfect paper airplane
   • draft maps can be smaller that the final visual soundmap.
   • showing options is preferred.
4. Create your final Visual Soundmap (due week 7 – 10/20)
   • The final map should reflect the feedback you have received.
   • the final map should have visual and structural integrity.
   • the results that we see should communicate the intention of your team.

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John’s Mapping Presentation

Often when imagining sounds in an urban environment it is the negative aspects related to noise pollution that spring to mind. What are some of the sounds that New Yorkers consider positive aspects of their sonic environment?  In this group project you will interview New Yorkers to find out! You will also record the sounds and post them online. They will be added to the online Favorite Sounds map created by the English Sound Artist Peter Cusack.

Collaboration
Favorite Sounds is a collaborative exchange project with a group of  students in Atlanta who will also record a selection of the “favorite sounds” in their own city. In the next project, called Recreating Atlanta we will work with the sounds from that city.

Radio!
Additionally, The New School radio, WNSU
and the Georgia State radio station, WRAS
are both going to feature this project.

Stage One – Interviews
In order to understand what positive soundmarks (as opposed to landmarks) New Yorkers associate with their city, you will need to conduct interviews.
Tips and ground rules:

1. How Many Interviews? Each group must collect information from 15 people.
2. Who to Interview? Only 5 of your subjects may be students and they cannot be freshmen (in other words, you’ll want to find some people that have a history with the city)
3. What to ask? It is as simple as it sounds.
   What is your favorite sound in New York City? It can be big or it can be small. Some examples from London were the “mind the gap” announcement on the Metro, a Bagel Shop on Brick Lane, and the Great Court Of The British Museum.

    

4. Be Specific! Ask your,  interviewees to be as specific as possible, especially about the location.
   (Example: “the 4 train pulling into union square station” rather than just “the subway”)
5. You must get the following info during your interview:
   – Location where interview took place.
   – Person’s Name
   – Person’s Age
   – Person’s Profession
   – How long has this person lived in new York?
   – Where does he/she live?
   – Snap a photo or do a sketch of this person.
   
   (As a gift participants get a special EAR button
   made from the class ear graphics from week one.)

Stage Two – make sense of your interviews!

• Enter the information into the online form found on the class website.
• Create a  portrait of each of your interviewees. These will go on a blog that we are sharing with the Atlanta collaborators.
  Format
  • Created in Adobe illustrator
  • Size: 10 inches wide x 8 inches high
  • Black & white + 1 color
  • Contains illustration of the person
  • Contains all of the info you received from him or her.
  • Saved as pdf and jpeg.

  

Stage Three – categorize the sounds and vote

• As a class, organize the sounds by neighborhood.
  select the “winning” sounds.
  Criteria categories: most popular, most specific, most unusual, quietest, noisiest, best possibility of recording the sound.
• Divide the sounds among the teams.

Stage Four – Go to record these sounds.

• Be sure to test your equipment! Check out equipment as necessary with John.
• Conduct recording tests with your partners.
• Post your sound to the class Soundcloud drop box. (also easily accessed in the sidebar of this blog!)
• Post to the Listening Lab blog.