Tony Schwartz – Sound in the City

Aug 282011

Tony Schwartz
Sounds in the City (pdf 430 kb)
From The Responsive Chord

As you heard in the Weekly Listening item devoted to Tony Schwartz, he was an incredible listener. Amazingly enough he suffered from agoraphobia an anxiety disorder that often manifests itself as a fear of the outdoors. It is incredible then, that his work actually got him out onto the streets to capture sounds and to interview people in the city, mainly in his neighborhood.

Besides his work as a sound recordist, Tony Schwartz was also a media thoreorist working alongside Marshal McLuhan at Fordham University. He wrote two books on the media called “The Responsive Chord” published by Doubleday in 1974,  and “Media: The Second God,” published by Random House in 1981.

Posted by admin on August 28, 2011 at 11:27 pm readings Comments Off Tagged with:

New York Magazine: Honk, Honk, Aaah

Aug 262011

Honk, Honk, Aaah (link)
New York Magazine
By Michael Crowley
Published May 17, 2009

The soundscape of major cities around the world has one element that is consistent: Traffic.
The sonic quality of a street or neighborhood is greatly affected by the way that traffic flows through it. The current commissioner of New York City Department of Transportation (and the recipient of an honorary degree in 2011 at the New School), Jeanette Sadik-Khan has made some bold changes to the way that some major thoroughfares in NYC, like Broadway, a diagonal artery that cuts through Manhattan, are used by both cars and pedestrians. While this article does not focus particularly on the sonic benefits of these changes, it gives the reader a good idea of how difficult it is to make changes such as these in a city like New york, that has such an established grid and assumed patterns of use.

Janette Sadik-Khan, the city’s Transportation commissioner, manages to be equal parts Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses. As she prepares to close swaths of Broadway to cars next week, she is igniting a peculiar new culture war—over the role of the automobile in New York.

Posted by admin on August 26, 2011 at 1:43 pm readings Comments Off Tagged with: , ,

The Art of Summer – The Contrapuntal Sounds of Gridlock

Aug 202011

The Art of Summer
The Contrapuntal Sounds of Gridlock
By JON PARELES
Published: August 9, 2011

A red-white-and-blue sign at the corner of West Broadway and Watts Street in SoHo reads, “Don’t Honk — $350 Penalty.” It is, shall we say, not always heeded. This corner is a five-way crossing, where Broome Street forks into Watts, which leads to the Holland Tunnel, and crosses West Broadway, which has two-way traffic. The tunnel entrances themselves run smoothly, if slowly; traffic police officers are there. But the New Jersey exodus has to back up somewhere, and this corner is one of those places. Amid this gridlock is a whole lot of self-expression via car horns and the occasional, ah, verbal admonition.

more…

Posted by admin on August 20, 2011 at 9:14 pm readings Comments Off Tagged with: , ,

R. Murray Schafer – I Have Never Seen a Sound

Jul 282011

R. Murray Schafer – I have never seen a sound (pdf)

R. Murray Schafer is a Canadian composer and author of The Tuning of the World, a seminal work on the history of the soundscape. The material in this essay was originally presented as a keynote address at the twelfth International Congress of Sound and Vibration, held in Lisbon, Portugal, in July, 2005. Schafer notes in his accompanying letter that he is “trying to get the acoustical architects and engineers to come back to sound as sound,  rather than the graphic projections that dominate most of their thinking today.
– Environmental & Architectural Phenomenology Newsletter (EAP)

Posted by admin on July 28, 2011 at 2:08 pm readings Comments Off Tagged with: ,

A Beeping Protest

Jul 192011

protest

Can you really detain people because their phones are beeping?
And when you cannot tell who is protesting, is it still a protest?

- Full article at the New York Times (link)

Posted by admin on July 19, 2011 at 9:52 pm readings Comments Off Tagged with: , , , ,