This brief clip is from the film Touch the Sound, a documentary about the world renowned percussionist Evelyn Glennie who happens to be deaf . While the entire movie is beautiful, this particular snippet is a great example of the mingling of sounds in the city and the way that attention alters the way that we hear the world around us.
You can actually watch the entire film on Hulu.
The New York IPS
(Jay Allison, Janice Bail, Katie Davis, Karen Frillmann, Portia Franklin, Lou Giansante,
Charlie Gilbert, Alan Gingold, Karen Pearlman, Marjorie Van Halteren)
‘New York City: 24 Hours in Public Places’ (Excerpt 2:44)
About THE IPS RADIO HOUR
The first Sunday of every month at 8 will be devoted to pro gramming from Independent Producers in Sound. “We are listening!’ they say, “and we are recording the wide range of expression that can be evoked and conveyed through sound: from the portrait of the waitress in the corner coffee shop to the ambience of the harbor at dawn; from explorations of social and f>olitical issues to experimental music and daydreams for radio!’ Programs combine live mixes, taped features, studio interviews and call-ins. Members of the New York IPS. are Jay Allison, Janice Ball, Johanna Cooper, Katie Davis, Portia Franklin, Karen Frillmann, Lou Giansante, Charlie Gilbert, Allan Gingold, and Karen Pearlman- from WBAI radio 1984
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.
Philip Blackburn
Children, in the absence of Playstations, play circle games and
join in the fun at the boomy museum Kinderconcerts
3:47
The BQEar is an enormous trumpet-like horn perched atop the fence of the outdoor sculpture venue The Art Lot in Red Hook, Brooklyn. It was a project of mine included as part of a group exhibition called Media Mixed X4 in September 2010.
johnroach.net/pages/2010_bqear.html
In Ceará, Brazil, Narcelio Grud has created one of the more impressive alternate uses for street signs the Urban Guide for Alternate Use has seen, and we’ve seen plenty. Narcelio transforms street signs around the city in to public instruments as part of his Musica Livre project. As the video above shows, the project is exceptional not only for its merits of installing DIY musical instruments throughout the city, but also for the range and inventiveness of the instruments themselves. From stringed instruments to xylophones, the city’s street signs’s new identities bring a smile and tune to anyone who passes by.
- The Urban Guide for Alternate Use
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)
About 30 people brought their iPhones to Wall and Broad streets, where Make Music New York and Metro helped sponsor a cell phone symphony flash mob.
Full article in Metro New York (link)
Professor Paul Jennings is leading a team researching how sound affects the perception of environments including urban and hospital intensive care units. People have generally seen noise as being unwanted, but the right sound has many positive aspects.
By building on their considerable experience in the automotive sector, Prof Jennings team is looking to quantify what people perceive as the ‘right sound’. This will help town and hospital designers build environments with sounds that engender positive responses in users, such as a lively city centre or a hospital ward that helps people feel less stressed and recover more quickly.
The Sounds of Silence (link)
By DAN BARRY
The New York Times
Published: June 30, 2011
A Restorative Racket (link)
By CHARLES McGRATH
The New York Times
Published: June 30, 2011
Walter Ruttmann – Weekend (1930)
Weekend is a pioneering work from the early days of radio, commissioned in 1928 by Berlin Radio Hour. In a collage of words, music fragments and sounds, the film-maker and media artist Walter Ruttmann presented on 13 June 1930 a radically innovative radio piece: an acoustic picture of a Berlin weekend urban landscape.Before making Weekend, Ruttmann had produced the experimental documentary Berlin-Symphony of a Great City (1927) as well as a number of short, experimental abstract animations. After his experience with his films, Ruttmann deliberately sought possibilities for producing an audio-film for radio. “Everything audible in the world becomes material,” he wrote in a manifesto in 1929, prefiguring Schaeffer, Varese, Cage and the other giants of the musical avant-garde.
Tones and sounds should exist in their own right. For Weekend they were recorded as arbitrary and intentional elements on the soundtrack of an optical sound film using the so-called Tri-Ergon process. For the first time an artistic radio production was created whose material could be assembled and designed according to rhythmic, musical principles.
The original of Weekend was long considered lost. A copy was only rediscovered in New York in 1978.
Exomapascape
by Fernando Corbal
(From Brasilia Soundscape Compositions)
This composition was created in a workshop in Brasilia led by the sound artist and acoustic ecologist Hildegard Westerkamp. The local participants who created the soundscapes ran the gamut from those with musical, recording and composition experience, to those who had very little or no experience at all working with sound.
Fernando was a musician and performer. He composed this piece with the explicit purpose to preserve the realism of the soundscape. It is a short and effective journey through the day of a middle class person in Brasilia. Leaving the quiet of the home, through the sound of a metal gate, entering the car, the work world with all its hectic, intense rhythms, finding recreation and stimulation later on the playground and in the gym with children, and finally ending up in the calming soundscape of a natural environment.
The idea of transferring the country’s capital away from the coast has existed since the second half of the eighteenth century, as a way to populate, develop and secure Brazil’s vast interior (James Holston, p. 17). In the mid-fifties during the presidential campaign of Juscelino Kubitschek it was finally proposed as a concrete project and was realized shortly after, in the 60s, Brasilia is a very young city.
This city has exactly what other, not so consciously designed cities have – a lot of traffic noise. Meanwhile at the nearby lake one can find serene silence. It is obvious by now that Brasilia is a place of sharply contrasting soundscapes: traffic noise and natural sounds. There is very little in between. Human social contexts, like cafes or restaurants, appear in small isolated clusters, dotted all over the city, connectable only by car. That which defines a community acoustically is mostly lacking: the regular street, the small alleys, little squares, shady old trees, market places, neighbourhood cafes, those hidden corners that develop over time as a city becomes older. It is in those more intimate places where community develops, where culture first occurs, where people in their social interaction are protected from the larger noise of a city and can create small islands of undisturbed communication, a type of inner voice or village voice of urban culture and social life.
- from the website of Hildegard Westerkamp
Helen Thorington – 9-11 scapes (excerpt)
a collaboration with Jo-Anne Green
<a href=”http://radioartnet.bandcamp.com/track/91101-scapes” _mce_href=”http://radioartnet.bandcamp.com/track/91101-scapes”>9.11.01 Scapes by radioartnet</a>
9.11.01 Scapes was composed to accompany a series of collaged images created by Jo-Anne Green the day New York’s World Trade Center was attacked. Green’s palette consisted of NASA images of earth and photographs of diatoms and ground Zero. Each Scape consists of multiple layers. Thorington used the layers’ titles, and the texts that accompanied the NASA images to weave her multilayered narrative for the Notes; and much as Green used found ‘pigments’, Thorington used found sounds to create the soundscore for the series. 9:11:01 Scapes was the winner of an Honorable Recognition, Prix Bohemia Radio Festival, Czechoslovakia, 2003; and the Winner, Aether Festival, KUNM-FM, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 2003.
Helen Thorington is a writer, sound composer, and media artist. Her radio documentary, dramatic work, and sound/music compositions have been aired nationally and internationally for the past twenty years. She has also created compositions for film and installation that have been premiered at the Berlin Film Festival, the Whitney Biennial, and the Whitney Museum’s annual Performance series.
Indian Soundscapes – Loudspeaker
Two CDs of sound recordings from India, presented in a beautiful handmade wooden box. An engrossing two-hour-long audio adventure for armchair travellers, backseat drivers and homesick Desis. North, South, East, West. Rajasthan, West Bengal, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Uttar Pradesh, Goa and beyond. From sea to sky, desert to jungle, and quiet village to bustling metropolis. Temples and trains, mosques and markets, beggars and bicycle bells. Quiet conversations, laughing children, enthusiastic salesmen, gamblers and dreamers. Cricket games, riverside clothes washing, humming insects and thunderstorms. It’s all here, in a compelling variety of feelings and moods.
- from Soleilmoon recordings
Sarah Peebles
Walking through Tokyo at the Turn of the Century
Shinjuku Station (south entrance) – Ticket vending machines, telephone, wicket beeps, train arrival/departure music.
More a documentary than a composition, Sarah Peebles’ release is nevertheless perfectly capturing the soul of a city that’s world famous for its messy life. But what’s incredible listening to “108″ is the fact that the very characters of noise, confusion and – not to exaggerate – stress one usually gets in metropolitan environment become – little by little – appreciated companions in any of their particular inflexions: the fast-food girl’s almost carillon-like voice accompanied by company jingles, a preacher, commercial music from Japanese radio, and so on… The only moment of relief comes with the wonderful tolling of a temple’s bell preceding the New Year. Here you have the total meeting: the body has time to settle down, the mind can work in spans at last. Contrarily to similar projects that just draw a blank, Sarah’s soundscape needs to be listened with polished ears.
— Massimo Ricci, Touching Extremes
Bill Fontana
Soundbridge Köln/San Francisco»
In 1987 the first satellite bridge in the history of radio was produced with two sound sculptures: Soundbridge Köln – San Francisco. The «orchestra» consisted of 18 sound sources in the city of Cologne and 18 in San Francisco. Simultaneous events in the two cities, parallel but completely independent of one another, were brougtht together and mixed into a collage by Bill fontana from a mixing board at the WDR, producing the live composition, Satellite Soundbridge Köln – San Francisco. For an hour the listeners entered into the sound world of two widely separated cities though the medium of Fontana´s sound composition. Many listerners have mentioned that this work had a soothing effect which was almost therapeutic in nature.
(Source: ZKM Audio collection)
For solo tape with poetry and reading by Norbert Ruebsaat
Length: 16:05
A Walk through the City is an urban environmental composition based on Norbert Ruebsaat’s poem of the same name (see below). It takes the listener into a specific urban location – Vancouver B.C.’s Skid Row area – with its sounds and languages. Traffic, carhorns, brakes, sirens, aircraft, construction, pinball machines, the throb of trains, human voices, a poem, are its “musical instruments.” These sounds are used partly as they occur in reality and partly as sound objects altered in the studio. A continuous flux is created between the real and imaginary soundscapes, between recognizable and transformed places, between reality and composition.
The poem is spoken by the author and appears throughout the piece, symbolizing the human presence in the urban soundscape. Its voice interacts with, comments on, dramatizes, struggles with the sounds and other voices it encounters in the piece.
A Walk Through the Citywas composed at the Sonic Research Studio at Simon Fraser University and, in its final stage, at the CBC studios in Vancouver, with the technical assistance of Gary Heald. Many of the sounds were taken from the World Soundscape Project’s environmental tape collection at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, including two of the street oldtimers, recorded by my friend and colleague, the late Howard Broomfield. Some were recorded by myself.
The piece was commissioned by and first broadcast on CBC Radio’s “Two New Hours.”
from: http://www.sfu.ca/~westerka/program_notes/walkcity.htm
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