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Landon Mackenzie. Pink Dot, 2012 © Scott Massey
LANDON MACKENZIE: NERVOUS CENTRE SEPTEMBER 7, 2012 - JANUARY 5, 2013
Esker Foundation’s first solo exhibition, Landon Mackenzie: Nervous Centre presents a compelling survey of Landon Mackenzie’s work from 1993 to 2012. It highlights her abstracted study of cartography to map out human systems of movement, thought and convergence. The exhibition presents rarely seen drawings, a selection of her ‘suitcase paintings’, and several of her better-known, large-scale cinematic canvases. Mackenzie has spent a lifetime looking at land, how it is shaped, how we shape it, how we remember it, and how we tell its stories. Her research has taken her to remote locations such as the Cumberland Delta, as well as map rooms and archives including the Scott Polar Institute in Cambridge, UK. Like an esker formation, Mackenzie’s stories can be narrow and sinuous or broad and flat-topped; they can have multiple crests or can be segmented like a string of beads. Her recurrent use of bridges, nets, ladders, balloons, filters, neural pathways, branches, leaves and subway maps, and her exemplary use of color, scale and sound, encourages viewers to make the leap to other places and times. Landon Mackenzie has received numerous awards and is an influential artist and educator. Her work has been exhibited in over ninety exhibitions across Canada and internationally, and is collected by many museums including the National Gallery of Canada and the Vancouver Art Gallery. She began her education at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD) in Halifax (1972-1975), and received her MFA at Concordia University (1976-1979). Based in Vancouver, she is a Professor at Emily Carr University of Art + Design.
444, 1011 - 9th Avenue SE | Calgary, AB, Canada T2G 0H7 | +1 403 930 2490 | www.eskerfoundation.com
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letters
Islands of the Imagination
re. Shannon Wiley’s article, ‘Vanishing Lands: Shishmaref, Alaska’ ( On Site review 27: rural urbanism )
1 As Sarichef Island continues to erode, and rising temperatures leave Shishmaref vulnerable to storm surges, I was struck by a perverse double of Shishmaref’s efforts to preserve itself. Thousands of miles south of the receding ice flow, some of the world’s richest capitalists are imagining other islands, where they can be safe from the damages they have wreaked. In 2008, The Seasteading Institute was founded by an influential group of libertarians. While many around the world have fled real state harassment, the seasteaders instead imagine a utopia free from government intervention in their business plans: a sort of Shenzhen-on-sea. For those who think America – with its government, its social security, and its medicare – is now lost, the seasteaders offer a dream of mobile platforms, resting outside the control of government. Available to all. For a price, of course. II For the Inupiat, Sarichef Island and the Arctic landscape are not empty – places to be filled by utopian dreams – but full of meaning, and bound up in the Inupiat way of life. So much European thought has imagined islands differently. The island has been a place of absence, where a new world could be imagined. Think of the success of Robinson Crusoe, who James Joyce named as the calculatingly taciturn exemplar of the British colonialist, or the continuing appeal of the fantasy of the desert island, where, apart from the humdrum of our working lives, we can finally be free. Or so it seems. III Island thinking reached its apex in the early modern period, as European thinkers struggled to come to terms with the existence of the Americas. What did it mean that these people lived so differently? Were they even human? In part, the tradition of natural right exemplified by the work of Hobbes and Locke was a way of coming to terms with this discovery. If tradition and custom could no longer be used to justify the way life was lived in Europe, perhaps by analysing man in his most basic state, one could arrive at basic rights and laws that applied to all humans.
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IV It is no mean feat, however, to get back to man in his most basic state. This is where the islands come in.
In book six of De Architectura , Vitruvius writes of the philosopher Aristippus, who is shipwrecked on the coast of Rhodes. On the beach, with not a person in sight, he sees geometric shapes traced in the sand – signs of habitation. In the early modern period, this story was reinterpreted. What is important in the retelling is the not that the geometric shapes are a recognition of proximate humanity, but that they are recognisable at all. Even on a deserted island, humans can recognise those most basic shapes dear to Descartes. Even alone, we have reason, which binds us into the human community. The thought-islands of the early modern period were places designed to strip man to his most essential, outside of tradition and culture. Grotius, the Dutch legal theorist influential in shaping natural right theory, wrote that in the natural state, man would have dominion over animals, nature, and his wife. Suddenly, the deserted islands began to look rather like 17th century Amsterdam. These island utopias may have been empty of people, but they were full of significance. Imagining man in his most basic state was also a way of imagining what the world should look like, and the world that was imagined looked much like a real world of increasing European domination, and the marginalization of those for whom islands were not empty, but places full of memories, ancestors, and ways of life. V Seasteading, with its incredible dreams of “permanent, autonomous, ocean communities” full of the “entrepreneurial spirit” seems rather like the thought-islands of the early modern period: both reimagine contemporary economic arrangements into a fantastic vision of what man could be. Unlike the early modern experiments however, Seasteading is based on a creaky ideology: government has made capitalism impossible; the old world is dead, and the new world at sea. As more and more of the world is opened up to resource extraction, and Sarichef island increasingly feels the cost, it was refreshing to read Shannon Wiley’s article, which did not imagine fantasy islands, but thought poignantly about how to live on the islands we have. Joshua Craze Toulouse
Suburban Drivers
So much of architectural and urban thought is a disguised rant against the suburb. There is much that is inherently wrong with suburbia including the underlying economic incentives and biases. However most North American people choose to live in suburbs. Askew’s Salmon Arm ( On Site review 27:rural urbanism ) is a thoughtful attempt to weave broader community sensibilities into the suburban reality. Our current design culture is focused on the religion of high art with a resultant emphasis on art galleries, museums, libraries and theatres as the vessels of culture. But these are the formal expression of a culture that also resides in the matter-of-fact realities of daily living that includes buying groceries. Of course this current architectural predilection has not always been the case. Modernist architects of the 1920s up to the 60s did pay attention to domestic and community design. Perhaps as a result of some of their well-documented failures, architects have abandoned these areas of investigation. I applaud Allen+Maurer and Fasr+Epp for approaching this prosaic commission as an opportunity to create a meaningful experience in a suburban grocery store and parking lot. Fundamental to this type of design exercise is how to accommodate the car. The challenge with suburban development is in responding to the standard metrics of parking stalls per square foot of retail space. An architect’s ability to effectively design around these limitations is key to managing all the economic drivers of suburban development. In other communities there are recent trends away from the big store surrounded by acres of parking. It would have been informative to see an actual parking plan and the relationship between the topography, parking and the proposed buildings on site. I look forward to seeing the finished project documented to better understand how well the architecture has advanced the too-quiet suburban design conversation. Paul Whelan Toronto
Florian Maurer, of Allen Maurer Architects, replies —
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Paul Whelan makes many good points in his letter, for instance, that ‘serious’ architecture has largely abandoned suburban architecture in general, and shopping centres in particular, being more interested in cultivating its ego through signature buildings that have little effect on the life of the ordinary guy. However, that this may not have been so much the choice of the architectural profession, but the business reality driving these developments in our particular economic and political system: developers want to first and foremost turn a profit, and going against the grain and proposing alternatives to proven (in the economic sense) development models is not part of their game plan, nor is engaging the architect to do more than the absolute minimum required to perpetuate the status quo. I credit our client, Mr. David Askew, for breaking this cycle. Without being allowed to do so architects cannot do good work. I would also like to comment that most North American people started choosing to live in suburbs at a time when even Le Corbusier thought this was the way of the future and that the automobile was the greatest invention since sliced bread. Half a century later we are not so sure anymore, but the reality that has been created since then has changed the world profoundly and has an inertia that may be impossible to stop, if we want to be pessimistic (which I don’t). Finding a way back (or forward, if you will) is a long and painful process. Our Askew’s project is a baby step in that direction. The Askew’s store is phase one of a much larger mixed use development. We do have a master plan that will not only show the final parking configuration, but also how we use buildings to enclose streetscapes, rather than being the usual ‘islands unto themselves in a sea of parking’ so typical of suburbia. This master plan also shows how we could successfully argue a significant reduction of parking, based on the argument that the new development is in the precise centre of a large area of residential use within easy walking/cycling distance. This is another baby step. If we keep making these, we’ll get somewhere. The irony of the culture that has created ‘starchitecture” is that it has had profound influence on how the anonymous architecture of suburbia gets its form: every strip commercial is an accumulation of solitaires that badly want to stick out amongst the other solitaires, shout each other down, with larger neon signs, more garish colours, glued-on attributes whose only purpose is to say “look at me!” To find a way back to a culture that joins buildings to create streetscapes would not violate people’s desire to live in suburbs. Florian Maurer Penticton
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Location, Location, Location
Miriam Ho’s essay ‘Fictional Terrain’ and Dana Seguin and Christopher Katsarov Luna’s essay ‘Heritage Vil- lage: an embedded collective memory’ unearthed in me some uneasy memories and musings about the rural ideal and the urban gaze. Though I have lived for nearly a decade in the busy urban centre of Montreal, I grew up on the shores of the Northumberland Strait in Nova Scotia. Before the construction of the Confederation Bridge joined Prince Edward Island to its Maritime sister provinces, and when school let out for the summer, I was often rolled into our family car for a ferry trip to ‘the Island.’ There we joined the other tourists in the dream of an isolated place where the sun always shone, the land was always green, the water warm and the people quaint. I sincerely remember it being so. At least on one occasion we stopped to take a tour of Green Gables National Park and of Anne’s house. I was an intense fan not only of the Anne of Green Gables character, but also of the characters and village of Avonlea, immortalised by Montgomery’s novel and CBC’s long-running drama, The Road to Avonlea . Miriam Ho comments that “visitors to the Green Gables house negotiate the actual, historical and fictional, projecting their story onto the site, altering how it will be shaped”; however, as I imagine was the case for many child(like) tourists to this mythological place, Anne’s house destabilised me. The limbo between fic- tion and historical fact was uncomfortable. I was horrified when I realised that the green-gabled house in Cavendish was not ‘the real thing’. As Ho mentions, Montgomery’s childhood house now lies in ruins, its protection trumped by the tourist-driven desire to preserve the myth of Anne. It was amusing to experience a hint of this brand of agitation when I read Seguin and Katsarov’s essay about the Town of Markham and the heritage planning policy that has transplanted hundred-year-old houses to the suburbs. Seguin and Katsarov Luna argue that Markham’s transplanted houses exhale “a sigh of relief that that their community still validates a particular moment of rural Canadian history”. As much as I appreciate the impetus to preserve these fine examples of rural architecture, I cannot suppress the feeling (and to quote Anne Shirley) that “this is the most tragical thing that has ever happened”. Would not these houses be ultimately more comfortable decaying in solitude on rural properties than corralled into a suburb? I admit I am probably projecting my own inner conflict about my rural and urban identities on these inanimate centenarian houses. I choose to live in the city because it offers so much in terms of proximity to cultural life, ease of mobility and varied architecture. And it is easy to expect that by making this choice I can ‘have it all’; however, it seems unfair that the prizes of rural life, such as the Markham Heritage Estate farm houses, are appropriated by those who do not weather its inconveniences. Meaghan Thurston Montreal
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Send comments, critiques, corrections, rejoinders, footnotes and further discussion on anything you find in this issue of On Site review 28: sound , to editor@onsitereview.ca letters
sound
on site 28 fall 2012
contents
urban listening Nick Sowers Caelan Griffiths Will Craig
8 10 12
Listening Practice A Stratigraphy of Skoundscapes Sound Control
the sounds of belief Chloé Roubert Paul Whelan and Ryan Bessey Jason Price
14 17 32
For Whom The Bells Toll Sacred Acoustics Holy Ghost ...FIRE!
the uses of history Martin Abbott Emily Thompson Zile Liepins listening to buildings Helena Slosar Eon Sinclair Brian S Pearson
20 23 26
The Sound of Berlin The Roaring Twenties Singing a Revolution
38 42 46
Embedded Sound Singing in the Rain Para-Site
walking sound Urs Walter and Olaf Shäfer
48 50 52
Audible Architectural Models Configuring Space Everything Its Own Silence
Ron Wickman Joshua Craze
other stuff Stephanie White calls for articles masthead
6 55 56
Sound : Lyrics on site 29: geology, on site 30: ethics and publics who we are
Our thanks to Shannon Werle, who was the editorial advisor to this issue and who wrote the call for articles. Her article in On Site review 25: identity , which compared the sounds of Hong Kong and Lagos, was the spur to this issue.
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There are a number of soundtracks available to accompany some of these articles: they are on the
webpage for this issue: www.onsitereview.ca/28
Individual sets of sound files have their own URLs and QR codes, but you can get to them all through the 28:sound page, left.
sound firmness, commodity and delight
introduction | architecture and sound by stephanie white
l istening hearing fi ltering interpreting speaking
itself filters out meaningful sounds, and Martin Abbott interviews Plastique Fantastique, at the audial centre of Berlin’s club scene. Zile Liepins, Jason Price and Chloé Roubert, each in quite different ways, discuss the use of sound, usually in song – but not always, to achieve some end: a revision of history, or a suppression of identity, or an assault on all rational thought processes. I was hoping someone might write on the use of seemingly trivial American pop anthems in torture, but much has been written about it elsewhere: banality in extremis . Sound manipulation, other than mind-blotting amplification, is examined minutely by Brian S Pearson and Eon Sinclair: precisely how does sound sound ? In a post-structuralist reading, a sound is not an absolute, cannot be precisely and accurately defined; it is a matter of context. Paul Whelan listens to a parking garage and hears a church. Which brings us to the cover, Lady McCrady’s Daddio listens … , where all the layers of New York street sounds jumble together on the canvas. Do we need an accompanying sound track to this, to confirm what New York sounds like? Surely through sight we can understand sound, whether through cultural memory, or personal experience. Emily Thompson tells us about an archival project that allows us to hear what New York sounded like in the 1920s through carefully recovered and assembled recordings. Evidently it was deafening, but deafening relative to what? to now, or to a pre-industrial rural past against which the city was considered a satanic hell. The recovery of these sounds of early twentieth- century cities to be listened to today seems more than mere entertainment, but some kind of urban critique. New York is still deafening, that is what strikes anyone who visits for the first time: garbage trucks clank and grind all night, sirens, traffic, shouting, din, din, din. It is great.
This issue of On Site on sound comes with an inherent contradiction: reading a print magazine is a generally silent activity, unless one’s reading is punctuated with shouts of ‘oh no, that is so wrong!!!’ And although the radio is probably on, or the tv, or your iPod, or the phone, or the train is going by, the dog is barking, the new energy-efficient sound-profligate furnace is roaring away, the kitchen tap is dripping annoyingly, we have the ability to shut out all these sounds as we read, and we begin to hear other sounds in the words themselves and what the words are describing. We intuit sound as much as we hear it. What this issue asks is that we actually listen for a while: no short cuts, no assumption we know what going up a staircase sounds like, no blocking out of the muzak of our daily lives. In this, Ron Wickman’s afternoon spent with a blind friend comes very close to Urs Walter and Olaf Shafer’s use of sound models as architectural design tools: how we use our hearing is a quite complex process we take completely for granted. That said, I’m not sure we need to actually hear a train every time we look at a Winston Link photograph. The mind fills in the sound, but one of the premises of several of the articles in this issue, is that we have forgotten how to do this, or are too lazy to do it — an example of our etiolated relationship with the real, rather than the virtual, world. The delight at the sonic revelations found by Helena Slosar, Caelan Griffiths, Will Craig — the experience of hearing places, not just seeing them, and Nick Sowers who records places he visits rather than photographing them, his binaural microphones the equivalent of the viewfinder: these are all about the experience of sound. Whatever is heard is what is there: the filters that assign value to certain sounds have been dropped. Joshua Craze walks some empty streets of Paris and finds that the architecture
Blackboard sketch by Gilles Saucier (with aerial photograph) for the National
Music Centre, Calgary, 2009
facing page: Saucier + Perrotte’s proposal for the National Music Centre where it faces Ninth Avenue, showing the Stampede Parade – pipe bands and quasi-military marching bands echo through Calgary’s downtown canyons.
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courtesy Saucier + Perrotte Architects
courtesy Saucier + Perrotte Architects
A few years ago there was an international competition for the Cantos Foundation’s National Music Centre in Calgary. The Saucier + Perrotte proposal was not chosen, but a file of marvellous drawings came my way for a different project on unbuilt and unrealised ideas. Because I know Calgary, and because I’m not particularly interested in the politics or names of superstardom in architecture, I looked at the drawings for this project as drawings , eloquent diagrams of architectural intent. Without reading all the explanatory texts that came with the proposal, I looked at the drawings and saw wind. Part of Saucier + Perrotte’s narrative reads: The National Music Centre’s skin provides a manifestation in three- dimensional terms of the sounds represented by the music we hear. … Since the generational organisation of musical sequences is similar to the harmonic overtones generated by a vibrating string, facade patterns are based on a family of lines according to a musical sequence. This family is then rotated around a central point to create a two-dimensional pattern. By accenting certain families of lines, a hierarchy is established in the pattern, which begins to define the important nodes. These nodes are the basis of a structural diagram that relates to the lighter glazing pattern. When a three-dimensional aperiodic pattern is created, it is possible to relate the boundaries of certain solids to families of planes organised along musical sequences. This can create interesting offset options, as the pattern on the boundary of the solid will be mirrored, but slightly altered, in the offset plane. The resulting 2D and 3D (or multi-dimen- sioned) grids are non-repeatable, ensuring regular nosing-out proper- ties despite the irregular pattern. For purposes of exhibition, the exterior skin is always left intact, but the interior skin changes in opacity depending on the nature of the objects/artefacts displayed. This is what results in the changing nature of the facades, from clear to smoky in appearance as perceived from the outside. In fact, the exterior envelope’s colours appear different as one moves around the building. The west facade appears white, but as observed from 9th Avenue SE the south facade is gray. As one sees the building from the east, the east facade appears very dark or even black. This perceptual dynamic ensures that, just as music and sound do not remain static, the National Music Centre is ever-changing in appear- ance. Well, I hardly understand this at all, but I do get that the appearance of this building will be ephemeral, ambiguous, motile. If one could imagine a building blowing down 9th Avenue as if it were a silver sheet of water, this is it. Alas, we shall not see such a thing. The music centre we are getting looks like an organ with gilded pipes at the top.
More from Saucier + Perrotte: …the atrium…based on notions of echo, delay, reverberation, [is] a space that can be mechanically modified to alter sound and perception. This large chamber reacts to any sound input (human or instrumental sounds, using microphones or with electronic input) and is able to manipulate these sounds. This element becomes the central structuring node for the overall project …visitors remain cognisant of their position with respect to this resonant object…experiencing different sounds or sets of sounds as the input is constantly changing. This brings to mind Martyn Ware’s 2012 Tales from a Bridge , sound loops coming from all directions in ever-changing syncopation. The Music Centre’s resonant object is an atrium, skylit, bouncing sound and light around within it with lesser and greater control. It is the glass core of the project, all tilting walls and walkways: a disturbing collage of sound files and an equally disturbing collage of reflectant surfaces. There was a program for this project, of course: studios, sound stages, the museum: Cantos’s extensive, historic, interactive musical instrument collection; there is Elton John’s white 1910 piano and the Rolling Stones’ 2001 Mobile Studio — there is stuff in this centre, not just space. And we know that the building cannot actually be ephemeral, ambiguous, motile, it can only hope to encourage such a reading. What I quite like is that the appearance on the street, in its urban context, does not shout out ‘music lives here’, rather it transcends program, the renewal of east downtown Calgary and the accommodation of the indigestible 1910 King Edward Hotel which must remain on the site, and instead captures some near-indefinable but lyrical characteristics of Calgary – the transformational Chinook winds that blow over the mountains from the Pacific Ocean a thousand kilometres away, the sound of the trains across the street on the main line that stretches from Halifax to Vancouver: thin, attenuated, a sound a continent wide. Saucier + Perrotte’s particular tilting folded-plate form-making suits this very well. There is no immediate urban context to respond to – well there is, but it is ghastly. The context here is geographic and environmental, not ephemeral at all. Thinking about an architecture that addresses sound, it doesn’t have to be the sound of our civilisation, its music, its mechanical noise, its bellowing spatial control. It can be something much more fundamental – the sound of our place on the earth. j
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listening | to travel by nick sowers
ambience travel binaurality soundscapes averaging
listening practice Travelling is a kind of laboratory. It is a grand experiment, setting foot on foreign land, not knowing what events and adventures will ensue, what people one will encounter, what new tastes the tongue will discover. The continuous assault of new experiences hone the body’s senses into a versatile, perceptive instrument.
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nick sowers
Fes, Morrocco
My travels throughout the last decade have taken me through rich and rewarding laboratories of sound. The auditory interest began with documenting my first trip to the Mediterranean where I often left my camera buried in a day bag. Instead of shooting photos, I captured my experiences by walking around with a pair of binaural microphones (microphones which are placed above or in the ear to replicate the stereo listening environment) hooked up to a pocket- sized digital recorder. Before the trip, I had researched low-profile sound recording equipment through a community of concert tapers –people who trade bootleg recordings of live shows. On one trip studying military base edges in Japan, I went so far as to label the minidisc in my sound recorder ‘classical music’ should the military police ever look upon me with suspicion. So sound and travel began for me as a way of simply recording my experiences without drawing attention to myself or letting a camera get in the way. The way I travelled changed almost right away. In order not to return from a trip with a mountain of uncategorised audio, I forced myself listen to each set at the end of a day, making notes on significant sounds. On the first few days of travel, I was surprised to pick up sounds I was completely unaware of. First it was obvious things like a faint buzzing tone in a room where I was recording some musicians. This buzzing sound I learned later is known as ‘room tone’ – having to do with the microphone's location in the room resonating in a certain way. Then I noticed more subtle background sounds, such as voices of people reverberating through walls, or the variable loudness between different marketplaces, or the room acoustics of alleyways. The next day I would go out with the previous recording playing back in my mind, changing the paths I decided to take because the sound was different here or there. My day became a live soundtrack, with my feet driving the reel and the city’s surfaces and inhabitants sliding by as content. I learned to listen, and to listen very closely. I listen to places I go now, whether travelling abroad or travelling in my own city, with a recording mind. Sometimes I like to go out with a recorder and record several hours of sound with no intention of ever listening to the recordings. The recorder in hand keeps my ears alert. Even without the recorder, the residue of re-listening has stayed with me, and I move about in an environment as though I were recording sound. Tracing the various laboratories I have spent time in, the city of Fes, in Morocco. continually captures my imagination. It’s not possible to spend time in Fes and not be affected, imprinted. There is no ‘passing through’ Fes. At times it seems there is no escape either, from the intoxicating smells, the toxic smells, the clamour, the abandoned narrow passageways no wider than a mule’s head. Of all the intense sonic experiences in Fes, from the merchants’ heckling in the souks to the banging and clanking of craftsmen in workshops to the serene call to prayer before dawn, a single scene comes to mind which captures my bewilderment: I am on a scrubby hill overlooking, over-listening the city. Like the view, the image in sound is dense in detail. Tiny peaks of contrast: a distant horn, sparrows flittering in the foreground, the sharper cry of a child nearby. These peaks emerge from a grey droning sea: scooters,
voices, air conditioners, idling buses and, all of a sudden, the overlapping calls to prayer. The afternoon prayer is most interesting, as the bustle of the city attenuates for a moment and a multitude of amplified muezzins call out from the minarets. Altogether, these sounds form the averaged sound of the city. I climbed this hill, sound recorder in hand, thinking I would gain an understanding of the landscape below. I had been exploring the covered souks and winding passageways of the city for several days, the pathways worn by hundreds of years of feet, cart wheels and mule hooves, tracing paths from the tanneries to the souks, from the copper smiths to the mosques to the residential quarters. The citizens of Fes may find the maze of streets perfectly logical, but to the traveller, navigation is a bewildering and enchanting endeavour. The view of the city confounds any understanding of its 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? I attempted to listen to the madly twittering sparrows, but the sharp focus on one sound blurred the rest. I tried to pick out a particular revving scooter and locate it, but is it the scooter or something else not known, not seen, that I am hearing? Part of the fascination was 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 presents itself to a patient listener: listen to the averaged sound, and forget the names of all things making sounds. The ‘non-musician’ Brian Eno used to go to the middle of Hyde Park and absorb the averaged sound of London for hours. Subsequently his music tends to seek that abandonment of cognitive listening. Is listening in this case still listening to London (or to Fes), or is the averaged sound of a city just a sound, even a musical assemblage to appreciate 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 travelling (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. j
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a stratigraphy of soundscapes: listening to amsterdam and vancouver
acoustic urbanism | sound over water by caelan griffiths
l istening recording world soundscape project sound souvenirs place
First Impressions – a poem:
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pedestrian crossing noise takatakatakatakatakatakatakatakatakataka a kind of five-of-six-legs-working grasshopper tarantella on a cigar box dance floor pursues the flitting walker with such urgency! a trilling bike bell sounds warning shaking out a corduroy rubber sheet
car tires on cobblestones a streetcar dinner-plate bell the competition for street space is a running battle
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The sum of human activity in a particular urban environment yields its own tune. Is there a ‘key’ to a city? Is Vancouver an Fsharp? Is Amsterdam an Aflat? Can auditory comparison of each of these waterfront cities yield insight into their architectural character? There are two groups of writers that have proposed important ways of thinking of sound and design: the World Soundscape Project (WSP) and the theories proposed in the work of Karin Bijsterveld. These listeners and writers suggest ideas that can affect design analysis methods, and thus design proposals. In this sound comparison of Amsterdam and Vancouver I have compiled
a sound diary in my day-to-day wanderings of the cities. This resulted in an written observation about each city’s soundscape. In attempt to catalogue the constituent chimes and racket of Vancouver, the WSP catalogued the sounds of that city. Under the direction of R. Murray Schafer, it succinctly recorded, collected and catalogued their work in an album called Vancouver Soundscape . Throughout the course of their work – in Vancouver and eventually abroad – the WSP proved that listening to a city leads to a kind of analysis. Recording and identifying sounds can lead to a different way of understanding the city-scape – and
Ambiance – the city sounds of Amsterdam – should be thought of as the boulevard street noise that superimposes onto the canal network. This far-reaching ambient noise includes streetcar bells, bus roar and train noise. Atmospheric – the proximity of Schiphol airport means that passing airplanes are a keynote. This description of the intimate to the broad soundscape is a kind of hierarchy of sound experiences. The intrusion of an atmospheric sound into your personal ‘ear-space’ will cause remark, but only with careful listening can a person be aware of the continuing background of atmospheric sounds. The Vancouver soundscape can be examined with comparable stratigraphy. Of course, what is missing is the intimate integration of water into the street network. However, False Creek and English Bay can be considered analogues. Street level – vehicle traffic dominates, the sound of buses accelerating, and multi-lingual conversations. The beep- boop of the pedestrian crossing. Ambiance – The city sound of Vancouver is mostly vehicle traffic, but has a marine connection, with foghorns in the dead of winter and the cruise ship horn in summer. The sound of Skytrain acceleration travels remarkably far – in my personal experience five blocks away is perceptible indoors. Waterbody – The motor predominates, as in Amsterdam, but the lapping of the waves is more pronounced in Vancouver. Gulls scream here. The large open water carries downtown hubbub across to the urban hilltown to the south. Atmospheric – airplane traffic predominates, although the frequency of helicopter traffic is relatively high compared to Amsterdam. Sirens deserve their own private description. In Vancouver: wee-ooo-wee-ooo-wee-ooo. In Amsterdam: weedle-weedle- weedle-weedle, although there are many variants of sirens in both countries – I have observed three in the Netherlands and as many in Canada. The average city-dweller absorbs an astounding mix of sounds everyday. The built and natural environment around us adjusts the volume and intensity of these sounds. It is an acoustic environment that has arisen by our society’s choices and by our negligence. It comes down to this: everyday urban noise is produced and processed by elements of architecture and landscape. These alloyed signals we perceive are mediated by the city’s form. There are possibilities and constraints, jarring and soothing events, and a low level drone to human activities to which we assign priority and meaning – without reflection. The more we accept the background hum of urban activity, and accept the daily toll of sound events, the more we grow to ignore the entire auditory sense… The listener’s plaint, so eloquently paraphrased in R.Murray Schaefer’s term schizophonic , is that the meaning of a signal – the idea of a sound, is nourished by the action at its source. A schizophonic world, where sound is recorded, disseminated, processed and displaced, is seduced by ghosts. So if urban design opens its ears, perhaps too today’s omnipresent white ear-buds will become museum pieces. j
ostensibly, our place in it. A soundscape is a kind of topography, another to add to the geological kind. Sound topography is an interpenetration of gradients. Sounds ooze around corners, leap tall buildings, intermingle, cohabitate one another’s territories, all in a throbbing matrix of fluids. We can’t selectively shut our ears and appreciate an isolated sound event – at least not without technological aid. The World Soundscape Project was conceived to catalogue that world of the ear. From their analysis of everyday sounds, WSP proposed that our acoustic environment is a form of music, and that the distinction between noise and music was a rarified concept of the sublime – it isn’t that there aren’t bad sounds (noise), but to toss out all sounds outside the concert hall is a bit drastic. These elements of the everyday acoustic environment can be composed and organised to form a part of the palette of the contemporary music composer. For the design world, if these sounds could be deployed to arouse emotions intentionally, then they can (and must) have unintentional æsthetic repercussions. At heart, by including the day-to-day acoustic environment in the context of formal music, the composers of the day were critiquing our inattention to our ears. In this way the World Soundscape Project is a kind of manifesto. When applied to the built environment, it calls for urbanists to open their ears to aural design. Karin Bijsterveld and José Van Dijk’s latest work Sound Souvenirs examines the phenomenon of a mixture of nostalgia and archive using recording technologies. Pinpointing the World Soundscapes Project as a seminal moment in this kind of audio archiving – by conscientious experts – Bijsterveld and Van Dijk suggest that a kind of democratisation of sound recording technologies has resulted in a widespread listening culture. Our society wants to remember soundscapes. As everyday citizens are now able to collect sound artifacts, we can easily compare soundscapes through time. As a designer of built form it is important to understand the repercussions of the built environment on the sound environment – because invariably someone is listening. What hypotheses can be proposed to explain the relationship between architecture, landscape and sound in Amsterdam? It could be suggested that, at least in the canal belt of Amsterdam, that the lion’s share of the city fabric is given over to water. It can additionally be observed that the level of the canals is lower than that of the sidewalk, roadway and canal edge. This stepped edge creates a kind of stratigraphy of sound environments. The passing canal boat’s pounding dance music is somewhat contained by the water level (I write during Pride weekend). This we might consider the canal soundscape – the puttering motors, calls of boaters to one-another, and the shouts and hollers of passersby on foot. On warm days, in a canal in the Jordaan, I observed a group of three separate boats pass in 15 minutes. It was quiet enough a water level for two women to conduct a conversation in their boat – despite street level traffic. Gulls hoot here. The street level, or canal edge soundscape, interacts across the water and although separated by 10 metres of canal, there is an interaction between these edges such that it constitutes an environment in and of itself. In some instances, although rare, people on the canal edge call to the canal users – from a bar to a barge, I witnessed a happy “hallo” from drinkers to boaters, hailing between strangers.
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sound control sonic leaks : urban delight
urban overlaps | sound communities by will craig
identity control
accidents spatiality sonic territory
On any given day, my office suddenly becomes thick with sound. A tremendous din permeates every inch of the building. The Kimball Theatre Organ, donated to the National Music Centre in Calgary (formerly known as Cantos), is stationed on one of the lower floors. It is the largest organ in the collection, occupying approximately 200 square feet of museum space. Its sole mission is to generate noise. At one time the bellows would have been hand-pumped by a team of dedicated men; now, electrically- powered, it can be turned on at a moment’s notice to educate inquisitive school groups. It combines an array of instruments simultaneously to create an explosion of sound until, with a wheeze, the contraption completely exhausts itself of air. Once, this organ was used to entertain large crowds during evening performances. Now a museum piece, it inadvertently becomes a regular, daytime feature in our muted office environment. As the sounds migrate throughout the building’s structure, they distort to create a new, hybridised music. Sound leaks of this kind are rarely desirable in today’s urban environment – high frequency sounds such as traffic noise mask other sounds that might be more important to us. Nowadays, people wish to control this urban ‘noise’ with an environment designed to control and filter sound. * Before amplification and the modernisation of cities, sounds were part of ongoing, daily rituals. In seventeenth century London, church bells sounded when it was time for services, or for news of events. This provided a sense of locality – the St. Mary le-Bow church is a prime example, defining you as a true Londoner if the bells were within earshot. Urban life was enhanced through sound. Streets had their own distinctive sounds from the workshops of different trades. Marketplaces such as Smithfield, Leadenhall, Billingsgate and the Exchange teemed with merchants and animals. As Bruce Smith explains in The Acoustic World of Early Modern England , sound was used as a spatial device: “The soundscape of early modern London was made up of a number of overlapping, shifting, acoustic communities, centred on different soundmarks: parish bells, the speech of different nationalities, the sounds of trades, open-air markets, the noises of public gathering places.” 1 As sound migrates, communities begin to form. The habitual intrusion of these sounds into one’s environment, even homes, meant an outwardly-focused, collaborative culture— collaboration was a survival skill and a way of life. What made the life of the street was people’s dependence on it for trade and information. Knowledge was constantly being passed through sound waves and access to it was essential to anyone wishing
to stay informed. Narrow streets, timber, clay and plaster walls made sound leaks common.
In acoustic terms, the inside of a house was very much part of the street. Clanging, ranting, banging, hammering and serating migrated through adjacent buildings. Vaulted colonnades, arcades and marketplaces amplified the effects. Public spaces and places for exchange were, in this way, physically connected to other parts of the city. On the other hand, the parasitical nature of sound can be considered invasive. In the same way that our interior or personal space can be violated, so too sound can invade the very bodies we inhabit. Brandon LaBelle explains: “Initially, sound unfolds as a dynamic relation between an
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will craig
inside and an outside. This physical movement immediately occurs at the level of the ear – without closure, the ear radically permits the intrusion of the exterior onto the interior of the body, … In this way, it immediately crosses a number of boundaries, of the object itself, of given spatial separations between rooms or related divisions, and finally, of the separation between object (source) and subject (ear).” 2 Thus, sound can be seen to have material properties. Much like the need to remove dust and dirt from our physical environment, as a society we are inclined to control sound. In effect, sound is more easily fed to the population in a pure state, removing many of its qualities for the purpose of providing information, security or pleasure.
In J.G. Ballard’s fictional story ‘Sound Sweep’, 3 when a building becomes saturated with sound, overpowering its occupants, it must be decontaminated. The sound sweep uses a device called the Sonovac to cleanse floors, walls and ceilings. Overwhelming noise then makes way for the pleasant experience generated by a new form of ultrasonic music (which cannot be heard). As technology and digitised sound overpower conventional sound in Ballard’s story, ultrasonic music points to the reduction of sound to a purer, more absolute form – pleasure. Sound is no longer experienced. It has become like a material – something which can be potentially cleansed and erased completely. Hence, the shaping of this material as architecture and the transmission of selected sounds is an inherently strategic process. Sound leaks are accidental intrusions to this strategic filtering process. They interact with built form, causing new encounters between differing environments. As with pre-industrial London, the regular throng could suddenly be interrupted, causing any multitude of occurrences or encounters. “On any given day, in a given place, at a given hour, people might or might or might not behave precisely according to habit. Early modern London was not a sociologist`s grid but a range of possible paths the inhabitants might take throughout the day. ” 4 The accidental intrusion of sound is fundamental to the process of city-making. These sensitive arrangements of close-range activity allow commonalities of sound to develop. They are embedded within the fabric of our cities, morphed by material effects. Over time, the canvas of sound evolves producing unexpected results. Sound is spatial, yet our aim is often to exclude it, risking the loss of such productive encounters. I for one, look forward to the occasion of the next sound leak. j
1 Bruce R Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England , first edition. University Of Chicago Press, 1999 2 Brandon LaBelle , ‘Other Acoustics’ from Oase: Immersed, Sound & Architecture , No 78. 2009 3 J G Ballard, ‘The Sound-Sweep’ [1960], in The Complete Short Stories . London: Flamingo, 2001 4 Ibid, Smith
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facing page: covered marketplaces in London amplified the sound of activity within, radiating into neighbouring areas. this page: old and new – highly-reflective, insulated glazing isolates new buildings, preventing sound leaks from once commonly-heard soundmarks.
will craig
sonic landscape | recovery by chloé roubert
historicity middle ages campanology authenticity identity
for whom the bells toll restoring Notre Dame’s sound heritage
Until last February 20th,Angélique-Françoise, Antoinette- Charlotte, Hyacinthe-Jeanne and Denise-David, the four three- ton bells of Notre Dame de Paris’ northern tower had rung every 15 minutes since 1856. Although blessed by Napoléon III with the names of French saints, on that day they were not immune to dismantlement: in early 2013 they will be replaced by eight new bells. The ending of their 156 year-old rhythmical soundscape has caused a bit of a stir among some Parisians, who see it as the unnecessary destruction of an essential aspect of the French capital’s sonic identity and heritage. Notre Dame’s rector and head of this project, Reverent Patrick Jacquin, on the contrary, defends the forthcoming rearrangement insisting it will provide a more authentic soundscape than the one heard over the past 150 odd-years; and this, just in time for the beginning of the cathedral’s 850th anniversary celebrations next February. 1
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It isn’t so surprising then, both for their strong symbolic association with the aristocratic and religious elites and pragmatically for the making of canons that, in 1792, Notre Dame’s smaller bourdon in the southern tower (baptised Marie and first cast in 1472) and the eight bells of the northern tower were among the cathedral’s 19 melted bells. In fact Emmanuel is the cathedral’s only bell to have survived the Ancien Régime : confiscated during the Revolution’s turmoil it was re-installed in 1802 under a Napoléon Bonaparte decree. Emmanuel towered over Paris alone till 1856 when four new bells, gifts by Napoléon’s nephew, Napoléon III to celebrate his son’s baptism, were installed in the northern tower. These are the same four bells that, till last winter, called the daily offices, every quarter of the hour and the angelus. 5 What the current project hopes to do by replacing these four bells with eight new ones and by adding a second bourdon in the southern tower, is to recover the cathedral’s former pre-revolutionary harmonic formation. * Restoring the cathedral’s eighteenth century sonic landscape isn’t a uniquely contemporary enterprise. In 1845 while working on the cathedral’s renovations, Viollet-Le-Duc had started a similar initiative, to no avail. If he was perhaps simply hoping to fill the empty towers, today the project finds its justification in the four 1856 bells’ assessed poor quality. Out of tune with Emmanuel as well as with one another, made of poor and wearing metal and faulty by quantity and size, Notre-Dame has put forward a number of arguments backing the return of what once was. This is somewhat controversial among bellfounders. Philippe Paccard, owner of the Fonderie Paccard, told the New York Times “the tradition dictates that bell makers never renew bells in identical ways”. 6 Given the technical prowess necessary for the exact recasting of a bell, the tradition doesn’t seem so preposterous. Overall the casting of Gabriel, Anne-Geneviève, Denis, Marcel, Étienne, Benoît-Joseph, Maurice, Jean-Marie and Marie, will have required twenty-three years of work. Managed by the cathedral, the research involved in-depth historical and
Since its erection in the late twelfth century the cathedral has produced numerous soundscapes with many bells. As the most important building within the region’s episcopal hierarchy, Notre Dame has always sheltered the largest bell in the area and, even before it was completed, had numerous smaller bells emphasising its presence. In 1378 it acquired and installed Jacqueline, its main bourdon (a large bell), at the top of its southern tower. As is customary in traditional bell-founding, Jacqueline was melted and re-cast differently many times over the next three centuries. In the 1680s it was moulded to be significantly heavier – reaching the total weight of 13 tons – for a lower tone and re-baptised Emmanuel-Louise-Thérèse (after no other than its god-father Louis the XIV th and his wife Maria-Teresa). If campanologists still consider Emmanuel as having impeccable timbre, at 327 years-old next March its aging structure means it resonates only on extraordinary occasions such as the end of World War II, Christmas, Easter, 2 or Papal visits and funerals (it rang 84 times for Jean-Paul II’s passing at age 84). Emmanuel was lucky. Like France’s aristocracy, most of the country’s Ancien Régime bells never made it past the French Revolution and subsequent wars. 3 For the greater part of the past millennium in Europe whoever tolled the bells controlled the community. While church bells obviously called prayer, historian David Garrioch has argued that the broader implication of this was that these sonic objects regulated the social behaviour of those who heard them – for instance the chiming of the angelus began and ended the day. Understanding the various tolls of one’s church was also vital, as a way of belonging to one’s community as well as remaining alert to potential threats: they indicated storms, plagues, fires, the opening and closing of the city gates and the rigid town curfews in place. Furthermore bells re-enforced the established order. The weddings of the rich (but rarely of the poor) were musical, funeral-chimes were gendered (two pulls for a women, three for a man) and the birth of a French heir could lead to subsequent kingdom-wide all-nighter celebrations (for the birth of Louis Le Dauphin in 1729 every bell in Paris rang for three consecutive days and nights). 4
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