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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