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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

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