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
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