There was a deep blue metal door across the street from our old flat in an inner suburb on the eastern edge of Paris. On hot summer nights, when the windows were open, letting in the city sounds that travel fluidly through the dark, still air, we would hear a low hum. Behind the door was a piece of public infrastructure (in this case contained within the building of a private Catholic secondary school): an electricity substation. Inside the substation, medium voltage 11kV electrical current is lowered to 230V - the level at which it can safely enter our homes. This happens by passing the current through a metallic coil, consisting of steel, aluminium and copper, within whose magnetic core the energy is dissipated. This process of energy transfer generates heat and sound. Ventilation grilles allow the heat to escape, and the sound travels with it. As my musician partner got interested in the acoustics of the substation across the street1, and began making recordings and composing with them, I started to notice other similar metal doors, dotted through the city around us. Sometimes integrated into larger buildings, sometimes in standalone one-storey buildings. They all emit the same low frequency hum2. This becomes audible, quite suddenly, when you are about two metres away. It dies away again just as quickly as you walk by. The urban form of the location of each substation is unique, the variables are countless: street width, surrounding building heights, isolated building or integrated within a larger building, building façade materials, orientation, presence or not of trees and/or vegetation. All these factors lead to small differences in the acoustics around each door. The same source noise, a 50 Hz hum, seems amplified in certain situations, and rapidly dissipates in others. On every door a blue (occasionally black) sign, screwed on at eye level, reads: ENEDIS L’ELECTRICITE EN RESEAU POSTE DE TRANSFORMATION HAUTE TENSION Then a second plaque is screwed on to the sign, indicating the name of the substation, in black capital letters written on small yellow rectangles, arranged as required, like scrabble letters or fridge magnets. Underneath this is written: DANGER DE MORT. 1 This work would probably never have existed if it hadn’t been for my partner, Juan Guillermo Dumay’s interest in this sound. He made a sound art piece using recordings of the hum, and we co-wrote a text about the substations: https://theatrum-mundi.org/library/the-background- buzzlistening-to-electrical-substations/, published in December 2021 by Theatrum Mundi. the subtle poetry of French electricity substation doors ruth oldham
Each door (each substation) is identified by a name. Not a number. The one across our old street was called GRAINDORGE. This made sense as 50 metres down the road was the rue Charles Graindorge. In nearby streets were BAUDOT, HIRSCH, HURE, STOKVIS … names whose meanings were not immediately obvious. Walking one day in a far-flung suburb of northern Paris we went past one that was called INTELLO . This got me wondering. Why name a substation INTELLO – French shorthand for an intellectual? The internet threw up a link to Michel Recanti, a Marxist student activist who played a prominent role during the May ‘68 protests, and brother of a well-known philosopher. In 1978, following the death of the love
Ruth Oldham
2 The frequency of this hum is around 50 Hz, corresponding to the 230V alternating current (AC) that is the norm in Europe, Africa, and large parts of Asia. In the US, most of Central and South America, Japan and South Korea, the AC runs at 120V / 60 Hz. I’m not sure I will ever know, but I continued to spot more substation doors as I walked through the city and their names became an ever more absorbing source of intrigue, painting images and ideas in my mind. I found BAOBAB, BARBE, COMPLEXE, FLASH . Then ASTRAKHAN, DRAKKAR, FAUCON, MAMELOUK . Some have masculine first names, popular in France: ANTOINE, JULIEN, QUENTIN . Feminine first names do not seem common, though one chilly afternoon I spotted ASTER , a flower, but charged with meaning for me as it is the name of my daughter. I also found an ELEKTRASTAR , not a girl’s name but a wonderful, female sounding name for an anonymous piece of infrastructure. of his life through cancer, he committed suicide in the suburb in question, Goussainville, by throwing himself under a train. Is that the connection?
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