From the edge of this precipice, you can eavesdrop on the “soundtracks of the life on the other side: cows from the pampas of Argentinas, commuters rushing among transit through New York City, the maritime life of Stockholm, and layers of history so audible among the streets of Berlin. These soundtracks pique the imagination of the visitors, transferring them away from China, away from the garden,” away from Alice's rabbit hole, and to more exotic locales, real or fantamagical.
“As tradition,” explains Topotek1, “a garden is a place that transfers someone into a ‘foreign’ space: from inside to outside, from city to nature, from one culture to another. This garden is the cusp at which two worlds are colliding, a foreign world entering China, defined by the visitor's imagination.”
One wishes the hole was an actual entrance to another satellite garden. Take away the glass railing so visitors slide down into the portal, sliding non-stop through the dankness and darkness of the earth before finally popping out a little soiled, disoriented and swooning from claustrophobia into the blinding light again, perhaps into a more lush landscape. For to enter this Eden, one must first endure the Abyss.
According to the Royal Astronomical Society, “scientists at the University of Leicester have shown that emissions from the radio aurora of planets like Jupiter should be detectable by radio telescopes such as LOFAR, which will be completed later this year.”
At first we thought it would be cool to plug a modified radio into their database and then all night long listen in to the sonic broadcast of exoplanetary auroras. Just a fizzy shower of static from some lonely, out-of-state AM radio station, your roommates will think. But no, it's actually the gravitational whirligigs of exoplanets, exomoons, magnetic fields and ionized gases. Ambient drones for when you're writing or coding.
But you know what? Screw the radio!
What we actually want are subterranean listening chambers. Arecibo crossed with Roden Crater crossed with the Super-Kamiokande. Deep underground, these antechambers vibrate extraterrestrial landscapes — crackling and warbling, hissing and bleeping, UFOing and theremining, or however the translation matrix is rendering the data.
But could the sonic fog actually be hiding more than one aurora-crowned Hot Jupiter? To find out, the task of mining the noise dump will be crowdsourced to audiophiles with super sensitive hearing. Distributed radio astronomy in dormant calderas. Acoustically quarantined each in their own symphony hall for one, these citizen scientists will monitor for the tell-tale chordfront in the electromagnetic storm. Jodie Foster spelunking with Jules Verne in James Turrell's caverns, planet hunting by podcast.
For this ad of the 2009 Honda Civic, a stretch of highway has been engraved with a specially sequenced sets of rumble strips. When a car drives through, the wheels and car body vibrate a distinctive musical tune. In this case, it's the William Tell Overture that soundtracks the passing landscape.
It goes without saying that longer pieces are needed. Imagine driving through the unrelenting vastness of the American West, and all of a sudden, your car begins to shudder an entire Aaron Copland score. This will surely gladden your heart and fluff up your patriotic spirit. Or equally likely, trigger a prolonged bout of road rage, in which case more than 30 seconds worth of jingle is probably not such a good idea.
A comment left on our post on Australia's lyrebirds pointed us to the work of Nina Katchadourian, specifically Natural Car Alarms, a piece which was installed in 2002 at several locations around New York.
For the exhibit, the Brooklyn-based artist hacked the alarms of three cars to emit not the natural soundtrack of the city but the sonic pattern of real birds. This urban automotive flock, in other words, was “re-edited” into counter-lyrebirds.
Katchadourian writes: “Almost as important as matching the sounds was finding a patterning that mimicked the swooping cries and punctuated honks of the familiar six-tone siren. They also needed to be as loud, intrusive, obnoxious and surprising as the real thing. Ideally, I wanted to replicate some of the ambiguity I had experienced in the forest, where the urban and the natural were suddenly very continuous. Car alarms were after all a completely natural part of the Long Island City landscape where the piece would be shown.”
It's worth pointing out that one of the mimicked birds is actually a Superb Lyrebird. This copying of a copier could have set out the marvelous scenario, in which a lyrebird, upon hearing its own song converted into a car alarm, proceeded to mimic its reprocessed mating call. And then Katchadourian comes along again intent on making another remix.
One of those ubiquitous David Attenborough nature documentaries, called The Life of Birds, was playing in the background the other day. We weren't paying attention much until Attenborough focused his hushed voice on the Superb Lyrebird (Menura novaehollandiae). The name comes from its lyre-shaped plumage but surely it also refers to the male lyrebird's extraordinary ability to mimic almost any sound.
In the video embedded below, you can hear the bird mashups its own songs with that of other birds, such as the kookabura, and with man-made sounds — a camera shutter, another camera with a motor drive, a car alarm and chainsaws — all with amazing fidelity.
In other YouTube videos, you see the birds not on the floor of a real forest but enclosed in imitation surroundings at the zoo. You can also hear an expanded selection in their repertoire, which includes a jack hammer, a truck and a two-way radio. Dipping into the uncanny valley, that radio unnervingly comes with a replay of an analogue human voice.
Though these copied sounds came from a building site inside the zoo, it is nevertheless interesting to imagine that a similar soundtrack might have been playing in their home forests before being rescued and brought to their present cages. What visitors are listening to, then, are the narratives of their displacement, from their own voices. Their birdsongs are a kind a strange audio tour through environmental degradation and ecological extinction, something more direct and visceral than an exhibit label that most only glance at.
We are reminded here of Abraham, a pet of David Gissen's neighbors. Abraham is an African Grey Parrot, and it “squawks and squeeks” the sounds of their neighborhood: alarms on microwave ovens, screeching brakes of busses, the clanging of dishes, pots and pots. “In short, Abraham is a type of architectural and urban, living archive.”
Gissen later learns that African Grey Parrots “engage in a migratory pattern in Africa that extends from Liberia into the Sudan. In other words, Abraham’s species-kin move through some of the most troubling areas of the African continent in the very expression of their lives.”
From this, Gissen proposes what must be one of our absolute favorite speculative projects, the Socio-natural Archive.
[I]magine the naturalist, the geographer and the urban historian collectively capturing some of these birds, with the violence they have recorded, and bringing them into our urban zoos. One might imagine recoding the zoo, an archive that appears as a space of entertainment, as the representation of trans-continental war and conflict that it really is — those animals come from somewhere (usually an “elsewhere”). If we can imagine bringing Abraham’s brothers and sisters into a space where we might reflect on their song of urban and social destruction, we will hear things that will shock us, frighten us and make us consider the particular power and moving nature of archives that are part of life itself. When we consider the way non-human life is used as an archive, we realize that the social, the natural and the historical cannot be so easily divided.
It's hard to resist imagining future historians getting frustrated that the only first-hand accounts of our present wars are irretrievable from ancient data storage devices. So they turn amateur ornithologists, netting birds whose ancestors might have eavesdropped on the long ago conflict and then passed on their precious recordings to their offsprings, who then passed it on to the next generation, and so on. The signal after centuries of analogue downloading and uploading might be garbled, but perhaps there's enough there to reconstruct something, anything, a song being broadcast from deep time.
Above is the spectrogram to this richly textured five-minute sound file of space dust particles hitting Earth's ionosphere as they are received and recorded on Thomas Ashcraft's forward scatter radio array. We could probably listen to it over and over, replace our CADing music with an extended version lasting hours. All night long eavesdropping on the earth infinitesimally accruing new terrain expelled by extraterrestrial landscapes. It's like Haydn's The Creation re-composed by Ligeti.
Is Eyjafjallajökull producing similarly marvelous soundscapes?
According to the brief, this avant-garden is “an intervention that frames and presents this experience by creating an electronic sound field amidst the poplar trees – building on it, transforming it, and ultimately creating a woven fabric of sound.”
As visitors wander through the site they will become aware of slowly shifting and changing sounds that are familiar but not clearly identifiable – the buzz of insects, perhaps, or white noise from a radio. Five sensors capture changes in wind speed and direction that are then translated into subtle changes in the sounds broadcast through a grid of small speakers and amplifiers that are distributed throughout the site. A conversation develops as the trees whisper back and the electronic sound field changes in response.
But consider, meanwhile, Alex Metcalf's Tree Listening Installation, in which you listen in to the “quiet popping sound that is produced by the water passing through the cells of the Xylem tubes and cavitating as it mixes with air on its way upwards. In the background is a deep rumbling sound that is produced by the tree moving vibrating.”
Consider, as well, Markus Kison's touched echo, a site specific sound installation attached to iron railings on a hill overlooking the city of Dresden. There, the public can hear the recreated aural landscape of Dresden during a nighttime bombing raid in 1945. But to listen in to the sounds of airplanes droning and of sirens wailing and of bombs whistling as they fall to earth and then exploding, you have rest your elbows on the iron railings and cup your hands over ears.
As explained by the artist, the sound “is transmitted from the swinging balustrade through the arm directly into into the inner ear (bone conduction) and cannot be heard by anyone else. Visitors suddenly get an idea of what it must have felt like that night; they travel back in time to this situation. Everyone by dealing with this terrifying event becomes a kind of 'memorial' of it. In their role as a performer they put themselves into the place of the people who shut their ears away from the noise of the explosions.”
Combining these two other installations, perhaps one could imagine a re-working of the first so that rather than the recording and listening devices scattered about the place, they are implanted into the trees. And instead of sitting on a bench or just standing there having reconstituted ambient noises blasted at you, there is a more direct, physical engagement: you cup your hands and let elbow and bark touch. Or you press your ear against the trunks to hear the soundtrack.
And yes, you can even hug them, letting the vibrations course through your body — reverberating through your bones and echoing through the chambers of your lungs until they hit an ear drum, much changed and re-sampled by your own body. It's a Forestry and Anatomy mashup.
To hear the sunless interiors of their roots, you'll have to lie down flat on the ground, on your stomach, your ear pressed against the soil.
And who knows, perhaps the sound emanating from the earth and then filtered through a certain body type may sound incredibly like the otherworldly harmonics of Jupiter.
For a few seconds this week, in between the live feeds of the spectacle in Washington, D.C. and on the Hudson River, CNN went silent. When reports of possibly another round of shelling in Gaza, its anchors and reporters had the bright idea to stop talking and let viewers simply listen in on whatever that could be heard from yet another live video feed, this one peering into the war zone from afar. No international journalists are allowed inside, so it was the best that CNN could do at breaking news reporting from the trenches.
“Is that some kind of a humming noise?” the anchor asked the foreign correspondent, breaking the silence.
We didn't hear a humming noise; we heard something droning. But was it from a surveillance UAV or the movement of tanks sonically reverberating through holy bedrock? Or was it something coming from our heating vent? Could it have been the running motor and refrigerator fans of the delivery truck parked outside our HQ? Was it coming from here or from thousands of miles away?
This apparent and quite accidental conflation of sonic and physical space led us to imagine a temporary sound installation, which would go something like this:
1) Overlay a scaled map of Gaza City on a map of Chicago.
2) Set up microphones throughout Gaza City.
3) Network these microphones individually to their own speakers in Chicago.
4) The locations of the microphones and speakers should match on the superimposed maps.
When the next major conflict erupts, turn them all on, and Chicagoans will eavesdrop on the aural landscape of another city: the whirring blades of helicopters, the whistling of mortars as they streak across the sky, the roar of burning buildings, metal grating on metal grating on rocks and dirt, the cries and wails of widows and orphans, the crackling statics from a speaker disconnected to an obliterated mic.
Of course, where Chicagoans might listen in will depend on the orientation of the maps.
Perhaps this twinning results in one speaker getting sited on a school playground, and so the joyous screams of children there will mingle with those of telepresent children playing during the brief lulls in the fighting.
How about a speaker on Federal Plaza, right on the same block as President-elect Obama's Miesian HQ? Its counterpart in Gaza is actually on a prime location to pick up the thundering shockwave of Israeli jets crossing the sound barrier. The plaza would thus come under similar sonic attack, turning it into a battlescape. Moreover, as there is no way of knowing when it gets blasted again, the plaza becomes an anxious landscape, wherein, after several exposures, federal employees acquire post-traumatic stress disorder.
Will one of the city's Olmsted parks be serenaded by the natural soundtrack of war?
Of course, most speakers will likely be on the streets and inside buildings, embedded into the sidewalk pavement and office walls, adding to the ambient noise of the city. Is that a mortar explosion or a car backfiring? Is that a malfunctioning siren humming in B-flat or the hum of the HVAC system?
POSTSCRIPT #2: “Surreal: 830 PM in #Gaza City and all I can hear is wailing cats below and many buzzing drones above. No sound of people.” — Ben Wedeman (@bencnn)18 Nov 12
POSTSCRIPT #3: “From the BBC: how the sound of war is changing, from shields to helicopters to drones (includes audio): http://bbc.in/SW65r4” Simon Sellars (@ballardian)22 Nov 12
Engineers at Fraunhofer Institute for Structural Durability in Darmstadt, Germany apparently have found a way to cancel out environmental noise using the very windows that normally amplify it.
According to Discovery Channel, “postage stamp-sized patches made of a ceramic called piezoelectric material, which behaves both like a sensor and vibration generator when shot with an electric charge” were embedded into test windows.
More from the article:
Wires running through the window link the stamp-sized patches to a computer controller and an amplifier. When a sound-generated vibration rattles the window, the piezoelectric patch senses it.
That data goes to the controller, which in turn delivers a specific electric charge back up to the patch, causing it to vibrate at a phase that ideally cancels out the sound vibrations.
In laboratory experiments, they were able to reduce noise of 90-100 decibels (the sound of a subway or power mower) by 50 percent.
Other technical and cost issues aside, we wonder if you could doubly reverse this. What would happen, for instance, if one were to embed these stamp-sized piezoelectric patches into Notre-Dame's new stained glass windows, and rather than canceling out incoming noises from outside, outbound noises from the altar and nave get amplified? Paris will burn, perhaps. Nevertheless, we do like the idea of cathedrals humming to the surrounding landscape with a Requiem mass or Haydn's Creation. We've always imagined how incredibly cool it would be to hear Pärt's Sarah was Ninety Years Old inside the cavern's of Hagia Sofia, and now wonder how it would be like for to hear its hypnotic drum beats echoing, like a muezzin's call to prayer, through the streets of Istanbul.
Of course, future applications will more likely involve rewiring your windows so that they can alert you of incoming X-ray hurricanes and to wage suburban audio warfares?
Anouk de Clercq, Joris Cool, and Eavesdropper are your tour guides to Kernwasser Wunderland, a “deserted landscape” of “abandonment and brooding emptiness,” where the asphyxiated din and howls of a former ecology are replaced by the boisterous clicking of a geiger counter.
Wherever you might have gone to, listen! Hear that? That's your DNA being sliced, repaired, and then snipped again. Hear that feedback loop? That's you being genetically recombined into a subspecies. And those incomprehensibly mesmerizing chants — the crackling, humming, ticking, whirring, pulsing, buzzing, throbbing from the deep? Those are the birth pangs of new landscapes borne out of contamination. New biotopes for new species.
Today's BLDGBLOGentry reminded me of this map of road traffic noise in Paris. The noisiest are in blues or reds. At the other end of the decibel spectrum, greens.
And there is even a 3-D map, with the colors now transferred onto the facade of buildings and structures. Inner courtyards are expectedly green and those fronting the busiest streets are typically in blues and reds. And here's an interesting snippet from the how-to section: “as the [express ring road] is semi-subterranean, lower storeys are less exposed to sound nuisances than higher storeys.”
It would be awesome to see these palettes actually get painted onto the sides of buildings. Or how about covering an entire building, noise-abatement walls, bus shelters, billboards, people, etc. with LED lights, which would then display these ever fluctuating colors. A sort of Albert Speer or a Pink Floyd light show spectacular.
Some noisy big rig or a fleet of puttering mopeds passes by, and the entire facade turns blue. In real time! Like a techno-robotic chameleon.
But having spent millions on a programmable lighting system, you probably wouldn't want to use it for just one light trick. So when you're being robbed at gunpoint by members of the Dubai Liberation Front, the exterior pulsates in Severe-Terror-Alert red, hopefully alerting the Department of Homeland Security.
And when co-workers are having illicit office sex, the exterior also blushes in, what else, red. The possibilities are limitless.
In the meantime, how about those 2-D maps marketed as real-time, data-generated canvases, which would be kinda nice right next to the Van Gogh or to the Velvet Elvis. Or even alongside Pierantonio Cinzano's light pollution map. A minimalist painting by day, but by night, it becomes a bravura pointilist masterpiece. A new genre of landscape painting.
