{"id":364,"date":"2021-02-25T17:59:00","date_gmt":"2021-02-25T17:59:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mediawerks.ca\/?p=364"},"modified":"2022-11-24T21:54:16","modified_gmt":"2022-11-24T21:54:16","slug":"phonotopias","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mediawerks.ca\/n\/2021\/02\/25\/phonotopias\/","title":{"rendered":"Sound Projections"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

A collection of ideas for sound experiments and research.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Phonotopias<\/h3>\n\n\n
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\"Vincent<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

The Epic Soundtrack Timeline. Sounds of Time are drawn from literary descriptions of the audible past in various traditions. This archeo-acoustic<\/a> <\/em>soundwalk<\/em> through History features principally environmental sounds (similar to the track Promenade<\/a>), much like those found on an M&E stem, while the Listener can interactively select parts of the timeline.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

See “How Early America Sounded” by Richard Cullen Rath<\/a>, a book that attempts to unearth sounds from various historical accounts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Impossible Instruments<\/h3>\n\n\n
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A piano with continuously alternating B&W keys. This instrument is designed as a thought experiment that questions the order in which the human ear (and brain) organizes sound. The uncanny keyboard quickly upsets traditional (Western) notions of harmony while retaining the semblance of classical design; however, in so doing, it also offers the possibility to re-imagine composition through newly imposed aesthetic constraints. For many contemporary musicians and composers, the piano is no longer played traditionally: [\u2026]<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Jack In<\/h3>\n\n\n
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Michael Beitz: Ear Brick, 2001, Brooklyn, NY, cement<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

This project proposes a series of installations built into the environment throughout urban space that interface with the listener via a conventional 1\/4\u2033 headphone jack (similar to Carsten Stabenow\u2019s public listening projects<\/a>). Headphones are a common and widely available aural extension well suited to point attention towards acoustic details and cognitive dissonances in urban space that are otherwise suppressed. For example, when standing in front of one of the many ineffective but quaintly overgrown with ivy noise walls<\/a>, one may \u2018jack in\u2019 to hear an alternate universe, a phonotopia<\/a>, where traffic really is<\/em> screened out and where other sounds, perhaps those of nature, dominate. Alternatively, one may hear urban sounds from other locales thousands of miles away, something that may well be happening in near-real time depending on the technology \/ funding available for the installation. This project touches on several overarching questions of our age: (sound)ecology, globalization, and post-humanism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Part of The City as a Studio<\/a> proposal for a long-term A\/V installation that enacts environmental surveillance and offers an ambulent public exhibition platform. Immediate engagement with the public can be established through a mobile app, intended as much to mobilize interest as to collect ethnographic data. For a related conversation, refer to CBC\u2019s Spark<\/em> ep. 295 on street psychology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

esreverse echopathy<\/h3>\n\n\n
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esreverse echopathy is a piece that integrates radio frequency interference (RFI) into the composition. RF interference is an electromagnetic effect dreaded by audio engineers, which plagued smaller studios of the analogue era that lacked adequate shielding. Various workarounds were devised, and ultimately with digital recording RFI is (mostly) a thing of the past. In this composition we hear what faintly sounds like radio interference, slowly coming to the fore to overtake the main sound, while [\u2026]<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Wind Sound Engine<\/h3>\n\n\n
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[idea<\/a>] This outdoor installation questions whether the interdisciplinary obsession with the scientific performativity of data as art (data that may at a first glance seem chaotic to the observing artist) may not in fact be a spontaneous desire to render this data back into chaos. That is, to take something that is organized according to a post-human logic and treat it as a source of random numbers with which to trigger audio-visual events imitating the [\u2026]<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Slow Sound<\/h3>\n\n\n
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Slow sound evolves over time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Too slow for the human attention span, slow sound is musical nonetheless and can be experienced by sampling at the same location at various times throughout the day\/week\/month. The sound evolves at an extremely low rate, but app users can reconstruct, decipher, and experience the piece after having collected enough samples.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Placebo architecture and other whimsical objects<\/h3>\n\n\n
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Placebo architecture and other whimsical objects is a proposal to the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) for a call for participation in a collection that examines urban anomalies and aberrations that have little or no practical purpose but, unlike public art or monuments, are intended to serve a particular civic function such as the sound barriers around main traffic arteries. We call these examples of placebo architecture, structures that proudly stand for decades, bearing testament to the social engineering strategies of complacent – or incapable – gouvernmentality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

At Urban Sounds: Acoustic Transformations in the 21st Century City<\/a>, a roundtable featured a presentation from two Montreal urban planners who gave a bubbly positivist account of their valiant efforts to improve the aural health and happiness of urbanites. Though the examples given certainly meet the formal criteria of “something getting done,” it was nevertheless not clear whether it was in fact effective. Sound barrier walls, according to presenter Marthe Boucher, improved the life of citizens living near loud areas with constant traffic, but was fuzzy on practical details such as noise measurements, possibly the most important metric, dismissed as mere trivial details. There seemed to be no understanding that wide-band noise of the kind produced by a highway, for example, is not effectively screened by a wall. Boucher’s celebrated that the vines growing on an acoustic barrier wall would make it blend in with the environment visually and sonically, as if the wind rustling through the leaves could mask the sounds of traffic on the other side. The totality of the experience, she asserted, would be more “ecological.” This detachment from reality is a frustrating reminder of the kind of civil servants and middle managers that make critical and consequential decisions while operating behind the occlusion of faceless institutions that are difficult to hold to account.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

An article exploring the issue in more depth finds that there is minimal benefit to placebo architecture and managerial fantasies do not translate into scientific measurements:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The use of a single vertical screen to obstruct the propagation of noise from source to receiver over hard and soft flat ground is well known. However, in addition to considerations of acoustical efficiency, the design of road traffic noise barriers depends on many other factors. Site conditions, planning restraints and visual considerations will affect the final selected design, as will engineering considerations related to the construction materials, the weather loading due to wind and precipitation. The aim of this article is to show both the acoustical benefits and drawbacks of using a screen adjacent to a highway located in a cutting dip in otherwise flat ground topography.<\/p>\nPeplow, Andrew T. “Traffic noise sources in cutting dips adjacent to screens” in Noise & Vibration Worldwide<\/em>. Sep 2007, Vol. 38 Issue 8<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A collection of ideas for sound experiments and research. Phonotopias The Epic Soundtrack Timeline. Sounds of Time are drawn from literary descriptions of the audible past in various traditions. This…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":365,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[71],"tags":[48,73,39,28,22,23],"class_list":["post-364","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-projects","tag-ideas","tag-media-theory","tag-sound-compositions","tag-sound-design","tag-sound-studies","tag-soundscape"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mediawerks.ca\/n\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/364","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mediawerks.ca\/n\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mediawerks.ca\/n\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mediawerks.ca\/n\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mediawerks.ca\/n\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=364"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/mediawerks.ca\/n\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/364\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":749,"href":"https:\/\/mediawerks.ca\/n\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/364\/revisions\/749"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mediawerks.ca\/n\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/365"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mediawerks.ca\/n\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=364"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mediawerks.ca\/n\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=364"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mediawerks.ca\/n\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=364"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}