Sounding the City
sound art and urban spaces
Graeme Thomson & Silvia Maglioni
In an early J.G. Ballard short story, The Sound-Sweep we meet a character with particularly sensitive hearing who has the job of collecting up the aural detritus that subliminally persists in an environment long after the events which produced it have slipped into the unremembered past. The contraption he uses to do this is the “sonovac”, half sonic vacuum cleaner, half recording device. Paradoxically in the story, the act of making sound-dust disappear is inseparable from that of storing it in some way (which the protagonist does in a decidedly cacophonic aural landfill). Reading Ballard’s story today seems to cast an ironic sideways glance at a then nascent sound ecology movement, proselytized by figures such as R. Murray Schafer, while at the same time looking ahead to more ambivalent practices of contemporary sound artists for whom much of this sonic junk provides raw material for their work. While the border between these two groups is in some ways beginning to look rather fuzzy, it is possible to discern a two-way movement of sonic traffic. On the one hand urban sounds may be selected, sampled, removed from the chaotic flux in which they commonly exist and relocated (often after heavy processing) within the realm of autonomous structured music or sound-art pieces to be experienced either in a gallery or on CD; on the other, sound material culled from various sources is inserted into urban spaces in order to temporarily disturb or reshape their lived acoustic.
Aural dérives and cartographies of the invisible
In 2002 a series of artists were invited by Queen’s University Belfast to contribute a five minute audio work inspired by and utilising the sounds of a city. The project, called Invisible Cities, is curated by Fällt designers Fehler, and was first exhibited in the Naughton Gallery as part of the Belfast Festival at the university. It has since gone on tour to other cities in Europe, gathering new contributions from local artists along the way. As no constraints have been placed on the artists other than the duration of the work, approaches and techniques are varied, ranging from soundscapes attempting to draw an acoustic map of the city as a whole by tracing a path through its various sound environments to works dealing with specific sites and trajectories of memory, desire or simply routine; from more or less untreated field recordings to highly processed works that transform the original sound sources beyond recognition. The emerging contrasts in the ways individual artists have chosen to ‘portray’ their cities are not simply a question of aesthetics, but open onto issues of a social and biopolitical nature, regarding the way cities in different parts of the world are both viewed and experienced.
It is interesting to see the way in which many Western cities have given rise to ‘isolationist’ sound-works that trace personal itineraries cut off from wider social involvement or experience of the urban sphere. Stephan Matthieu’s hypnotic recording of rain hitting his umbrella as he takes a walk through his Berlin neighbourhood, with the distant murmur of traffic barely perceptible in the background, or the eerie metallic computer-treated scrapings and keenings of Frans de Waard’s bicycle wheels as he makes his way to and from the Nijmegen house where his estranged partner lives with their daughter, evoke worlds that are at once highly personal yet also curiously uninvolved, abstract and impersonal, symptoms perhaps of what sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has dubbed the individualized society of ‘liquid’ modernity.
More anonymous still are the depopulated, desertified ‘public’ spaces of Taylor Deupress’s New York or Richard Chartier’s Washington. Made exactly a year after the events of September 11, Deupree’s work, processing the muted sounds of a Sunday in Central Park into a phantasmal breath that ‘passes over’ the scene before being sucked into the silence of absolute otherness, points to the uneasy disjunction between public and private realms in the US at a time when collective mourning and ‘coming to terms’ seems at once a necessity and an impossibility. Chartier’s piece, meanwhile, is a cavernous, emotionally refrigerated distillation of ambient sounds gathered from several galleries and museums in the city, atmospheres whose windy hush brings to mind a world of grey-faced guards and surveillance cameras.
Yet it is not simply in psychological or metaphysical terms that Invisible Cities draws us to what lies hidden in the city’s interstices. Janek Schafer’s Recorded Delivery, created by the simple act of sending a voice-activated tape recorder through the cogs of the London postal service, is a work which is, paradoxically, put in circulation before it exists and in fact only comes into being through its circulation. In the process it reveals a normally concealed working and social network, punctuated by amnesiac vacuums of pure transit. The Catania of laptop musician Massimo, meanwhile concerns the redevelopment of urban space, testifying with ironic nostalgia to the demise of the city’s red light district and summoning through a sustained burst of ur-techno brutalism plateaus of fondly remembered intensity.
While the experience of Western cities is in the main conveyed through personal soundworlds of an impressionist, expressionist or minimalist nature, those elsewhere, cities like Lima, Marrakesh, Hanoi and Lalibela are informed by a more traditional ethnographic approach (not surprisingly the artists in these cases are all Western ‘sound tourists’ whose taste for the more ‘authentic’ signs of the exotic reveals lingering traces of orientalism). Only in the cases of Delhi and Beijing are we given ostensible ‘self-portraits’. For the former, the Raqs Media Collective focus on the spaces of transit that mark the passage of migrants and commuters to and from the city, while Dajuin Yaoof the Beijing sound unit monitors the changing patterns of the capital’s urban sound-fabric under the sway of modernization.
While for the artists Invisible Cities opens up the possibility of a contemporary urban dérive where the flâneur becomes flânear, alert to the aural spectres, shocks and resistances that perforate today’s controlled, sanitised urban spaces, for the listener the project creates an actual-virtual circuit that links the place from where they are listening with an ‘other scene’ that modifies their perception of it.
Urban sound sculpture and spatial awareness
The irruption or insinuation of otherness within the urban fabric has equally been the concern of a number of artists who, rather than simply creating soundworks with sounds culled from the city attempt to modify our immediate perception and experience of urban space itself through direct on-site intervention. The works of Susan Phillipsz unveil worlds of privately felt anxieties and inadequacies behind an increasingly mandatory public social mask of success, efficiency and indifferent self-confidence. Composed of raw recordings of Phillipsz singing, as if to herself in a private moment, songs of personal or social significance, from the Velvet Underground’s Who Loves The Sun to The Internazionale, her site-specific installations, broadcast across the public address systems of impersonal ‘non-places’ such as supermarkets and station concourses, introduce troubling waves of intimacy, vulnerability and doubt into spaces from which such feelings are normally unconsciously barred, provoking reactions ranging from annoyance and embarrassment to recognition of the states of physical and mental alienation that places like these foster beneath an aural comforter of insipid Musak.
A different kind of symbolic exchange is at work in the sound sculptures of Bill Fontana who in Soundbridge Köln-San Francisco used an elaborate satellite transmission system to swap the soundscapes of cities on opposite sides of the globe, reconfiguring the lived experience of each city – Bay Area fog horns and traffic trading places with German church bells – by forging inverted pathways of aural longing. In other works Fontana borrows from land artist Christo the idea of ‘wrapping’ a particular space, literally burying the sound fabric of an urban environment beneath sounds taken from a different milieu. In Sound Island, Paris’s Arche de Triomphe, normally engulfed by the blare of circulating traffic, was instead enveloped by crashing waves and seagull cries recorded on the Normandy coast and broadcast from speakers mounted on the monument, while in Cape Trafalgar, the bustle of London’s Trafalgar Square was silenced by sea noise from the site of the original naval battle off the Spanish coast from which the square takes its name.
While Fontana’s obvious predilection for natural sources may refer back in some ways to the prescriptive sound ecology of Schafer, work such as his does argue for a more organic integration of the acoustic dimension into urban planning and shows how sound art has the potential to greatly enrich and intensify city life, awakening the passive bodies and minds of supermodernity to new possibilities of deterritorialization and dérive.
