Fri 2nd– Sun 11th
September 2011
june 2nd, 2011
Space is both the site of sound and the subject of architectural theory. Space contains sound, it can be experienced through sound, and be measured against the concepts that have informed its design. What is at stake are the methods by which the interrelation of sound and
space can be investigated.
Sound and Sound Technology
as Spatial Parameters
a seminar organized by Sabine von Fischer and Laurent Stalder, chair for architecture theory, ETH Zürich
speakers: Carlotta Daro, McGill University, Montréal
Sabine von Fischer, Institute gta, ETH Zürich
Marcus Maeder, ICST, Zürich University of the Arts
Olga Touloumi, GSD, Harvard University, Cambridge
Salomé Voegelin, London College of Communication
Thursday, June 2nd, 2011, noon – 7pm
Collegium Helveticum, Meridian-Saal, Zürich
re: sounding
space
The Place my Listening Makes
In the abstract to this presentation I call on architecture and environmental design, and by extension those who review, finance, report on and critique the environments and buildings thus created to start from silence. I describe this silence as an actual and a metaphorical position of self in sound. I suggest that it is in silence that I become aware of my inhabiting a sonic place, and that this inhabiting is a moment of correspondence between myself and sound. I would like to propose this moment of simultaneity as the position from which to design, plan and build spaces.
To begin with I like to clarify that I am not an architect nor an urban designer, but an inhabitant who does stuff with sound. My interest in architecture and environmental design is guided by my living in place, and is informed by a sonic sensibility acquired through my work in sound, its practice and philosophy. The consequences of this sensibility, lived out in the built environment, I hope however can contribute to architecture and environmental design and its discussion within and beyond the confines of its discipline.
I start then with silence, and what I mean by our simultaneity in its abundant nothingness: Silence is possibly the most lucid moment of myself in the soundscape. Noise deafens me to anything but itself and either brings on a deliberate solipsistic ritual, such as at a rave party, or, more mundanely, makes me look over-there, to find its source, often in the hope to switch it off or stop it, even if only by way of having identified it. Silence by contrast makes me hear even the almost inaudible, that which possibly does not sound at all and thus might not be there, but is generated nevertheless in my auditory imagination from the smallest speck of sound. When there is little to hear you start hearing things, and the relationship of the heard to what sounds becomes tenuous, invented, fantastical and the only certainty of having heard it at all is on my own body.
The tiny sounds of a quiet environment are not over-there, but are acutely in my ears. What I hear as distant is the distance heard, not the over-there seen. It is a quiet distance that has flattened onto my body and sounds with its sounds. In the plentiful nothingness of silence the rumbling of my stomach morphs with the gurgling of the water pipes and my breathing shares in the quiet humming of the house. The outside soundscape morphs with my inner soundings: I am in the midst of all that sounds, and all that sounds sounds with me.
Distance and perspective are visual traits, and silence makes this abundantly clear. Perspective-lessness is the basis of all sound but for the most part it is masked by the ordering facility of the eye and visual expectations with which we negotiate a noisier environment. In silence however the hierarchiless intimacy of sound becomes apparent. Quiet sounds are not about the visual source, they are not about the over-there, nor the viewpoint we have on them. They are about themselves and how I hear them here, in my ears, on my body, on your body that listens and hears in this silent soundscape itself. In silence the visual perspective vanishes into a sensorial simultaneity that signifies the reciprocity between myself and my environment.
My sonic subjectivity is produced in this simultaneity. In silence my spatiotemporal position is worked out continually from almost inaudible, passing and tenuous connections. The sonic ‘I’ is fragile and tender and full of doubt about hearing and the heard. Its position is not stable, mapped out, but in process, transient and a matter of its own engagement with its surroundings. In silence I am intertwined with the world of my own perception, equivalent and yet in charge through my listening; bound to it by the generative nature of my perception that also generates myself. What silence reflects back to me is myself as my agency in the world.
Silence in this sense is then not about the isolated self in Cage’s anechoic chamber, where the vacuum stops me from hearing anything but my own body. It is not a hearing of myself alone, but a hearing of myself in the social context of the soundscape. In other words listening to silence I hear myself as a social subject, defined and generated through my interactions with the acoustic environment understood as the listened to world - the inside morphing with the outside.
Silence puts me at the centre of things without however giving me control, only responsibility: The responsibility to listen so I might understand and take part in the production of the place and things thus heard.
The world heard, its sonic space and time, form not the solid infrastructure of a visual place that exists with or without my presence. It is not a pre-formed container but is built continually as the fleeting {timespace} place of my present listening. It does not provide recognition but invites curiosity and even doubt, (in the place perceived and in myself). The demand of quiet sounds to be heard and engaged with up close, on my body, without the distance that a perspectival viewpoint affords, (nor the consequent ability to read the design as place, in relation to other places) emphasizes the reciprocal and invisible nature of a sonic place. Listening generates place continually from my hearing of myself within the dynamic relationship of all that sounds. (The obvious reciprocity of myself in silence accentuates this dynamic condition.) Therefore the sonic world is built not from the stable relationships that form a visual place, but from the fleeting and invisible connections listening makes between me and my surroundings; temporary connections to other listeners, things and spaces. My hearing hears connections not the things connected and thus always includes me as the agency of connecting understood as the motion of building a place, temporarily, invisibly, from all that sounds at the time of my audition.
This is a socio-political position, or rather a socio-political positioning, in the sense of a social and political sensibility towards connections and actions between things, people and spaces: building transient relationships, places and finally communities. A sensibility to silence focuses us on the central position of the ‘I’, not as a selfish isolated being, nor as a controlling power, but as a generative and questioning ‘I’, whose agency produces reciprocal and transient places. These places are not autonomous containers for existence but “skins”: sensible living interfaces (points of interaction) that accommodate, stretch and bulge depending on the temporary and complex relationships and connections that produce them.
This politicises place as it invites us to consider the environment, designed or not, through the socio-political dynamic of that environment and the agency of each self and the connections between selves and things, as generating and being generated in its temporary build.
It is the acute awareness and questioning engagement of myself in silence that fosters the sonic sensibility, the notion of a sonic subjectivity that generates its environment through its agency of listening, and the agency of which determines place as a socio-political dynamic, a transient community. The sonic ‘I’ shares in the responsibility of place and community built in listening, conversely the value of that place and community is that of my engagement, of my participation in passing connections with others making sound in the acoustic environment, rather than that of solid and abstracted social relations and notions of identity and belonging.
In the same way that I write this out of silence it is Silence that I would like to promote as the basis for architecture and environmental design, so that it can facilitate and enable the invisible and transient communities made in listening.
I am not talking here of the silence of designs such as Tadeo Anda’s ‘Church of the Light’ built in Osaka in 1989, or of the ‘Rothko Chapel’ in Houston, Texas, founded by philanthropists John and Dominique de Menil, and dedicated in 1971 to painter Mark Rothko. Both their design aim to focus us on self-reflection as a spiritual pursuit. Rather, I am interested in an architecture that enables a lived, everyday simultaneity with our surroundings. The mundane inhabiting I talked about earlier. The two are of course not entirely unrelated. It is to be hoped that somebody who visits the ‘Rothko Chapel’ or who experiences Tadeo Anda’s ‘Church of the Light’ will bring this experience of quietude, rather than silence, as a sonic sensibility of self into the everyday and will start to hear silence and himself in that silence there too.
In fact I would like to suggest that all students of architecture and environmental design should be taken to isolated villages in snowy mountains or in the dessert for a week, to learn to listen to themselves in their surrounding, before they are allowed to think of designing anything at all.
One architect whose designs, at least for me, invite listening and the concurrent notion of a sonic inhabiting is Eric Lyon. Lyon’s Span housing enables some of this relationship between an awareness of self, place and community, the notion of living as inhabiting and the idea of morphing inside and outside. His interest in landscape architecture as well as buildings meant that he designed environments to inhabit, not huge housing machines, such as LeCorbusier, but, with some exceptions (such as world’s end in Chelsea), manageable, low-rise environments that foster a space of self from which to inhabit place as social relations and build communities as flexible and transient connections. I am sure Eric Lyon did not listen, and if I show you an image of his Span development in Ham near Kingston in Richmond, London, from the 50s, we cannot hear it either. But our auditory imagination and memory no doubt will make this sound very differently then say a contemporary estate such as this one.
And while no doubt the material these houses were built from are inferior to many contemporary builds and thus the internal sound proofing not great, the transparent openness alluded to through the generous use of glass, the deliberate invitation to the outside to enter the design and be part of it, the low density building, communal facilities and landscaped grounds, invite a different sense of self and neighbourly relations that sound a post-war collectivity muted today in the isolation or noise of contemporary living.
Implicit in this observation on the sonic potential of post-war housing projects is a critique of two developments that started in the 80s but still persist today:
On the one hand this development is manifest in the building of big detached houses for the very wealthy. Those, who had reached Thatcher and Reagan’s dream of self-realisation, manifesting the death of society. They live removed from society often cut off behind gates and entry phones, more often than not in designs that go back to a feudal area: a preference for renovated Edwardian architecture, mock tudor, and new unconvincing English country residencies favoured by premier league footballers. On the other side this development gave rise to intimidating estates for the very poor where every front door is adorned with a gate, whose purpose is less clear than the gates of the wealthy: is it a locking in or a locking out?
Both display in many ways a bunker mentality: The first allows me to only hear myself, in a vacuum, no equivalence, no simultaneity, my agency of listening will only get me to hear myself and act upon these sounds within the confines of their own making (within my own social strata). The second often does not allow me to hear myself at all. The noise and sheer scale of the housing development swallows my sonic self, and consequently I stop to sound or to hear myself sound. In such noisy environment I am never given the chance to develop a sonic sensibility with its implication of equivalence, simultaneity and responsibility. And so I do not take on the responsibility for the place I inhabit and nor do I take on the role of being a social subject, produced from me in my relationship with others, spaces and things around me. The only thing I can do in response to this noise is to switch on my own sound system, to shout and scream, to be anti-social, to drown out with noise the noise that separates me from myself.
Inhabiting place, taking on the responsibility of the social space, is about listening to our surroundings, the planed and built spaces of our designed environment, and hearing ourselves producing them as temporary realisations of our inhabiting. Architects and environmental designers can hopefully be encouraged to hear themselves in those sounds too, as I believe it is from the sonic sensibility that the place designed in a studio will find a socially inhabitable realisation.
I hope for an architecture that tunes its ears into the space built to give the inhabitant the time to live his place defined as his simultaneity with it. This I believe would put the responsibility on the inhabitant rather than seeing the house, the designed environment, as a place to fit into. It would re-invigorate some of the transparency sought in 50s design, to see the home not as a bunker, a shelter from the reality of sociality, but as a socio-political interface. A flexible skin in which my sonic subjectivity meets yours and creates a momentary, ephemeral and passing place in that encounter, the responsibility for which lies with us both. It would nurture a sociality of exchange, where belonging is fleeting but engaged, a place built from both our movements and agency in the world.
Musician and author of Sinister Resonance: The Mediumship of the Listener David Toop, Salomé Voegelin author of Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of
Sound Art and Stuart Sim author of Manifesto for Silence: Confronting the Politics and Culture of Noise will be discussing the value of quietude in an increasingly noisy world and its effect on artistic practice.
http://www.in-betweentwosounds.co.uk/
Silence and Quietude
I want to make a distinction between Silence and Quietude, that might become part of our discussions, and which I think is interesting when considering the role of either in art.
I start then with silence,
Silence is possibly the most lucid moment of myself in the soundscape. It makes me hear even the almost inaudible, that which possibly does not sound at all and thus might not be there, but is generated nevertheless in my auditory imagination from the smallest speck of sound. When there is little to hear you start hearing things, and the relationship between the heard to what sounds becomes tenuous, invented, fantastical and the only evidence of having heard it at all is my bodily memory of it.
The tiny sounds of a silent environment are not over-there, but are acutely in my ears. What I hear as distant is the distance heard, not the over-there seen. It is a silent distance that has flattened onto my body and sounds with its sounds. In the plentiful nothingness of silence the rumbling of my stomach morphs with the gurgling of the water pipes and my breathing shares in the quiet humming of the house. The outside soundscape morphs with my inner soundings. In silence the visual perspective vanishes into a sensorial simultaneity: I am in the midst of all that sounds, and all that sounds sounds with me. In silence I am simultaneous with the abundant nothingness of sound; inventing sound and self.
My sonic self is produced in this simultaneity. My spatiotemporal position is worked out continually from almost inaudible, passing and tenuous connections. The sonic ‘I’ is fragile and tender and full of doubt about hearing and the heard. Its position is not stable, mapped out, but in process, transient and a matter of its own engagement with its surroundings. In silence I am intertwined with the world of my own perception, equivalent and yet I am in charge through my listening; bound to it by the generative nature of my perception that also generates myself. What silence reflects back to me is myself as my agency in the world.
This makes silence demanding, and at times quite uncomfortable, painful even. I am painfully aware of my own fragile responsibility in the midst of this taut net of tiny sounds that hold me in the place of my listening. I lose my perspective, my form too, become uncertain, formless and flexible; and need to find a form contingently and continually in my relationship with sound, which becomes a metaphor for my relationship with my environment, material and social.
In silence I do not a hear myself alone, but hear myself in the social context of the soundscape. In other words listening to silence I hear myself as a social subject, defined and generated through my interactions with the acoustic environment understood as the listened to world -an observation which makes silence socio-political and makes its use in art aesthetico-political.
The silence played as a composition heard in the shared context of a lecture, is not the silence of your own formlessness. This is not you sitting in a quiet house or in the woods or in the snow, surrounded by the abundant void of sound mirroring you. Rather, when deliberately listening to silence you know you are expected to hear it and so aesthetic expectations and readings slip between the sounds and your raw experience and push them away into the quasi perspective of theoretical interpretation that makes the fantastical disappear.
Listening to it in a shared context, foregrounds the desire not to make a noise oneself, which stops us intertwining with that silence and thus to hear the simultaneity of ourselves in sound.
Silence, composed or in the acoustic environment, which we encounter alone without the framework of theoretical discussion by contrast, carries with it the anxiety of my own formlessness and possible disappearance. It takes away the anchors of signification and collapses the space between me and the tiny noises that keep me awake at night imagining all sorts of burglars and other worldly monsters creeping around my bed.
There is another silence I want to talk about as quietude
Quietude allows me to reflect, to be, to meditate and contemplate without the anxiety of formlessness and disappearance that silence provokes. It avoids the tension of silence by retaining form. It provides an aesthetic silence, a structured space of nothingness with clearer borders, rather than exposing us to unexpected, boundarieless nothingness of everyday silence, alone.
This quietude of silence in art leads us into a different listening, a careful listening to sounds and music with the intensity and simultaneity of silence but without its anxiety. It allows the listener to hear silence and fend of the bustle of a populated and busy soundscape without becoming implicated in the tension of its solitude. Morton Feldman’s Rothko Chapel for example does it, it breaks the silence and forms it into a meditative space to live. It lifts the burden of nothingness by giving it form and time however vague and durational. It reminds me of my simultaneity but does not make me suffer it. It is an aesthetic-simultaneity and thus aesthetico-political in that it makes me contemplate my relationship with music as the environment of my listening engagement, and triggers an aesthetic sensibility that can translate into the social.
I can sit in this quietude to think about things, other things than myself. It frees me from the physical bond of silence and gives me a space to think.
Silence is the formless surprise of hearing nothing and inventing it all.
Quietude is an attitude, a shape we take while we listening.
And does not necessarily have to be quiet.
The distinction can be compositional or a matter of context.
the uses and abuses of field recording
June 9th, 2011, 3pm to 6pm
Podium Lecture Theatre
London College of Communication
On the 9 June this year CRiSAP held its fifth research symposium. In celebration of the beginning of our two year EU Cultural Partnership Project, the event explored the role of field recording in artistic practice. Eight speakers were invited who all, in different ways and for different reasons, use microphones to capture something of the world around them: Viv Corringham, Peter Cusack, Felicity Ford, Michael Gallagher, Ruth Hawkins, Bill Thompson, Salomé Voegelin and Mark Peter Wright.