THE PHONETICS OF SPACE

Here are stereo versions of most of the 7-channel pieces I composed for my M1 presentation.

Work Out

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Workshop (The Blue Danube)

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Shadows

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Global Village

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Footsteps

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Main Street

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St. George Station

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My first real attempt at sound design in a film.

Wide Asleep from Joel Di Giacomo on Vimeo.

An excellent example of the power of sound to invoke dreams. Also my last halloween costume.

A world sound map!

http://aporee.org/maps/

A searchable database of field recordings around the world. Wonderful!

http://soundtransit.nl/

Montreal Sound Map:

http://cessa.music.concordia.ca/soundmap/

New York city Sound Map:

http://www.soundseeker.org/

Chicago Sound Map:

http://www.chicagopublicradio.org/Soundmarks_Browse.aspx

M1 Review Preview

Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller are canadian artists who specialize in sound art in various forms. I visited their website to see (I mean, hear) what they were all about, and I was tremendously impressed by a couple things:

First was the work entitled “40-part motet,” a very interesting and seemingly quite effective way of allowing an audience to get intimate with individual members of a choir (you know what I mean).

Second were the Audio walks. Conceptually, the idea of making audio recording one’s experience through space seems very rich to me, especially since I intend to do my own “audio walks” through various Toronto buildings and spaces. Unlike Cardiff, however, I hadn’t considered using my own voice (I was thinking more objectively, I guess), but I do think now that a voice, perhaps that of another, could prove very useful in my walks. I hadn’t thought either to produce elaborate choreographed “encounters”, as she does. For example, while walking through Central Park in “Her Long Black Hair”, she crosses a man singing, and pauses to listen to him. The preconception of the encounter is given away by its precise timing and thematic convenience. It is quite beautifully composed, although the obvious fantasy in her work interests me less than the real possibilities of juxtaposing one aural reality —that of the recording— with another, that of the listener. In this vein, the temporal aspects of spatial sound recording are rife with potential. A photograph or a painting might capture a single framed moment in time, and is a proven vehicle for memories. A song or a piece of music might also, by association, bring about memories or bouts of nostalgia. A spatial audio recording, on the other hand, has an immersive quality that allows the listener to live, or relive the space in a way that might be far more meaningful. For example, listening to something I recorded days, months, or even years earlier, would enable me to relive the original experience, strengthening my memory of it. But if someone else were to hear this same recording, having not been where I was when it was recorded, they would have to imagine the space, allowing their minds to drift into a world they can’t see… a world much like that of the womb.

How much more rewarding is it to imagine the space of a sound than to imagine the sound of a space?

Technically, the sound quality of these audio walks is incredible. In the first excerpt I listened to, Cardiff records the sound of a person walking into a quiet room and sitting down beside her (“words in water” excerpt). It sounded so real, I actually looked around the room I was sitting in to try to figure out where the sound was coming from, and I became quite concerned for a moment that I couldn’t discern its source, even though it seemed so close. This was largely due to her recording technique, which she briefly discusses on the website:

“Binaural audio is a technique that uses miniature microphones placed in the ears of a person. The result is an incredibly lifelike 3D reproduction of sound. Played back on a headset, it is almost as if the recorded events were taking place live.”

I know what I want for Christmas.



“Words Drawn In Water” Exerpt

“Her Long Black Hair” Exerpt

At some point in my thesis (likely in the final stages), I’ll have to apply all these principles of aural design to an architectural design project. When I do, the aural relationship of any project to its street, how it mitigates the urban and interior acoustic environments, is of crucial interest. For any given site, there are several factors that play an obvious and immediate role in this discourse, either as sound sources or sound receptors (that reflect, refract, diffuse, or absorb the sound emitted by the sound sources). So to name a few that spring to mind:

Sound source factors:

• street traffic volume and the types of transportations involved;
• the proximity of major infrastructure (highways, rail lines, airports…);
• the proximity of major industry.
• the number of people on the street;
• the weather, especially wind patterns and rainfall;
• the number and type of animals present, especially birds;
• the culture of the neighbourhood and how much sound/music is generated for commercial or private purposes;

Sound reception factors:

• the predominant buildings materials and facade treatments;
• street shape, either straight, angled, or curved.
• landscape form and materials;
• the types of trees or other vegetation present and their sound diffusion and absorption capacity;
• zoning bylaws as they pertain to building height, spacing, and size;
• the number of people on the street;
• the weather, especially snow;

In thinking about which particular site to select, I realized that a Toronto sound map, that diagrammed the relationships of Toronto’s various “aural arenas” (as discussed by Blesser and Salter), as well as average decibel levels, would be extremely useful to me. But does such a map exist? First I thought of creating one myself, before I realized how much work it would be to do it at a useful scale. In my case it’s likely best to remain site–specific. But if there were a city sound map, think of how useful it would be to developers who were considering buying property who hadn’t previously considered its sound qualities.

Paris Sound Map (1st arrondissement)

As an example of where sound is an important but seemingly overlooked factor, an condo development is in the works right between the Gardiner Expressway, the CN railway tracks, and Spadina and Bathurst Avenues. This site also happens to be quite close to the Island Airport. How noisy might it get there!? Either they haven’t considered this and the project will be a disaster, or they have some very good ideas on how to handle noise. We’ll see. I mean, uh, we’ll hear.

From my point of view, this could be a great spot on which to do a thesis design project, to see aural architecture to good use. At the very least it’s a massive acoustic engineering challenge, so it has potential.

Stay tuned.

Blesser and Salter’s book is, to me, the latest and most important work for establishing a discourse on aural architecture. This book covers many issues relevant to the first stage of this thesis, and provides a clear starting point for the work I intend to pursue. Here are some key highlights:

1. They discuss at length the human ability to understand space through sound, both physically and psychologically, as well as the power sound has to connect us.

2. They make crucial distinctions between aural architects and an acoustic engineers. An aural architect is “someone who selects specific aural attributes of a space based on what is desirable in a particular cultural framework.” An acoustic engineer, on the other hand, is the person who “who implements the aural attributes previously selected by an aural architect.”

3. They establish two key spatial concepts: the acoustic horizon —“the distance limit from which a listener can hear sonic events”— and the aural arena —“the area in which all listeners can hear a sound source”.

4. They suggest that the five senses (sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell) are a culturally biased construct, that there are many sub–senses that aren’t as considered: “…our culture takes no notice of the many different kinds of information processing that actually compose a single sensory modality. For example, the tactile modality—touch—includes independent sensors for vibration, texture, temperature, movement, and so on.”

5. They identify four reasons the language of aural architecture remains underdeveloped:

“First, aural experiences of space are fleeting, and we lack means for storing their cultural and intellectual legacy in museums, journals, and archives.

Second, for both cultural and biological reasons, the language for describing sound is weak and inadequate.

Third, being fundamentally oriented toward visual communications, modern culture has little appreciation for the emotional importance of hearing, and thus attaches little value to the art of auditory spatial awareness.

And fourth, questions about aural architecture are not generally recognized as a legitimate domain for intellectual inquiry; professional schools provide little or no training in physical acoustics, aural aesthetics, or sensory sociology.”

Much like Al Gore though, who, in his infamous movie, made known a problem but never suggested a way of fixing it, Blesser and Slater do little to propose strategies for aural design. They tell us not to be “intimidated by experts since there are none in aural architecture. Trust your instincts.”

This is where I hope to chime in.

(A concise summary of the book’s subjects can be found in an article they wrote here)

The disassociation and reassociation of sound that Walter Murch speaks of in his article I wrote about earlier could be used creatively in a medium other than film.

What would downtown Galt sound like if there were street life?

I’ve been recording a number of bars, restaurants, and parties in Toronto. I hope eventually, to play back these recordings at full volume from speakers set up in a number of abandoned retail spaces along Main St and other streets in the downtown area, where there could be, or might have been, bars and restaurants. The idea would be to fabricate an aural environment that will create an impression of a vibrant downtown core, where there is now an almost complete absence of urban life. At worst, this would be yet another vain attempt to inspire the locals to build a real city, but if so I don’t think it’s too antagonistic. At best, it would be a tremendous experiment on transforming space at the scale of the street through aural visualization auralization. And who knows, maybe it will bring local yearning for a better town to a boiling point.

Stay tuned.

Architectural photography: Audiography

ArchDaily serves as an excellent reminder that current architecture is slave to its image. Most architects seem content if their buildings look great a set of photographs. And if it looks like the rendering made before it was built, even better.

I have several concerns with the practice of architectural photography. For instance, having to produce buildings that look like their renderings has been a source of lamentation for many architects for some time now, but there seems to be a new, perhaps equally nauseating problem emerging. In the case of these images, it seems the photographs are attempting to look like computer renderings. These and other photographs are almost certainly being photoshopped not only for exposure and colour corrections, but also to correct design omissions or construction errors. They present a fantasy that is masquerading as reality. Surely not all of the photos on ArchDaily and other publications are falsified, and I’m sure that very few of them are significantly different from reality, but how can we tell anymore? Who knows how much is real, or how much is fake anymore?

This gives a person all the more reason to visit the building in person. Anyone who’s visited a great piece of architecture knows that the experience is quite different, often much greater than that of seeing it in photos. This is not only because the third and forth dimensions (depth and time) are absent from the images, but also because touch, taste, smell, and of course sound, are also absent.

So why not include sound in online building publication? Appending an mp3 file of a recorded walkthrough of the building wouldn’t be difficult, and would give a much better impression of the space and allow a virtual experience of the architecture that is far more compelling and informative than a simple image. Or why not publish buildings as short videos, now that youtube and vimeo allow such high qualities, so that the sound and images go together?

Since I own both an HD camera and a 4–channel field recorder, I might as well begin the trend. I’ll document a series of buildings and post them on the internet, just as architectural photographers do, except I’ll do it with sound, with possible video or photographic accompaniment. I’ll be an architectural audiographer. I’ll start with famous Toronto buildings, and some not–so–famous ones too. I might also include the odd urban environment or landscape too.

Stay tuned.