NOTE: The above sound files* formed part of the initial presentation and were attached to the slides with the little loudspeaker on; the order is unimportant as each is to illustrate diverse element of the text. The playing is -obviously - optional.
SUB-TEXT:
The human visual encyclopedia and recognition system is sophisticated; adept at understanding streams of confusing images that demand de-codification and classification. in general we get it right.
Visual bias also manifests itself in a protective guise - we like sticking blue plaques on things, and listing things, and inventing planning rules. Visual certainty gives us cultural security. On the negative side perfectly sensible energy schemes are thrown out if they don’t ‘fit’ into the landscape they are supposed to be saving.
ZVIs, VIAs and EIAs curious quasi-scientific valuations to protect against loss of visual amenity.
The UK base line of visual amenity / aesthetic is the Landscape Character Assessment. Landscape defined as silent film; a fine art tableau on the wall of some reverential Gallery undisturbed by the noisy reality resulting from the base mechanics of natural or human activities.
What if the gap between recording and radio had been several decades ahead of moving images and TV? And if in this time the wide world had been dynamically revealed to us via sound, our ears fine tuned to the intricacy and minutiae of various cultural and geographical soundscapes?
SUB TEXT:
A typical path to Harmonic Urbanism is littered with variants of the question, why is sound so poorly considered..? Perhaps there is (in the UK) a social/intellectual bias that fails to comprehensively (conceptually, artistically and technically - in the manner of Aristotle) address sound within both education and generic usage? Architects are no less aware of sound than the rest of the populace; simply that sound should matter more, as they are shaping it. This is doubly unfortunate given the elemental importance of music in architectural theory; where Pythagorean reasoning was central to classical Architectural reasoning via, for example, Alberti and Palladio (among others).
It may also be because the 4 key liberal arts contained in the Quadrivium (Mathematics / Astronomy / Geometry / Music) that was at the core of post-renaissance higher education - and particularly architecture - has long since ceased to be.
More fundamentally, for things to be heard, the architecture had to be responsive - as the ancient Greeks understood without the aid of the modern digital modeling resources currently available to designers.
Post serialism and musique concrete: the architect can avail him/herself of a multitude of harmonic proportions to delineate form and space. There are no stylistic implications, simply that the link to these concepts establishes the Architect’s elemental awareness of the convergent properties of sound and space: the harmonic proportionality of sound influencing the division of space: and the division of space in turn influencing the way we hear sound in our environment. Yet with all the available knowledge, this type of ‘sound inclusive’ iterative design process is clearly not happening for either enclosed or external spaces
One way to resolve this is to make it clear at he most elemental level that each structure influences what and how we hear so the architect/ the landscape architect / the interior designer are (by default) INSTRUMENT MAKERS as well as sculptors. All cultural space is filled with cultural sound, this need not be arbitrary or disconnected from the design process but an entirely predictable and logical result of an integrated design process.
The question now becomes, what sounds do we need to tune the architectural instrument to resonate to?
SUB-TEXT
The UK has had to contend with an extremely noisy 300 years arising from the ever more diverse results of the industrial revolution. Maybe it has dulled our senses.
The design and physical construction of ‘visual space’ is inseparable from the design and physical construction of ‘acoustic space’ - from materials used, to proportionality, to the ‘tuning’ of urban places. So why is sonic distinctiveness not given as high a priority as visual distinctiveness?
Despite the profusion of sound around us the topic of environmental or architectural sound is not an established school subject: excepting briefly in physics (for some) and music (where it is still taught). It should be far more important than that. Sound and soundscape is central to people’s lives as evidenced by the every burgeoning media sector. Home entertainment means a big screen and a big, big sound. 7:1 surround sound. People with white wires coming from their ears, detaching themselves from their surrounds.
And by detaching ourselves we effectively reject the urban soundscape as unwanted or irrelevant noise, and choose to substitute a personally selected commercial soundtrack. Imagine then a future where we all wear white iSPECS – architecture similarly condemned in favour of soap opera, movies or pastoral landscape to “block out those horrid buildings.”
If this is so absurd, then why has sound been allowed to reach a comparably low status in the design of our urban environment?
Harmonic Urbanism aims to re-focus on and re-value / re-evaluate our sonic environment. And, taking the model of our silent LCA, could we somehow re-shape it as a SOUNDSCAPE CHARACTER ASSESSMENT?
Would analysing and categorising myriad distinctive sounds and sound combinations help better define our city, our home, our workplace, our culture, our subculture?
SUB-TEXT:
For the Santhal community, sounds signal rituals act as mundane orientations in the space-time continuum. Further increasingly complex definitions follow as activities and sound types interact. Sounds as important as life itself; so much so that spaces in the villages are planned and built (anthropologists and musicologists use the term ‘tuned’) in such a way as to enable diverse aspects of this rich soundscape to be best revealed and appreciated.
Yet how much more diverse and wonderful would our myriad diverse UK cultural soundscapes seem if we only took the time to similarly appreciate them? Compare the UK National Trust (‘your search - ‘soundscape’ - did not match any documents’) with the US National Parks Service (returning a well researched soundscape policy in sections:
Explore Sounds / Cultural & Human Sounds / Effects of Noise / Inventory and Monitoring / Laws & Policies / Natural Sounds / Recources and Publications / Sources of Human Sounds / Understanding Soundscapes and Acoustics. With each section featuring commendable technical descriptions, illustrations and sound clips.
Maybe we in the UK are in need of a set of simple sonic definitions; clear, concise, accurate & objective to get us started? A method of elemental sound categorization to include the cultural meaning or the source of the sound, referenced to intrinsic perceptual properties (morphological criteria) such as those proposed by Pierre Schaeffer in 1966. Would this be a prerequisite of understanding the nature of soundscapes?
‘When we study soundscapes we are not only interested in individual sounds, but also the relationships and interactions among the sounds. Understanding these relationships is vital to protecting soundscapes for current and future generations.’
If only this had been the opening lines of a lecture or school lesson…..
SUB-TEXT:
The cultural meaning attributed to sound is ever changing. One man’s music has evolved to being another man’s ring tone. This change occurred in parallel to a seismic shift from mechanical sound (where the visual connection between cause and effect was established beyond doubt) to electronic sound. Where was the bleep, what was the bleep, and ‘how the bleep do I fix the bleep??’
Yet we still crave real sound: steam engines; Big Ben; a mechanical watch... Probably because our personal universe, our very physicality vibrates with sound? Corporeal sound follows the same rules as we do, belongs to the same physical universe. A world of sampled and cloned sound, on recordings, on cash registers, on telephones, on birthday cards perhaps has the curious side effect as to deny subcultures an identity. The Newcastle Central station announcer apologizing to me for a delay is the same voice that told me the correct platform some 300 miles away and 4 hours previous.
Specific or unique vernacular sounds are becoming increasingly harder to find. Shipyard hooters, brass weights on butchers scales, the whoosh of vacuum tube connections, the bezel dial before the clockwork powered bus ticket roll issues forth, the distant discharge of steam from a marshalling yard. It is as if the sonic city has been demolished: which to a large extent it effectively has been; with the malodorous Mosquito device breeding in the ruins?
So many of new sound are transient, abstract, imported, imposed and unconnected to any vernacular process as to make the compiling of a distinctive cultural soundscape very problematic. A talking blue plaque should inform me “This is the place where that sound used to be..” But the sounds of the city, of a culture, must continue - but these are different, unrelated, borrowed, copyrighted, corporate, often stolen, and mostly abstract. Moreover, it no longer sounds like our city, but like everyone else’s.
Harmonic Urbanism is not a polemic against change, but rather a warning that our inability to define and appreciate sound leads to no-one bemoaning its loss in the same way as a much loved building or open space or woodland. We will know something has changed, but we will not know what. Neither do we quite know how to set the parameters required to replace these sounds.
As old vernacular soundscapes vanish there must be equally interesting vernacular soundscapes to replace them. Instead we are allowing our urban soundscapes to be gradually homogenized and rendered bland and unmemorable.. As Bernie Kraus, ecologist and sound recordist, points out:
“We're a visual culture. The problem is that the eye lies! Take a camera to a site that's been selectively logged, frame your shot and you'll get a beautiful photo. However, get a recorded example of that site before logging takes place and record the biophony. Then, record the site after the damage. You'll not only hear the difference immediately, but for years after."
Is this also the inevitable fate of our urban environments?
SUB-TEXT:
Noise is unpredictable and/or uncontrollable (until understood). Noise exists outside of spatial or temporal restrictions resulting from one or a combination of several natural or man made phenomena. Thunderstorms, unwanted vibration, loud car stereos, whistling drains. NOTE: Noise can include Music, a loud car stereo is both music and noise depending on where the listener is placed. In my house it is music, in my neighbour’s it is noise – there is no contradiction if we understand the overlap.
Furthermore it remains as noise regardless of it being measured under a level where it is supposed to technically/numerically cease being problematic. NOISE IS NOT A FIXED LEVEL ON A dB METER. Playing the numbers game is only a small part of evaluating the complex medium of AWE.
MUSIC is made up of SOUND or NOISE organised rhythmically (with respect to time) which become part of the MUSIC, and no longer remain SOUND or NOISE.
It is is preferable in all ways to our current reliance on scientific terms, technical measures (obtained via dB meters) and abstract representations (on bar charts and maps – for example) when debating the effect of sound in the environment. Such narrowly framed analysis is the aural equivalent of judging a building’s design quality by its reflected lux level at various times of the day, or perhaps grading old masters solely on the use of the colour red?
So, can we build a level of qualitative analysis into legislation, measurement devices or calculations?
SUB-TEXT:
Acceptance, safeguarding and creative enhancement of our new cultural soundscape has implications. Once acoustic considerations are placed ‘up front’ the way we design spaces will necessarily change.
Piped muzak or artificial sounds as an afterthought will be seen as an admission of failure in the initial conceptual design of the space in the same way massive bolt on ‘wall wart’ air conditionings systems are. Instead of asking design students to ergonomically fashion torture apparatus there are a hundred sonic and acoustic issues that require creative input. What price stackable municipal busking booths that direct sound evenly to specific areas or resonant paving or wind responsive aeolian fencing?
In 1974 Pink Floyd used full surround sound live. A decade or so later the Parc de la Villette and let the visitor experience sounds scooting around as if invisible creatures. 2008 and most High Streets are still strictly mono - and rubbish mono at that. At Xmas if, it’s Bing Crosby at one end, I know he will be there at the other; sounding tinny, distorted, and very sad. All this despite the existence of 3D soundscapes and ambisonics.
Why shouldn’t each Each pedestrian High Street or pier or mall or car park be a potential cultural sound gallery? Commissions extended to schools, artists, musicians. When not in use for creative works of soundart, multiphonics can work as a integral urban soundscape, channelling the sound of the weekly Market to the main square, or a recorded conversation from 50 years ago to the place where it was recorded. The limits are the designer’s imagination. Sound can make the link when the visual cultural link has long since been lost, where the temporal link is fading. The sea is 150 metres away – why can’t I see it – why can’t I hear it?
Are there affordably alternatives to the tyranny of the Tannoy? While, of course, accepting that Urban soundscape never be the sole provenance of technology – additional sound electronic sources should be a key element along with such physical things as visual and acoustic links to the adjacent spaces, the sensation of weather, the certainty and cultural ownership of sonic and acoustic markers, the provision of quietude, fleeting whispers of distant conversations, the sudden focus on micro-soundscape and small sounds – all hard wired into the design brief, driving creative urban development. Anything is or should be – possible.
Harmonic Urbanism holds that Sonic Architecture should be as physically tangible and culturally valued as Visual Architecture, each an integral part of the other’s existence.
SUB-TEXT:
The aim of the Harmonic Urbanist should be to make our public realm more than simply a largely unregulated and ‘sensorially’ disconnected (and disconnecting) external space. The whole urban experience should be one where the acoustic memory is as distinct as the visual one.
Sound remains important to people. An appropriate soundscape is a critical element in how we experience natural, cultural and historic resources. It is arguable that people’s need for such historic cultural soundscapes (as provided by heritage and interpretation centres) also reflects a general alienation from corporate dominated soundscapes. Indeed from the soundscape that seeks to accommodate aircraft and car noise as crucial economic necessities, despite the medical evidence showing indisputable links between drowning in such noise and high blood pressure.
The need for distinctive soundscape is recognized in all disciplines from film making to museum design. The soundscape lays the defining foundation for the visual experience. If our urban experience is nothing but muzak or digital clone sound signatures or karaoke or 24 hour news on big screens in pubs and banks greyed out only by ever present engine noise then why should we want to experience town’s and cities? What joy is there? (>)
Harmonic Urbanists should refuse to disconnect from the soundscape around me, no matter how wearing it may be. Refuse to pipe someone else’s soundscape via someone else’s white wires directly into our ears. Our own immediate live happening sonic cultural environment should be at least as fulfilling - and hopefully a damn sight more challenging - than a commercial digital download from a foreign website recorded who knows where, who knows when, played over dinky little headphones… ?
We hope is this is a challenge that the design and engineering professions can jointly recognize and respond to.
We need to be overwhelmed by urban sound, we need to swim in its world-wide waves: in ancient alleys where the cacophony of taxi horns recedes; where narrow streets prevent easy car access and traders and customers spill onto cobbled streets creating pools of small distinct sounds at all hours; where conversation, musicians and the clink of glasses is louder than engine noise or the top 40.
It is still there, so turn your mp3 players into recorders to play back to your grandchildren before it has vanished. In Brighton’s Lanes. In Cardiff’s old Arcades. In the stepped access to London’s underground, or the many back lanes and inexplicably empty urban squares they often lead to. In various covered markets, retained but on borrowed time. In an old printer’s works that somehow still affords a city centre rental.
Without a diversity of people and a diversity of activity, there is no urban experience; no meaningful public realm. Even if people are not in an urban space, it is their absence that defines and highlights the solitude; no matter how temporary. It enables me to hear the trickle of water from the solitary fountain that sustains me as I head back towards the throng – refreshed.
Words should not be drowned by unrelenting cacophony. (urban) Theatres, conceived in silence as precise masterpieces of acoustic engineering, can still only project what they receive….
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