NEW OUTDOORS SOUND AND VISION
Just as we have microclimates, we have microcosms of sound outdoors. We like some better than others, depending on our mood as much as on our immediate surroundings. In nature, each little ecosystem’s flora, fauna, geology, and weather contributes to it’s unique sound landscape. In urban areas, each block, with its specific traffic patterns, architecture, surfaces, cultural mix, and juxtapositions form a particular sound portrait.
What does a city sound like? How how might cities each have their own outdoors sound? Composer Tod Machover first set out to create a sound portrait for the city of Toronto, when he composed, in collaboration with the city’s residents, a new kind of iconic piece, entitled “A Toronto Symphony: Concerto for Composer and City.”
Sounds were recorded by volunteers across the city - everything from noisy traffic to children's voices - were woven together with the strings and horns of a traditional orchestra. Contributions were invited via the internet and the audience were even able to manipulate the ending of the music via an app.
A Toronto Symphony was performed, for the first time, by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra last March (2013), first and foremost for the citizens of Toronto. They lit up the CN Tower to mark the occasion. Check out this official trailer to hear a section of the performance.
Photo: Nitrogliserin. Edinburgh
Machover then got busy creating a sound portrait of Edinburgh. Again, he set out to sample the city by inviting its residents to send him a digital recording of a sound -- an audio impression -- made somewhere in Edinburgh, both during and outside of the city’s famous Festival. The sounds were mixed together, and Machover composed music around them to produce “Festival City,” a beautiful one-movement orchestral work.
Watch as Machover explains the collaborative sound and music project.
With conductor Peter Oundjian, and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra performing, “Festival City” will premier at the Edinburgh International Festival on August 27th.
Click here to go to the Festival City page, where you can get instructions how to get involved, inspirations, and plenty of information about the project!
Last month, Tod Machover and pianist Tae Kim did a live demo online of the Constellation and Cauldron app, built at the Media Lab for the “Festival City” and sound portrait project. The Cauldron app is populated with the sounds and are represented by colored circles. Online participants could “stir the musical brew” by positioning their cursors over the circles, which move and grow in response. Tae Kim used the evolving images as a “score” to improvise music which will inform the final piece. Stay tuned!
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Join discussion on Twitter using #edintfestcity
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Join Festival City Facebook event to share ideas
Urban sounds are often not so pleasant and beautiful. In fact the din of cities can be sometimes hard to take. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Stereopublic: Crowdsourcing the Quiet' is one of the TED Prize City 2.0 award recipients. It is participatory art project that finds quiet spaces in urban jungles and and shares their geolocation data. Participants navigate their cities, searching for quiet spaces. They take audio and visual snapshots and share them with their social networks via the Stereopublic app. The project was devised by Australian artist and musician, Jason Sweeney.
Video: Courtesy of TED
So far, 14 cities have been activated, including Edinburgh and a smattering of others in the US, Europe and Australia. The Sound Agency, a UK based consultancy that optimizes sound for business and public spaces, is helping Stereopublic to activate London now, with more to come. Sweeney is seeking more people to locate and tag quiet spaces these and other cities.
If you have an iPhone and you are in one of the fourteen currently activated cities, you can login or register on Stereopublic and you can become an earwitness by downloading the app and start walking the streets now to find, add and experience quiet spaces directly!
Julian Treasure, Chairman of The Sound Agency, likens quiet mapping to an act of public service and describes Stereopublic as “the citizen journalism of sound.” He says, “If we can mobilize people to record quiet spots in cities, we can protect them from the harmful effects of noise.”
Treasure aims to make the world sound more beautiful wherever we go. It’s more important than you might think. Sound affects our health, productivity and our relationships, as Julian explains in his four fascinating TED Talks. The first is on the four effects of sound; the second on sound and health and the third, which has over a million views on the TED website alone, is on conscious listening.
While much of The Sound Agency’s work involves creating soundscapes for interior spaces, like shopping malls, department stores, and office buildings, with clients like Harrods, Honda, BP, and Nokia, it is now being sought out by municipalities who understand that the sound outdoors in the bustling cities is having an increasingly negative effect on their populations. Machines, cars, trains, planes, loud music, honking horns, and other harsh sounds are a constant assault. We can try to tune it out or drown it out, but by doing so, we also lose the natural sounds that are vital to our physical and psychological well-being.
The city of Lancaster, California, hired The Sound Agency to create more beneficial soundscapes. The Agency created a generative soundscape, including birdsong, lapping water, and musical elements, designed to work with (vs against) traffic and other ambient noise.
Photo: Courtesy of Charlie Essers
They created “birdsong boulevard” by installing 70 weatherproof Bose speakers along one of the city’s busiest corridors to broadcast the beautiful soundscape to both people in cars and pedestrians. One positive result seen already is a 15% reduction in crime, as reported in the Wall Street Journal and the LA Times, among other major news outlets.
Birdsong, one of the most delightful outdoor sounds, is, according to Treasure, one of the three main sounds that make humans feel better. The other two are wind and water. These sounds can reduce cortisol and adrenaline, which are produced by the human body in response to stress. He points to evolution, suggesting that singing birds reassured early humans that there were no forest predators lurking nearby. "We've learned over hundreds of thousands of years it's when they stop that we need to worry," he says. “Birdsong is also nature’s alarm clock, with the dawn chorus signalling the start of the day, so it stimulates us cognitively.”
If you don’t live in Lancaster, or you can’t get outside to enjoy the birds at the moment, Birdsong Radio has you covered. Listen here. It’s really a joy! In fact, I’m listening to it now as I write this post. Sometimes loud so I can immerse, sometimes ever-so-softly, a lovely background to my afternoon. I think I’ll keep it on for a while so I can, at least, feel like I’m outdoors today.
Here’s an interview Julian Treasure conducted with me, as I talk about the launch of BeautifulNow and its interest in Beautiful Sound.
Stay tuned all this week as BeautifulNow explores the beauty of Outdoors, including posts in Arts/Design, Food/Drink, Nature/Science, Place/Time, Mind/Body, and Soul/Impact. And get out! Get some fresh air. Enjoy some beautiful outdoors!
