I am constantly telling it anyway in that silent room I heard two songs why if
the room was so silent, I had heard two songs there is no such thing as silence
sound everything we hear and many things we don't
much of the discussion about sound is actually about noise not about sound
meaning it's a fairly negative view of sound and people complain about things
if they're too loud or too irritating but it's much more unusual to find
discussion about what is positive what people find pleasant or conducive in
their soundscape
what I love about sound is how it travels around corners like you can't
see the sniper around the corner in Iraq right now if you put your head around
you'll get shot but if you listen you can hear him rustling
you know it wasn't for our sweet sounds we survived as a species we heard
relatively well and therefore we managed to avoid the losers because of our
auditory quality which is much bigger than the visual that is, in fact we
heard much better than we see, congratulations, let's get closer to the dialogue, are the doors
no, it's a wall, I walk and when I come back I produce if there are sounds and I don't need anything
so that they produce, the simple touch of the ring allows us to have a sense of space
that is, if I had a wall in front of me, the rustling or the sound that was produced
by the echo of the ring, it would be radically different, for example, I can understand
that there is something here, by the way, a beat, I realized that it is a part of plastic
therefore the part will be a lever and that's it, great, to understand that this space
for example is ample, I don't need to put myself on walls or run from one side to the other
even involuntarily, even if I don't do anything, I have this perception of fear given to me by the auditory
the shape of the ear has all these curves that make the sound want reflections of the beat
on these walls and it is channeled to the auditory channel and if you see a sound from above
the points where the beat is different from what is below, the reflections are different
and this creates certain alterations in the cycle, in the waves
that help the brain to understand where the sound comes from
and another thing is the delay in the time when the sound reaches one ear and the other
it has to travel a little more and have to control the head, it reflects the nose
and reaches the other ear with other reflections, this time difference also contributes to
understand where the sound comes from, and another third is the acousticity of the space where we are
at this moment we are listening to all these reflections, these multiple reflections
that are going to give you the perception of space, of my own, of myself
I trained as an architect, I have always been very interested in the way the sound and space create unique places and how they all combine
in this room here the boiler is going, when I go out the boiler is still going, it's got a character to this room
and the carpets and everything and the fact where the sound coming through the wall
all give an important quality to how we perceive our environment
But is there communication? Yes, if there is for example someone next to you who followed you in what you were doing, you were calmly reading and you spoke on the phone
and after you went to the kitchen to make noise, etc. the kitchen is always very noisy
you have made a sentence, you have said something, you have said what you have experienced without the will
Thank you God
I really feel like there is a lot of information that gets transmitted to us about
the environment physically and socially and you can stand in a field and you can listen and you can gather information about what animals and birds live in that field
and what time of day it is and what the temperature is and what the social, cultural factors may be in that environment
just by listening to all this information that gets transmitted to us as individuals
That's why I feel like there is a lot of information that gets transmitted to us
The way of speaking comes to life, that is to say, the contemporary world, as it is organized, if you want, points to other types of language and voice
For me, it interests me the sound of Portuguese things as a raw material to be reconstructed, destroyed
and the essence to continue there and here to have a contemporary dynamic and be used as instruments, as samplers
and to be able to make 7500 musical works and other things from that
Now, it simply is not the case that there is any language anywhere in the world that is primitive
In one sense, you could look at language ecology as sort of perhaps the most important from a human point of view aspect of acoustic ecology
because once sounds of a language are gone, they'll never be fully recovered
Music is a very personal sound and in fact it is part of this process, if you want, of identity, of belonging, of this movement, of this sound landscape
which is really very good
There are sounds that are special to where they live and we go out and collect those sounds with recording equipment
then we bring those sounds back into the classroom, upload them onto a computer
so other pupils can hear what it sounds like to live in Slough or in Aberdeen or in Cornwall or any number of places that we've delivered projects in
They just can't believe what they can hear and a whole new world is opened up to them
I like things quite noisy and I think people who choose to come to cities to live, I mean they do that for many reasons
but often city people like a noise, they feel uncomfortable in the countryside where things are too quiet
Music
My name is Max Dixon, I'm advisor to the Mayor of London on ambient noise
Our work here is setting out policies for noise abatement in a very traditional way
Planning and design of open spaces is one area where the positive aspects of soundscape are most manifest
I like this place because it's rather interesting sonically
You can hear the water lapping and there are birds, if you hear at the right time for birds, boats going past
sometimes they will blast a horn, when it's windy the wires they sing a little bit
and when people run over it or walk over it it bounces up and down and rattles
so there's a lot of sounds here if you pay attention to them
I noticed a series of long-term horizons, long-term acoustic horizons
and today I have something here that I feel is 100m at most
Long sounds
This is Bob Banks, marketing manager, Radio and Victoria Division of RCA Victor
What you're going to hear about today is nothing short of a miracle
It's dramatically new, it's an RCA Victor exclusive
made possible only through years of research, inventions and innovations
Living Stereo, played on a record
The world is changing, see what's going on in your cities, the movement, the machines
everything that's going on, how the man is changing his system, his life, his society
he's mentalizing, mechanizing and this society produces its own color, its own sound
there's a lot of low frequencies in the cities, in the military environments
and that's low frequencies
We're going to do this, we already have a lot of techniques
We're going to do this, we're going to do this, we're going to do this, we're going to do this
I don't know if it's going to be a miracle, but if it's going to be an event, a very sudden event
all the people stop, these people disappear, the people die
The authority should concentrate
La la la la la
Sound is everything I hear
And noise is also everything I hear, but a bit more disorganized
Silence is everything I want to hear, but I can't
And here, there, thy blood
This can be silent because before there was something non-silent
This traffic we hear in the background, what if instead of just trying to listen to my voice
and ignoring that background, what if we listen to that as sound?
What's interesting about it or not interesting?
One of the things about London is that it is a noisy place and that's one of its features
Everywhere actually sounds a little bit different from somewhere else
but you have to sort of listen to notice that and appreciate it
Sound is everything I hear
This window acts as an elevator
and suddenly all that noise from the traffic
starts to annoy you, you start to hear the footsteps, the ours, the other people
the little birds of the bayonets, the voices of the children
And here it starts to gradually listen to this continuous noise
Meanwhile the noise of my steps or the sound of my steps
is already completely affected by this noise
The noise is a disturbance in the communication process
Which is different from music or articulate speech
or different from signal, different from something that you're trying to communicate
Noise is background
Basically unwanted sounds
Music
A person who has the radio, the car, has the power
For this person it is a form of being able to do it
First of all in general I feel like Americans have no sense of respect
for how they affect a space when they enter into it
The sound is the way it gets expressed the most because people are loud
and the city is loud
In some cases it was intentional provocation
because I quote a very simple example
A young mother who had a neighbor down there
an old lady who she didn't support
because she controlled her exes and came
and so when she made love to her husband
she had a problem in her sleep
and she didn't repair it
she said she didn't repair it
so that every time I make love to my husband
the old lady down there she hears
There have been figures in the past who have talked about the soundscape of cities
with the image, the analogy of a musician, a composer
You know we can think of the whole world, all audible phenomena
as this vast stream of noise
and then each of our messages and each of our music
comes from it and comes out of it
and then merges back into it
Musicians take their sounds for granted
they take a certain set of field of sounds
pitches, timbres, meters
and they work with it
Sound artists think, what's this vast world of sound that we hear
how can we think about it
how can we shape it
how can we consider it
Music
In the mid 90's there was like
two or three thousand pirate stations throughout the country at that time
and a lot more people interested in radio
and what radio could be
because they weren't hearing anything interesting for so many years
because it just became controlled by corporations
who were only interested in selling advertisements
and not providing any interesting content
or different content or innovative radio
I encourage artists to think about the airwaves
and the transmission spectrum
as this creative tool and medium into itself
is very connected to acoustic ecology
because it's the air around us
that's part of our environment
I'll give this box ears, I thought
I'll put a tape recorder
and I'll post it
I'll pick it up the next morning, 15 hours later
took it back to the studio
popped it in the cassette player we had in the studio
and wow, we recorded the cars, the people singing
lots of stuff, at 5am
recorded five men scanning the parcel
swearing about having sex the night before or not
always pop up in my head
and it's just some postman somewhere in London
that's in my head for the rest of my life
I think that's an amazing quality of sound
I don't know what he looks like
but he was coming and I was trying to protect myself from the wind
I saw the different corners of the houses
where I was trying to protect myself
you get used to sound
But then you get used to other things like bad air, but often the question is, well should you get used to it?
Should we actually not be striving for something which is a little bit more stimulating and pleasant than what we've actually got?
And I think as people become more concerned about managing their health in a variety of ways,
whether that's diet, exercise, the quality of the air around them,
people will also become more concerned about the exposure to the sheer volume of sound in entertainment,
and will become more demanding of quality.
Slurping and making way to when the water is light now, you hear the echoes.
If you wait around here, you hear sort of little things like that, which makes this an interesting place to be listening.
There's a Zen question about if tree falls in a forest, does it make a sound?
But is this music? Is it a noise?
It's parkland. It's like this shared communal space.
The sound is immaterial. You can sculpt it, you can chop it, you can edit it, you can collage with it.
Silence, yeah. Well I think, I mean there I think Cage is really right.
Cage was obsessed, John Cage was obsessed with silence, but he also said that there's no such thing.
And what I think he was obsessed with, what silence was for him, was a kind of noise, was noise, was background.
And also in French you find that bruit is also used in the same sense in old French.
Le bruit des oiseaux means the noise, the singing of the birds.
So the beautiful noise is said by this.
And I think we should think about this other connotation as well when we use the word noise.
I especially am interested in the Japanese noise music, which seems to be very chaotic,
but there is so much insight and so much thought about what is sound, what is music, what is desired, what is undesired,
what is the human ear able to perceive and so on.
Silence, what is sound, what is music.
The noise is like the stranger. Everything we don't want to hear and the many things we do.
Sound is the friend. So sound is what you feel comforted by, it's what you look for, it's what supports you.
The challenges of the work with sound is that there are no magic bullets, there are no single keys that one can turn.
This is one area where artists have an important role.
You have to look to diversity and finding ways in which communities around the city can co-create more humane sound schemes.
They are sometimes going around a really familiar place, but with a completely different outlook they're using their ears instead of their arms.
That's very the imagination.
This is music, this is music, this is music, this is music.
This is music, this is music, this is music.
This is music, this is music.
This is music, this is music.
