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I wore a pressed shirt in order to better engage not only protesters and passersby but also with bankers as they left work and took stock of the chanting crowd. I wanted t get as many voices as possible, from the staunchest defenders of OWS and related movements to its arch-opponents. Not because all of these perspectives are equally valid, but because we get a richer picture of how OWS has affected the psyche and political landscape of our world when we consider the dissent and ambivalence OWS encountered as well as its networks of support. Hearing the voices of bankers and defense contractors who can barely contain their rage at OWS should, in fact, tell us a great deal about how much the movement has achieved. Meanwhile, we also hear certain slippages–privileged people who can’t hide their sympathy.

The audio piece that resulted intersperses voices as well as perspectives. Hear it here:

Protest as Religion

Or here:

http://canopycanopycanopy.com/15/call_and_response

Image by Seth Denizen

Episode One is the pilot. Its purpose is to explain sound studies in a nutshell (less than 15 minutes), and then to set the table for the project to come. Each future episode will aim at specific, aurally rich situations in Bangkok: street sound, protest, musical performance, noise, commerce. Perhaps you’ve read about what’s happening in Bangkok now – there should be plenty to talk about. I’ll post whenever new episodes go up on Triple Canopy.

By the way, back in 1997, Steven Connor created a five-part series for the BBC called Noise that you can hear here. In addition to being a good academic writer, Connor has an almost Dr. Seussian gift for language, when he wants to turn it on. For the pilot of BiR, it was useful to hear Connor’s work, although I expect to move in a different direction with future episodes, since the content will be field recordings rather than general discussion. Keep tuning in.

Max Neuhaus: Times Square, Time Piece Beacon
Lynne Cooke, Karen Kelly, and Barbara Schröder, editors
Dia Art Foundation, 2009
140 pps., $35 ($21.75 on Abe Books)

As an art critic, it must be an awkward assignment to memorialize the work of an artist who rejected memorials. Sound installation pioneer Max Neuhaus, who died in 2009, productively confronted the limits of artistic form throughout his long career, but at no moment was this challenge more powerful than in death. A recent book by the Dia Art Foundation, one of Neuhaus’s key patrons, engages just this paradox.

Neuhaus was among the first modern composers (if that title even applies) to work with sound in a deliberately non-musical idiom. Breaking from predecessors and contemporaries in the field of sonic art, Neuhaus was never interested in how to bring concrete sound into composition, let alone the concert hall. To whatever extent possible, his work was publicly situated – on streets or in subway stations, for example. His authorial presence was supposed to be as invisible as his art. The idea was to engage audiences without ever signaling to them that they’d entered an artistic space. Working in the mid- to late-20th century, Neuhaus shared a number of insights and goals with contemporary Modernists in the visual arts, but his use of sound as a primary material gave his work a distinct status.

Neuhaus’s most famous piece is Times Square, an ambient drone that issues from beneath a grate on 7th Avenue between 45th and 46th streets in Manhattan:

Times Square is unmarked, and essentially unrecognizable as art. Passersby notice it all the time, and may even stop to listen, but generally in the assumption that the sound, however unusual, has something to do with the subway or Con Ed. In this respect, it can induce a kind of self-discovery for those who come upon it. Neuhaus hoped that such moments would be a gateway to more attuned listening down the line.

This piece, like much of Neuhaus’s output, was initially temporary. The Dia Art Foundation, however, has funded its continued installment since 2002. The quasi-permanence of Times Square, its objecthood, stands in ironic contrast to its intention – to project an artistic intervention without, at least as far as the listener realizes, marking itself off from the rest of the world.

The individual contributors to Max Neuhaus: Times Square, Time Piece Beacon (namely: Lynne Cooke, Alex Potts, Branden Joseph, Peter Pakesch and Ulrich Loock, Liz Kotz, and Christopher Cox) seem not to have read each others’ essays – their discussions are at times redundant – but this is actually a good thing. Perspectives shoot off like branches, parallel in some places, jutting sharply in others. The same quotes and chestnuts about Neuhaus are deployed repeatedly, but each interpretive treatment has its own gloss.

The question most consistently addressed in the catalogue is that of the migration from time to space. Neuhaus, by rejecting music, was also rejecting the proscribed duration of artwork. Rather than asking an audience to sit still and listen for a particular span of time, he wanted to alter the mood or character of public environments – of spaces. Alex Potts quotes Neuhaus: “Traditionally composers have located the elements of a composition in time. One idea which I am interested in is locating them, instead, in space, and letting the listener place them in his own time.”

This concept seems to have been initiated as a means of transformation, in which sound would decorate an already-installed architecture and make it feel different, to one where sound was itself treated as an autonomous spatial reality. This distinction is critical, recognizing as it does that sound is a material form rather than an ethereal engima. Sound, like any other space (including conventional architecture), requires both labor and maintenance.

Nevertheless, there was a register to Neuhaus’s politics that rejected the temporal structures of a capitalist society, and thereby its logic as well. So, even though his sound installations drew attention to the potent reality of sound, they also promoted a form of community predicated on phenomenological non-differentiation. Sound thus was used as a form of bodily envelopment that could envelop everyone at once. The question here, as Potts writes, was “How [ ] to make public art for a society that is intensely individualistic and whose public spaces, while shared by and open to a multitude of people, atomize the perceptual and mental world of those passing through it?” In other words, Neuhaus hoped people would hear his work as part of a massive flow of time rather than as a single, discrete signal. The last essay in the catalog, Christopher Cox’s Installing Duration, situates Neuhaus’s philosophy within broader mid-century debates about the nature of time – though politically radical in some sense, he was mostly in the mainstream among artists.

On a practical level, Neuhaus’s ethos of how to manage urban space was laid out most clearly in an Op-Ed published in the New York Times in 1974. In brief, aesthetics, joy, and discovery should trump the rationalization of space. The piece is reprinted in its entirety here:

“BANG, BOOooom; ThumP, EEEK, tinkle” by Max Neuhaus

The popular concept of ‘noise pollution’ is a dangerously misleading one. In reality, dangers to hearing do exist in prolonged, excessively loud sound levels. However, the residue of the idea that has ended up in the mind of the public because of misleading publicity is that sound in general is harmful to people.

A brief examination of a pamphlet Noise Makes You Sick published by the Department of Air Resources of the city’s Environmental Protection Agency is typical of the literature and clearly illustrates the problem.

The first sentence, ‘Sound is instantly transmitted from your ears to your brain and then to your nerves, glands and organs’, is of course literally true. Actually the reaction doesn’t normally go as far as the glands and internal organs.

However, we are left with the impression that we have absolutely no defense against unwanted sound. This is untrue. The body has automatic reflex barriers, both physical and psychological, to deal with sounds it does not wish to react to.

The pamphlet goes on, ‘Any loud or unexpected sounds put your body on alert’. This is true with a newborn child or in primitive societies, both of which need this reaction to survive. But certainly the modern urban dweller is not put into a state of fright (except of course when there is actual danger) very often by the sounds around him.

A human being conditions himself fairly quickly to what is ‘loud or unexpected’ in his particular environment.

Once having ‘established’ the impression that we are constantly in a state of ‘fright’, though, the brochure goes on to extrapolate in august pseudo-medical terms: ‘Adrenalin, an energy-producing hormone, is released into your blood stream. Your heart beats faster, your muscles tense, and your blood pressure rises. Sudden spasms occur in your stomach and intestines’. This finally gives the impression that every honking horn brings us a little bit closer to death.

The law defines noise as ‘any unwanted sound’. Surely several hundred years of musical history can be of value. At the very least they can show us that our response to sound is subjective, that no sound is intrinsically bad. How we hear it depends a great deal on how we have been conditioned to hear it.

Through extreme exaggeration of the effects of sound on the human mind and body, this propaganda has so frightened people that it has created ‘noise’ in many places where there was none before and in effect robbed us of the ability to listen to our environment.

Admittedly it may be necessary to oversimplify an idea to bring enough public pressure to bear on the producers of ear-damaging sounds in our environment to stop this victimization of the public. This degree of misrepresentation is not only unnecessary, but irresponsible and ultimately negative.

This present concept of noise pollution condemns all sounds by leaving, in the public mind, the impression that sound itself is physiologically and psychologically harmful.

It is this exaggerated and oversimplified concept that is doing most of the damage, not sound, damage that can and should be rectified by curtailing misleading propaganda and showing people other ways to listen to their surroundings.

Obviously we need to be able to rest from sound just as we do from visual stimulation; we need aural as well as visual privacy. But silencing our public environment is the acoustic equivalent of painting it black. Certainly just as our eyes are for seeing, our ears are for hearing.

Max Neuhaus is a composer

New York Times Op-Ed by Max Neuhaus, December 6, 1974

Undoubtedly, the most difficult claim here is that anti-noise legislation “has created ‘noise’ in many places where there was none before,” that the problem of noise is a consequence of a particular political reality that refuses listening as an art form. Neuhaus, tellingly, retreats from pure relativism, but remains adamant: we benefit by being receptive, and suffer by being too defensive.

Such a celebration of listening, because it locates artistic agency not in singular geniuses but in everyone, leads logically to the kind of anti-elitist stance that Neuhaus ultimately took. Thus, despite his explicit rejection of capitalism, Neuhaus was actually a proponent of installations and even mass-market gadgets that could bring avant-garde sonic experiences to the common man. Branden Joseph’s essay, An Implication of an Implication, discusses a couple of these fascinating ideas. One was a “silent alarm clock” that slowly, almost imperceptibly, increased in volume; the after-image caused by the cessation of sound would be the effect that woke its user, rather than the typical series of jarring beeps.

Another, called “Max-Feed,” was a machine that users could place next to their stereos, causing a wall of feedback noise.

These devices, though fascinating, were arguably the weakest ideas of Neuhaus’s career. They were attempts to objectify and lend semi-permanence to sound installation. On the contrary, the strength of Times Square is precisely its resistance to objecthood. That piece appeals to listeners without revealing itself as emanating from anywhere – and indeed, maybe it doesn’t. The fact that this catalog doesn’t even attempt to contain the artwork that is its main focus is really the highest compliment to an artist who, at his best and for all the right reasons, didn’t want to be pinned down.

Here are two crowd images, each moving east to west. The excitement, as they say, is palpable. With the mics at 120°, the chatter is diffuse, except when someone is directly in range. Most conversations are about finishing time, clever clues, or answers that might have been wrong. The post-puzzle mob is the main scene for gossip about the leaders.

The venerable, sagacious, and sleek-piped Will Shortz emcees the tournament. Here, he makes housekeeping announcements before the first puzzle begins. “Large-print clues for the visually-impaired?” “I was gonna get to that.”

One of the most perplexing examples is the cell phone conversation. To wit: if we’re sitting in front of two people on a bus, and they’re talking in a reasonable tone of voice, it’s very unlikely we’ll care at all. But if it’s only one person, and he’s talking at the same hypothetical volume on the phone, we might think bad thoughts about him, or have trouble concentrating. Why are we bothered by the latter and not the former?

We develop and adjust auditory filters throughout our lives. Our annoyance with overhearing cell phone chatter suggests that we’ve become accustomed to telephone conversations – however innocuous – being private. And so the sound of them in public space registers as a breach of etiquette, even if it’s no different in pitch, volume, or timbre than an old-fashioned, in-person conversation. This may change over time, perhaps after we’ve spent years and years confronted with the practice. For now, the memory of landline custom still obtains.

The following recording is a good example of this phenomenon, starring one of those much-despised Motorola walkie-talkies. As the F train went above ground during a snowstorm that had severely delayed train traffic, a man got a page (presaged by the famous tone) from a friend, and commenced telling him where he was, how long he expected to be there, and so on. There was a whole lot of eye-rolling on the busy car. The tones kept coming, and the voice of the man on the other end came through covered by a harsh, almost mean-sounding distortion. This mixed with the sound of train announcements which, as you might expect, were filtered into the normal bin.

Most of the interview snippets concern race, obliquely or head-on. If you ask New Yorkers open-ended questions about anything, the conversation will almost always end up there sooner or later. The movie anthropomorphizes common New York objects in a generally random fashion (with the exception of the Italian luggage, I didn’t read any associations between thing and identity), but the matter of race remains, both explicitly and implicitly. Explicitly, when the red emergency services box speaks about her pride as a black woman, when the big and little newspaper boxes discuss their Cherokee ancestry, etc., and implicitly when accents and other vocal details suggest individual histories – the smoker’s cough of the Bronx-born free-used-car-info box seemed, to me, particularly suggestive. Also notable was the Asian (?) pay phone’s awkward reference to “some black people” blasting music from their car, although the remark was obviously well-meaning.

Thanks to TM for the original link.

Next week: the ethics of recording involuntary outbursts, and the sound sculptures of Harry Bertoia.

The Rumbler is a response to new vehicle models with better aural insulation, louder car stereos, and the increased prevalence of iPod and cell phone use among drivers. In this environment, high-pitched sirens are decreasingly effective at alerting drivers to the presence of emergency vehicles. However the Rumbler, while no louder than a conventional siren, physically disturbs the interior space of cars in its path. With the move from treble to bass, drivers’ bodies vibrate, and their rear windows tremble.

Tom Morgan, vice president for sales and marketing for the company that makes the Rumbler, is quoted in the Washington Post:

Morgan said the Rumbler was developed after police departments complained that, increasingly, motorists weren’t responding to traditional lights and sirens.

“The basic idea is we become more insulated in our vehicles with stereos, iPods and telephones,” Morgan said. “We thought it would be helpful if there was something else along with the traditional siren that would reach a different level of awareness.”

Sonic technologies, again and again, are implicated in arms races. During arms races, as we learned during the Cold War, defensive maneuvers (like shields and headphones) only seem passive – in fact, they provide the impetus for more aggressive modes of penetration, extending a vicious cycle. Our reliance on simple technological solutions to complex problems like noise invites exactly this kind of frustration.

Thanks to Connor for the original link.

The double-wide storefront across the street had been shuttered for two months. Once I saw some guys getting arrested in front of it on my way to work in the morning, but that was the most action to be observed there, and it seemed unrelated to whatever business was hiding inside. Then, just last weekend, the metal gates finally flung open, like God parting the waters at Yam Suph. But what was revealed was far more miraculous than anything in the bible.

The building is home to Buzz-a-Rama “500,” the last remaining slot-car establishment in the city of New York. The owner, Frank Perri, 74, claims that there used to be 30 or 40 such venues throughout the boroughs, back in the late 60s and 70s when he first opened. Children worked on their personal cars over the weekend, and then brought them in to race on lovely and elaborate courses. This article suggests that the name Buzz-a-Rama “captured the energy of the hundreds of teenagers and kids who used to crowd into the room on race days, and also the sound of the cars themselves, a high-pitched, insectlike whine — the sound of constant speed.”

A short documentary has Mr. Perri yelling at a child who claims his fingers are numb, among other amazing old slot-car guy moments.

WV: Hey guys, sorry to bother you, I wonder if I could ask you a couple of questions for a project I’m doing.

Sure.

WV: Cool, thank you. Do you know what this is? Have you ever seen one of these before?

Uh, no.

WV: Can you guess based on …

It looks like a microphone.

WV: Yeah, it has a microphone. Can you guess what that’s reading right there?

Hz or something?

WV: Yeah, it’s the Hz of the sound, actually. It’s a decibel-level meter. This is what police and people from the Department of Environmental Protection in New York use to read sound, like to respond to noise complaints in the city.

Oh, that’s cool. Like how high it goes over?

WV: Yeah, exactly, yeah. Have you ever worried about getting arrested for having your headphones on too loud or anything like that?

Not yet!

WV: Oh, ok. Did you know that there’s laws about that?

Well, yeah. I didn’t know they … People go around with the little thing … people have those, like, secret …

WV: Well, they come out if somebody makes a complaint.

Oh, oh, ok.

WV: Have you had problems with noise in New York?

Yeah! There’s this annoying car outside my apartment, oh my god. Loud-ass brown music, just like … yeah.

WV: Loud-ass what?

Brown music.

WV: What do you mean?

Like, my culture. Non-American music. Yeah. Random languages.

WV: Do you ever complain?

No. I don’t know, I would feel like a herb if I complained.

WV: Feel like a what?

Like, I don’t know, like one of those people who get annoyed for no reason. Yeah.

WV: But you know you could call 311, try to get somebody to come out or something like that.

I guess.

WV (Speaking to other interviewee) What do you think about noise?

Sometimes there’s like … I dunno, my neighborhood’s pretty like suburban like kind of quiet and everything, so it’s like sometimes maybe like one or two neighbors will have like a party or something, but normally …

WV: Do you know that … so this is at like, (pointing to noise meter) it’s kind of pushing 80 right now, the decibels. You know sustained exposure to 80 decibels can damage your hearing?

Really? Really? What’s the standard level that’s like healthy?

WV: Well, there’s nor really a standard, but most reasonably quiet places in New York it would be like 40, maybe 50. But on the train there’s so much noise.

So it’s like, that’s bad, right? What is it on now …

WV: Well, it’s a high level, yeah.

Do you have your iPod on you (to friend)? Let’s see how many decibels it gets.

WV: Try it out, yeah. What do you think could be done about noise? Or can anything be done?

Well, random trains always are gonna make noise. But how about other places of the city, like how much would they be?

WV: Well, it depends, but it can get pretty loud. If you’re standing on the platform while the train’s coming in it can get over 100. It’s already up in the mid-80s now.

What about those trains that are like, covered or whatever? I don’t think those make as much noise. The new E Train. No noise man!

WV: The E train is loud?

The new E train that they made, that one doesn’t have that much noise as before. This one’s pretty loud though.

WV: Any other …

We have to shout over each other just to hear each other.

WV: Any other random thoughts about noise you want to share?

Uh, no.

WV: Thanks for your time, and sorry to interrupt you guys.

It’s OK. Thanks for enlightening us.

For context, G.F. and I moved last month to an apartment on the cusp of Kensington and Boro Park in Brooklyn. Our neighborhood is Hasidic/Bangladeshi/Pakistani/Polish/Albanian/Mexican/Caribbean, among others. We have, in the course of our sensory adjustment to the new neighborhood, gotten acclimated to the muezzin issuing five calls to prayer every day over a loudspeaker, to lots of children running around the building, and to the daily delivery of goat carcasses by the truckful to the butcher down the block. But some things are still unclear, even if we have guesses. e.g., Why do so many men congregate outside the closed-looking dentist’s office across the street? What’s in the jungle that comprises our (inaccessible) backyard? What and why does a chorus of women sometimes chant, as above, around dinner time?

Our new neighborhood, 1903

I’ve been researching sonic conflict in urban space for a few years now, and Brooklyn is a great place to do it. As much time as Brooklynites spend around people of different habits, cultural variation is so dense and dynamic here that even longtime residents tend to find themselves perplexed by sounds they can’t quite place. For some, what can’t be identified is heard as evidence of a special diversity. For others, or for the same people under different circumstances, weird sounds are rude, inappropriate, extraneous, heretical, and/or invasive. (I’ve heard people mention each of these.) We seem to have something of an itch to locate sound, not only in terms of where it’s coming from but in terms of what it means. We want a reference, often desperately. Why?

So, the second order of business: why do you think unidentified sound is so disturbing?

And the third: what mysterious sounds (recordings or descriptions, from wherever) would you like to share?