C91 Article 
Repetitive Strain Industries (David Lacey, percussion, clarinet; Jürgen Simpson, sampler, synth, chair; Fergus Kelly, adapted and invented instruments); performance in Project at the Mint, July 13, 1999; photo Kevin McFeely; courtesy the artists
Can sound haunt the very substance of a building? Paint on an aural canvas, sound and silence fashion and refashion auditory landscapes that engage, jar, elude. Here Shirley MacWilliam explores the material of sound and silence through a number of curious cultural manifestations. In The Sound-Sweep J. G. Ballard describes a city of the future in which the populace has become acutely sensitive to sound and in which the vast majority of audible sound is considered to be noise and treated as a form of pollution. This sensitivity is evident in the outmoded status of audible music, especially song, which has been replaced by the composition, performance and radio broadcast of ultrasonic music. Ultrasonic music is not consciously heard--the radio seems to broadcast silence interrupted by periodic audible adverts--but it nonetheless produces physical and psychological sensations of wellbeing and pleasure in its 'listeners'. "A second advantage of ultrasonic music was that its frequencies were so high that they left no resonating residues in solid structures... After an audible performance of most symphonic music, walls and furniture throbbed for days with disintegrating residues that made the air leaden and tumid, an entire room virtually uninhabitable." (p. 49)
Whilst the aesthetic and benign possibilities of inaudible sound are explored in ultrasonic music there is a counter concern with the disruptive effects of the inaudible residual reverberations left by audible sound. Those who can afford it regularly have their homes and workplaces treated by the sound-sweep. The sound-sweep, using his 'sonovac', sucks from the architecture the acoustic energy absorbed into the walls during the day's activities: voices, the hum of traffic and so on. This acoustic energy is then disposed of at a sonic dump, a stockade on the outskirts of the city. The buildings are cleansed of the echoes of personal and business conversation, transaction and conflict; and emotional health and privacy are ensured. For whilst such subliminal echoes are inaudible to most people, they still exert, like ultrasonic music, a potent influence on the human mind and body. They also pose something of a security risk because some, like the sound-sweep, are able to tune into and to hear the most delicate, fragile, private and faint of echoes--to eavesdrop, as it were, after the event.Thus the city is organised acoustically: speech is still used but its residue is regularly removed from its location; an imported set of thirteenth-century pediments from the Church of St Francis of Assisi, mounted in the altar of the Episcopalian Oratory, are sound-swept in such a way that they retain their "beautiful sonic matrices rich with seven centuries of Gregorian chant, overlayed by the timeless tolling of the Angelus" (p. 51) but are relieved of the reverberating clatter, coughing and mumbling of the daily congregations of their new site; architecture is experienced as a kind of irritating audio recording phenomenon; as much absorbed noise as possible is evacuated and consigned to the sonic dumps far from commerce and residence; and the silent radio airwaves transmit the sedative and tranquillising ultrasonic music. In this culture of acoustic sensitivity, sound is largely mistrusted, despised and to a great extent repressed. As one character puts it: "Noise, noise, noise--the greatest single disease-vector of our civilisation. The whole world's rotting with it..." (p. 53) 1
A general definition of noise might be: that sound which we have no desire to hear, and in which we identify no useful information nor aesthetic merit. Noise is the extraneous, the undesired, and, in communications theory, the materiality that interferes with the message. What constitutes noise is necessarily culturally determined: the notion of acoustic pollution, for example, is relatively recent and closely tied to our emotional, social and physiological experience of cities. Amongst other things the city has given us living spaces in which we are party, as never before, to the intimate sounds of strangers. A powerful image of the noisy acoustic city is conjured in Luigi Russolo's The Art of Noises . The infamous Futurist manifesto observes and promotes the liquidation of musical tradition, especially its sacred and autonomous aspects; and the rebirth of music as noise-sound through the deployment, reproduction of and inspiration from the noises that characterised Russolo's contemporary world. The sound-scape Russolo extols is that of "a great modern capital," its combined din of machines, slamming doors and metal blinds, foundries, factories and power stations, shuffling crowds, pipes, valves and pistons. Russolo's acoustic city is the industrial city in the grip of modernity and as such it presents to the contemporary imagination a romantic and nostalgic image. It is a city we can no longer hear, since the economic shift from manufacture to service industry and from the mechanical to the digital; and since the centre of the city has been first emptied of one kind and then refilled with other kinds of industry, commerce and people.Russolo's ideal music appropriates and reiterates the irregular vibrations of noise and it exalts in dissonance, amplification and cacophony. In contrast to the 'ideal' ultrasonic music of The Sound Sweep and its tranquillising effects, Russolo's aims to multiply and propagate noise--to reply to the sound of the city by sending more eddies of noise-sound into it. In its abstraction, purity and mysteriousness Ballard's ultrasonic music appears to represent the epitome of all that Russolo most despised within the traditions of musical practice.
Dublin heard in a reflection
Fergus Kelly's Invisible City presents an apparent continuation of Russolo's project: the listening to a contemporary environment and the forging of musical forms from its sounds and noises. Indeed Kelly's work is filled with many of the sounds Russolo included in his inventory: creaks, whistles, rumbles, booms, percussive metallic sound, hisses. However, these noises are manipulated and organised into an echoey hypnotic structure that, in terms of affect, also shares something with the qualities of the imaginary ultrasonic music. Invisible City, for structural and associative reasons, invites a reading in relation to, or indeed as, cinematic soundtrack. The four tracks move into one another and conjure atmosphere, space and narrative expectation as one might expect scenes in a film to do. The first two minutes of the first track sounds like an untreated piece of what in cinema would be wild track--the ambient background sound of some location in (presumably) the city. Like a long wide-angle pan over an indifferent or interchangeable cityscape the low hum of the space and movement of air is threaded through by the sound of a plane passing into, across and away from the space, by a faint whistling or creaking sound, by quiet steps and the brief indistinct murmur of human voice.
All these features are heard at a distance, as if our listening position is separate from the space, and they offer little information as to the specific identity of the location. It sounds banal and generic; it could be a city park, a space of disinterested and incidental hearing as if we hear without intending to listen. A two-second burst of traffic sound--much louder, much closer--abruptly cuts into this idle space and then cuts to silence. From this silence fades up what feels like the piece proper: a considerably denser and more evidently textured and manipulated sound.
The overall impression of the change that occurs across the burst of traffic sound is that the ear, which began by listening from the outside to some distant surface of naturalistic sound, has somehow slipped though this surface and listens from a submerged interiority in which the sound is enveloping, detailed and resonant. This passage from one kind of listening position to another reveals the acoustic city as resonant, echoing, rhythmic and highly patterned. The resonant quality of sound, and also the rhythm, which returns with regularity to that of an object bobbing on a wave, suggest that perhaps the city is invisible because it is underwater or perceived through some kind of trance. The swelling rises and falls of intensity and density of sound create a mesmeric space like the hypnagogic moment in which, half asleep and half awake, one constructs an imaginary world and incorporates into it all kinds of extraneous incidental sound. In Invisible City identifiable sounds drift into and through the reverberating world: a siren, an alarm, bird cry, a telephone, a scream, the explosions of fireworks. But identifiable as these sounds are, their role in the work seems to be to create in the listener the sensation that one is hearing things--as if really these things have little concrete identity and are merely imaginings on the surface of the big creaky, clanging, swaying structure into which the ear has been drawn. Like the city characterisations of its textual near-namesake, Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, Invisible City forges the city as fantastical image in the eye-ear of the beholder. This is not a historical city, this is a mythic city. This is what Dublin would sound like if you could listen to its reflection in the river or in an oily puddle, or in someone else's eye.
New York passed through a room
New York, listened to from the James Turrell room in PS1 Contemporary Art Centre, sounds as if it has been oddly diffracted and reshaped. The Turrell room does, with an architectural-spatial frame, for environmental noise what John Cage does for it using a temporal frame in 4m 33s . 4m 33s is designed for performance in a concert hall in which the pianist takes their place at the piano, plays nothing for four minutes and thirty-three seconds, then takes a bow. The piece creates a frame of 'silence'--the silence of the unplayed piano--within which all the extraneous noises from inside and outside the hall are gathered and via which they are listened. Turrell's PS1 room accomplishes an equivalent, although perhaps unintentional, gesture. Like many Turrell spaces the room is spatially consistent with the rest of the architecture of the building except that its ceiling opens directly onto the sky. This makes it quite deeply disconcerting but also extraordinarily calm. It is as if the opening onto the sky endows the room with access to some noumenal world and the audience do behave in it as one might in a chapel or consecrated space. Much of its impact, however, results from the very sensory experience it offers: the sensations of the peculiar interfaces between interior and exterior space, interior and exterior light, interior and exterior temperature, and interior and exterior acoustics. Just as one feels that shifts in temperature drop strangely into the space from above, so too what one hears in the room is peculiarly framed and delivered via the delicately edged hole in the ceiling. The sounds of New York in the early evening, the traffic, the periodic sound of a siren, the warning horn of the subway train, an occasional voice reach the ear as if from a very great remove, but are simultaneously audible with surprising clarity and detail. It is like the experience of listening to a valley from a position high on a mountain in those particular atmospheric conditions that draw the sound upwards with startling precision.
At the same time as the strange near-far sound of the city is audible, the Turrell room feels uncannily silent and still. Fancifully one could compare it to the rooms of Ballard's story and suggest that, thanks to the sonic properties of the unusual room, sound, rather than being absorbed into the walls is constantly drawn away, as if the opening onto the sky functioned like a huge sonovac. It is as if sound is heard through the curious silence of the room-sky and passes through the space leaving no residue or reverberation, no physical lingering or memory. Ballard's idea of the significant presence and impact of subliminal echoes is perhaps no more than a literalisation of our common perception that places are marked by their histories. Whether we consider this to be the result of the material-supernatural vibration of events through time or of the 'merely' symbolic accretion of cultural and political meaning, it influences our relationships with places. Ballard's conceit simply extrapolates the acoustic metaphors, of echo, resonance and reverberation, that are frequently use to identify this persistence of effect from the past.
London keeping and not keeping silence
In the performance of the requiem and the silence, the acoustic plays its role in our ceremonies of memory and we alternately raise or quell our voices to honour the dead. The delightful absurdity of the radio playing the silent ultrasonic music is little removed, structurally, from the annual observation and broadcast of the two-minute silence on British Armistice Day and Remembrance Sunday. In both, radio is the vehicle of something designed to be simultaneously inaudible and intensely moving. The two-minute silence, conceived as a nationally shared moment of remembrance and grief, was initiated in 1919 and first broadcast by the BBC in 1929.
Whilst, in principle, the entire country is expected to participate in the silence, what is broadcast is the localised silence of the environs of the Cenotaph memorial service, the sound of the heart of London conceding to quietude and stillness. Inevitably what is heard is not utter silence but a quietness marked by the distant incidental sounds of weather, children, animals, coughs and sneezes. It is, however, the focus on these relatively tiny sounds in the centre of the city that creates the impression that silence really is being maintained. As Bela Balazs suggests, "We feel the silence when we can hear the most distant sound or the slightest rustle near us." 2
Jonty Semper's current Locus+ project, Kenotaphion , endeavours to identify and collect all the archival recordings of the two-minute silence. These include a mixture of recordings of live broadcasts, on radio and later television, and newsreel footage. Semper's working catalogue of the collection so far details various audible interruptions over the years: coughing in 1932, 1933 and 1938; the voices of protesters in 1969; seagulls in 1977; heavy rain in 1982; a baby crying in 1988. The catalogue also reveals that the two-minute silence is frequently represented by something other than the actual location recording during the memorial service. In some the two minutes is simply curtailed and the chimes, gong and gun that introduce the silence are almost immediately followed by the gun fire that closes it; in others it is filled with the 'artificial' silence of the hiss of audio-track noise, unmarked by any recorded material; and in a couple of recent years the recording at the Cenotaph is faded into library recordings of waves on a beach or bird song, in order presumably to produce the perfect moment of reflection, stillness and peace.
The gathered recorded and manipulated silences of the state ritual at the symbolic centre of the nation make a curious collection of cultural artefacts. The practice of the two-minute silence during the remembrance service is no longer shared by a nation to the same extent as in its earliest years. In 1929 it seems likely that the broadcast silence was received in equally silent spaces--the silent centre of a silent nation. Now, whilst many in Britain still observe the silence, the Cenotaph space and other silent spaces are increasingly surrounded and encroached upon by the sound of the populace carrying on as normal. Semper's Kenotaphion project will make the collection of nearly a century of stored-up silences public again by means of a website. This will be accompanied by the release of a seven-inch single containing a recording, made in Hyde Park, of the one-minute silence during the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales. In the latter, the myth of a nation united in its grief and silence was re-performed.
Dublin laced in radio waves
In Spring 1998 the Audio Artists Radio Transmission project broadcast four days of artists' sound work produced through live, collaborative improvisation. Technically the transmission was not a 'broadcast' but a 'narrowcast', in that the broadcasting licence and technical set-up restricted the scope of its reception to a limited geography and the event addressed itself primarily to the city of Dublin. Like a guerrilla activity the work attributes authorship less to individuals than to the group; it resists the conventions and syntax of radio; and, at least in its documented CD form, it disseminates sound that is physically invasive to the point of threatening to damage amplifiers and speakers. For conventional radio the broadcast of either utter silence or sound so dense and suddenly loud as to damage the receiver would be suicidal. The AART event, however, occurred not thanks to a guerrilla or pirate station but with the blessing of an official licence. The collaboration between artists was also a collaboration with the legislative bodies of the state, a conspiracy to fill the city with unpredictable sound. During the four days the accidental listener, spinning the dial, might have happened upon this unexpected dimension of radio composed of seemingly endless acoustic weaves and waves; the cognoscenti will have sought it out deliberately, expecting the unexpected; and at times maybe there were no listeners at all. The idea of live eddies of noise-sound produced from an intense nerve centre of activity and rippling as radio waves through Dublin, but not tuned into, is as evocative as the enigma of the unheard sound of the tree falling in an empty forest. The pathos and romance of radio is that it can have an audience of millions or of no-one at all and that the radio wave carries on despite us.
Since its discovery the myth of the radio wave has been fuelled by its capacity to survive and to exceed its intended arena and time of reception. Radio waves are both politically and technically quite tricky to police and outer space, like the stockades beyond the perimeter of Ballard's city, is the repository of years of the earth's transmissions. Like the reverberations absorbed into the architecture of Ballard's world, radio waves have attracted suspicion as to their possible detrimental effects and their pollution of our environment. We may not be aware of them but they criss-cross our spaces and our bodies all the time. Perhaps the most famous and startling example of the endurance of the radio wave was the claim by astronomers that they had tuned in to a radio signal generated by electromagnetic activity at the birth of the universe and were able to hear the hum of its inception. The extraordinary implication of this, that we can hear something that happened at what we understand as the very beginning of time, puts our memorial and aesthetic silences, our noisy cities, our history of music, our conception of noise pollution into a giddying perspective. It is tempting to imagine, in response to what the astronomers and the sound-sweep can hear, a moment of perception in which all things from all times are audible. Perhaps, disappointingly, it would just be like white noise or the static of an untuned radio; perhaps we can hear it already.
1 All quotes above from The Sound-Sweep in J. G. Ballard, The Voices of Time , London: Indigo, 1997, pp. 41-79.
2 Bela Belazs in Elizabeth Weis and John Belton, Theory and Practice of Film Sound , New York: Columbia University Press, 1985, p. 118.
The CD Invisible City , by Fergus Kelly, was produced as part of the Project Arts Centre's Off Site programme and is distributed by Project Press; ISBN 1872 493 10 6. The AART broadcast was part of a project entitled A.A.R.T.-ARTHOUSE and is documented on a CD, Soundworks III ; Crocodile Records CD04. For more information regarding
Kenotaphion by Jonty Semper, contact Locus+ tel: +44 (0) 191-233 1450.
