I- II - III - IV - V - fade out
Set like a space station Amid metallic ice and wolverine distances Bright flash of copper church dome And stores spilled out Low across the land. Place the bread of stories; Hot in summer, cold in winter, The year-round hunger. A well-waxed floor in the area Filled with television screens, Narrative devices Insufficient for my purposes But included as the old grain Absorbs modern life. When I was young I used to hang around A newly-built shopping center With its record shop with poster of the Lizard King, And those spectacular domestic dramas, The stage sets of the department store. I am alive because I write, Because I hear and tell stories. Even mannequins have careers, But they do not tell stories, not like we do; And the spooky fact they may remain When we are 'gone' should not be taken To mean more than it does. The same goes for the fur and gadgets, The hunter-green camping equipment Set out as mock event to entice the imagination-- We make for significance, meaning. As single lives, as life. More than a pharaoh's arrangement Of possessed objects, however jazzy, It goes beyond those prints Of Great Moments in Medicine That pop up in pharmacy windows. And so, as you continue to live it, You also begin to remember it anew. That is what is happening for me. My name is George Drury.
'Northland', a work in progress and lifetime cycle by Chicago poet George Drury, opens the heart of America: 'Lost in the supermarket' as German radiomaker Walter Filz named his satirical report on the biggest shopping mall in the world. The Dome. The cathedral of goods, spreading out into the land, re-cultivating nature, as William Cronon outlines for the growth of Chicago as a Metropolis in general. Like a natural process leading to a massive glacier and at the same time encapsulating, condensing the urban sprawl into a faceless epicentre of daily life. Acoustic stations every Northern American has experienced. A counter culture. They form a symbol for how natural resources are transformed into endless streams of consumable material. Urban input of audiovisual taste. This piece and many other poems by George Drury, the former radiomaker, blues-and jazz afficionado, encouraging teacher and skilled urban flaneur, combine direct sensations of climate and atmosphere - the now quality of perception - with social pictures of personal performance in life (and death). In his urban safaris he discovers the human prototype, by writing and narrating and with aphoristic words encapsulating the hyper sincerity of their image. In his poems one re-views not only Chicago, but also other cities in it. The North he points to is a transitional zone of a city whose skyscrapers bow their great figures against the coldest wind messages from the land of snowbirds. Chicago represents a Northern City on the lake, which in summer converts into tropic Southern hell. It is 'Johannesburg on the Lake' (George Drury) with a Gold Coast, the virtual aim of immigrant moves from the South to make it only to the Southside, where the most complicated ghettos surround the impressive campus of the University of Chicago.
North and South are subjective dimensions.
Sound geography is a personal navigation through 'relative' wind directions.
Sound biographies are an ensemble of interfaces between them.
And between yesterday and tomorrow, in this sound memory by George Drury's
father George Drury, renowned teacher, philosopher and rhethorician:
Dear George, I was reminded of your request for some Chicago sounds from the Thirties for your good friend, Hans. I remember: Tire chains on snowy or icy nights; often a part would break one of its fastenings and slap against the fender as the automobile moved past our house on Jackson Boulevard. Some cars, left over from the 'Twenties, still honked 'Ah-oo-gah!' Fire engines on their way to answer an alarm had a (pre-siren) sound, do-re-mi-fa(prolonged)-mi-re-do, repeated and repeated. On their return, they sounded ' darn-darn-darn-darn,' as the children imitated their going by. All was not the sound of motors, those of cars or
propellor aeroplanes; there was the clop-clop-clop of the milkman's horse, with an occasional neigh from this incredibly patient beast. Sometimes there was a bakery goods wagon, or a waffle-man with his little steam whistle, or a junk man's wagon with his cry of ' Rags, Old Iron!' Or the peddler's wagon. All brought sounds of horses' hooves and wheels. The sounds of rubber sponge balls were ubiquitous, whether from girls' games of one two three O'Leary or from boys' games of what I believe in your boyhood would have been called ' step-ball.' Every now and then a hurdy-gurdy would show up in one's alley or area-way and, in addition to the music, e.g. ' In a Little Spanish Town,' there would be the sounds of the expected coins hitting the pavement. Streetcars were especially productive of sounds; the motorman's and the conductor's apparatus, and the trolley itself, especially when it had to be reattached to the wire. A special sound of the 'Thirties would be Father Coughlin's unmistakable voice coming through the open windows on a Sunday afternoon; the radio in every house or apartment would be turned up full blast.. A special sound in department stores would be the almost incessant ding-ding of some messages to personnel. In all stores the cash-register, hand-operated, made its contribution to the acoustical environment. Sent to you with love and continuing admiration and wonder,
Someone who is born in Chicago might experience the sound of the elevated train, the EL, as the first sound of his or her life. It is the last noise you hear before sleeping and it still reverberates in the inner ear for a long time after you have left the city. Wherever you go, the trains fill your acoustic horizon, become visible between the houses, punctuate the lives in them. Suggest endless loops.
Rotation. Energy.
The powerful sound is old; and, like the metallic stands, eroded outside, forever massive inside. A giant iron construction, forever in between deconstruction and repair. Four narrow curves in the Loop. The trains move around the corners with screeching calls of urban dinosaurs. A hundred years ago a sound of progress, today an anachronistic signal, soon to be
a 'vanishing sound' in the digital city.
The El swallows the people into its digestive system and throws them out again. All classes, all cultures. The train touches the whole city, the center, the south side, Chinatown, West Chicago. Parallel with North Avenue the tracks mark an unvisible border between the 'Housing Projects' of Cabrini Green and nicely restored Old Town. Further north the train passes Little Germany, with Meier's Delicatessen and Music in the Brauhaus. There is the German Pharmacy, familiar streetlamps, visible success. The people say they have integrated the rhythm of the trains in their conversation on the street. A moment of silence within the noise.
Microsoundscapes are connected through the meridians of the EL with other ethnic groups, social communities and informational networks in the city. In the rush hour all sounds of the city mix into a big cluster, at other times they come and go like waves. Urban waters. The soundscape of the EL generates a time-scape, at once mechanical and elastic, overlayed by the magnetic field of the city energy. Listening to the EL changes the eyes. The visual patterns of the wooden trestles are space frequencies and shadows. Driving west under the EL at Lake Street and looking upwards, projects visual patterns into your urban mobility. Images melt to an abstract movie of restless energy, expanding in all directions simultaneously but never reaching an end.
The EL is a transitional space. A moving house, a frozen metal sound of the American Dream. An Audio Icon of the restless growth. Forward Motion. The power of the pioneers, the workers, the capitalists, the unions in the 'City of Hands'.
Urban Grooves. Mobility is the Motif of the City. Dynamic flow. Hectic socializing. Soundscapes in Chicago generate rhythms.
Urban Grooves. Codes, sequences, that are available in every city, but never appear identical. They are genetic patterns for their environment and change their 'gestalt' permanently. The soundscape is in a steady process of erosion and renewal. The city is a serial experience, states Gordon Cullen in 'Townscapes'. Chicago lives in and out of time. Now. Then. Soon. Sound is historic in the moment of listening to it. This relation of voice and ear is in a flow, a vertical and horizontal soundlayer, whose change is its constancy. The realtime train ride with the EL leads us - non-linearly and associatively - into Chicago's neighbourhoods.
Sound biographies are an ensemble of interfaces between them.
In the Chicago Soundscape Project of 1996, the Experimental Sound Studio ESS of Dawn and Lou Malozzi presented a wide set of communities and micro soundscapes. There are, of course, many more to find. For their audio research they did not try to find the representational, the usual set of postcards from public spaces and passages. They were looking for a more holistic approach, entities of auditive communication, outside and inside as well. The soundworld in the inner ear, instead of the outside cultural noise alone. Two of the most impressive pieces are the acoustic self-definition in a juvenile detention center (a nice euphemism), where the sounds and the inhabitants form a unity. They gathered their daily patterns, their inner needs and calls for a vivid rhythmic world. An artist helped them to transform it into a community outreach project with density and a particular voice instead of simple acoustic categories. Dawn Mallozzi, the organizer of the soundscape project, has spent her whole life in the city. Her history is part of the urban change, and vice versa. Together with artist Lou Mallozzi she has recorded the vanishing sounds of the South Chicago's ACME steelmill. Through the sounds she rediscovered the 'soundscape of her life', to float away on 'steel sounds, steel memories':
'Everything I saw completed a deep sonic memory: the droning hissing heaving blast furnace melting ore mixture into steel, floor troughs of glowing liquid steel flowing away from the furnace and to the rail tank cars for transport to a rolling mill, sparks snapping out of the blast furnace, the steady heat rumbling of the six-story furnace that creates the steam that powers Acme. A community of workers and machines engrossed in the making of steel. The last of a breed, this mill and these workers. And for me this was also a soundscape of my life.'
Geof Benson worked for many years as musician, sound designer and composer producing music for commercials in Chicago. He has been in all facets of audiovisual productions. Sound montage for the Nature Company. Web pages, digital video and multimedia, sound recording and all sorts of music. Online activity combines his private and ecological interests with new technologies. For years Geof Benson lived between two worlds. In his urban studios with a view of the lake, and a hundred kilometers away in Indiana along the lake shore, where the people fight to sustain the dunes, which are surrounded by industrial areas and wasteland. The steel culture, once a long line running from the heart of the city south along the lake, now forms a pattern of lost work and abandoned social camps.
A dialectical image of nature's flux and human exploitation. Geof Benson designs internet presence for a regional environmental group and the motiv of waves, sand and organic forms have been a 'leitmotiv' on his promotional CD-Rom. Ecology and creativity: between the digitized commercial and the sound for pictures, Geof Benson is the man in the dunes. Today he lives near a fascinating biotope along the lake. Land inward driftwood swamps, abandoned houses along the lake, the Chicago towers in a remote view, pointing to the space between the city and the natural environment of smoking dunes. Whispering earth and howling winds, sounding like messages from remote areas. A landscape in flux, where sand, wind, wood, ice and water form an intricate pattern outside and within the human senses.
North and South are subjective dimensions.
Sound geography is a personal navigation through 'relative' wind directions.
Sound biographies are an ensemble of interfaces between them.
Filmmaker David Carlson: 'Chicago of course goes through all four seasons and when the winds come in and the nordic side of things cools things off and the snow comes in, then you find true Chicagoans, that bear it, because that brings people together. The landscape of the city in the winter is pretty dynamic. It is cold steel shooting up off the hard ground. That is a shared experience a lot of Chicagoans have. Cold, weather-beaten, we survived.'
Nordic Soundscapes are expected, the sound geographer Justin Winkler writes more pragmatically, above the 60th lat. North. A line of places from Stavanger to Helsinki, but it is still a relative measurement. In Germany the North means an image of a wide space, wind, waters, coastal patterns, but even more an attitude, an image of taciturn, laconic people and their spare words and precise articulation. It means life on islands and Halligen - islands sometimes 'under water', near the endless 'Watt' areas with their most diversified species in the big Harbour Cities.
Klaus Wittig is a passionate soundwalker, radiomaker and writer, whose recent book deals with geomantic energies: 'Hamburg's Nordic Soundscape has all to do with weather and wind and the see: storms, floods, heavy waves, warning signals, drifting ice after the winter, ice skating on the city's waterways, the moving of boats and ships.
And the Sound and articulation of a Northern German Law teacher.'
Hamburg is a city historically determined by the core of its harbour,
still the center of its northern identity as well as the gate to all cultures of the world now.
A summer visit in Sweden might move us to three nordic layers, there are many more: the sunny, almost mediterranean Oeland, in 'Glas-Reich' the little village of Skruv and into the festival city of Stockholm. There are connections in between, the ever present waters in the daily life and especially in the playing of children. Minnesota-landscapes with their tender curves and waves of the earth. Endless forests and lakes with their sound patterns. Islands and ascetic wooden houses seem to be there for everyone. Carefully designed lawns, the transition between houses and nature. And, wherever possible, outdoor places to sit, to eat, to relax.
A whole nation has access and nurtures its human attitude towards the environment.
The sound of the north is a sound within us. This is for me the most interesting point, both unique and comparatively. Single soundscape projects did have mostly a monographic approach. One listener, one's home city or traveling experiences, a personal inspiration. The original World Soundscape Project cross-checked their research: they worked as a group, compared villages, drew a line along Canada's areas and re-visited the Vancouver Soundscape many times since the 70s. In 1996 four invited sound composers worked with recordings of the city (along with the history of the project). What resulted from their sharing the same material revealed that the acoustic identity of a given space is a very personal construction, and not only for composers.
Hildegard Westerkamp exported the collective soundscape workshop to Brasilia and she describes a holistic process with many layers: from awareness to production of sound pieces, moments of introspection, critical urban discourse, thoughts of music and architecture, myth and identity, presence and sound memory. I think that these layers re-appear in most approaches to soundscape cities, but always differently, as we found in own projects in Lisboa, Madrid and La Palma in a non-linear comparative mode of the sonic detail and the acoustic homophony. After you explore singular soundscapes, listen, record, evaluate and maybe compose with the material, you juxtapose it to completely different worlds, like Hildegard Westerkamp did for Brasilia and New Delhi. First, she states, you mostly come as a foreigner, as a stranger in town and culture. You also bring your own sounds with you; we experienced this in Vancouver: your acoustic history, your song, your recordings from somewhere else. The image of the new place is from the first moment an inner image as well; the outside sounds resonate with the sounds in you.
Soundscapes are relationships, perceived and interpreted environments, both inside and outside. Both with an open ear for 'all sounds' and the inner desire for silent phases. Approaching the city with a audio pattern like this, will influence you.
Hildegard Westerkamp identifies the visual core of Brasilia and the traffic 'arteries' with their white noise that merges into the drone of air-conditioning. These are frames, not only in Brasilia, for the visitor and break between him and the natural soundscape around the city.
'Soundwalls' divide the visually open space in many cities, but always with a different color and density between urban center, neighbourhoods, 'plazas' of communication and natural soundscapes. 'Inside' the soundscape has many meanings: your inner ear, your domestic worlds inside the city and outside nature in the living environment are in flux and interact with each other. They are timescapes and their rhythm is a unique fingerprint of a city or, more clearly, of smaller communities with their public spaces shared by most of the inhabitants. The presence of signals and soundmarks - mostly missing in Brasilia - anchors the listener in his or her world. Acoustic identity is a deep feeling of home and heart.
Hildegard Westerkamp's own sound biography indicates several 'identities': her northern German culture, her long life in Vancouver and her traveling experiences in India. They all sound very different, but share a deep quality as a melting of the acoustic outside and the sonic inside. Soundscape projects are rehearsal rooms for this 'aquiring of the environment'. As an inhabitant or a flaneur you will discover a lot of interesting moments, sound polaroids with a strong local character. But maybe the inhabitant is too busy to revise the serial strings of his stories and the flaneur's aim is to relax and contemplate. Listening to and composing with the sounds of a city provides a balance between active and receptive modes, as 'the microphone alters listening' (Hildegard Westerkamp). Inevitably the inner microphones, our sound biography and the listening culture we represent get in a flow, revising our audiotactile montage of urban space. Soundwalking and listening, recording, analyzing and processing the material, and finally building a subjective image of the city embodying moments of a realistic documentation. An audio picture book. But it goes beyond selecting quiet zones and excluding noise, to comparing and juxtaposing the voices of this world. Music in the city is often in motion, either the ear or the sound source is transitional. You listen for the remarkable 'Gestalt', the soloist in the city or the timbral stream behind it. You are always in the soundscape and when you relate to it, it is always and everywhere fascinating.
Hildegard Westerkamp found the sound compositions about Brasilia very diversified, although the city itself, on first listening, has a stereotypical appearance. But the process and the form of composition -from 'real audio' to sonic phantasy is very stimulating for the urban-acoustic discourse, when we not only grimly accept but even welcome that the most systematic approach has strong subjective roots. It is the transition, the comparative mood itself that is the interesting information, not the urban profile alone; to discover in one city many others and to identify in each community a unique layer. You also find Micro soundscapes in each and every life. Space of birth and death, education and marketing, eating and communication, ritual, music, public passages and sacral rooms. They all build the homophony, the acoustic fingerprint heard from above and from the distance, the overall sound pattern and audio culture of a whole area.
Chicago, Vancouver, Hamburg and Stockholm have maritime soundscapes in common, beyond the cliche of northern light and sound. They are water cities, large metropolitan areas with an important Hinterland or Waterland as natural resource. As -relatively - old cities that have been modernized, they provide powerful interfaces between cultures. They have been 'new world' environments, an extension of their harbour as a traditional gate to other ethnic communities and markets. They are
transitional areas, crossings. The fractal profile of their coastal waterline suggests blurring, promising zones to Northland. Nurturing an inner demand for a nature to feed their own urban machine. Their Nordic Soundscapes have strong physical particularities in common, but even more sound biographical ones. Audiotactile memories you share with other people. This subjective level makes the headline of Soundscapes of the North ambivalent and relative. North and South are coordinates of the landscape, but they also influence changing atmospheres, experiences and feelings within the life of a city, a country, a continent and a hemisphere.
North and South are subjective dimensions.
Sound geography is a personal
navigation through 'relative' wind directions. Sound biographies are an
ensemble of interfaces between them.
The first sound grows out of the silence: the horns of the freight train Calgary-Vancouver, echoing and reverberating in the Rockies. They transport us to the city by the sea. Later, the sound collage of Horns and Whistles, a quote from the early World Soundscape Project. It is a collection of calls which reminds me of Vancouver's transparent acoustic landscape. This short piece has become a tonal layer in my own sound biography. But the sound of the city has changed, as I have. Like a broadband breath, the growing white noise of Vancouver is the expression of sped-up life rhythms. More people from many more cultures, dense traffic and transportation, the large harbour, industrial projects and audio-visual smog, the drones of jets and sharp snares of seaplanes, the signals and synthetic voices of digital telephone networks. The parks and beaches form vibrant activity zones between nature and city; border zones of the metropolis, full of life and human activities. VANSCAPE MOTION. The acoustic flaneur, the sound searcher, stops for a moment and listens through his microphone. His recorded sound becomes frozen movement, a sound current from inside the city. As in a dream. Or in a sound memory from the future? The strange whine of the skytrain and the stilt-like architecture of this train route connect and divide the city like a zipper. Voices, dialects , rhythms of movement and communication are momentarily woven into an intricate voiceprint of Vancouver and then dissolve again. Just like the sounds in the tunnels, which increase and decrease musically like large sighs, as if the city speaks in some ancient tongue, resonating, echoing the breath of invisible beings. Trains are songlines of the metropole, arteries between cultures and worlds.
VANSCAPE MOTION.
From Burnaby Mountain Park one can listen far into the inlets of Port Moody, to the horns of freight trains playing with mountain topographies. Every day, every time, sounds different here. The park has its own dawn chorus: students' footsteps cross the wet lawns; a half-tamed coyote, like a shadow, sneaks through the area; a Chinese woman practices her Tai Chi in the diffuse morning light; and the city hums to the far-reaching view over inlets and glaciers, the skyline, and the matrix of the streets.
Burnaby Mountain Park as listening experience is, like so many other areas in this city by the sea, an ambivalent zone. Eyes and ears meet the contradiction of nature and city and become curious. To walk through the city, to see it, to hear it, that is the composition. The transition from land to water sounds different everywhere in this city by the sea: beach recordings create a dense water curtain; a voluminous boathorn, two attacking ravens in the harbour, helicopters and seaplanes, virtuoso kite-flying by the beach, all seem to signal a city ready for take-off.
The train bell near the harbour creates a light groove for other urban sounds: a deep fog horn, the rise and fall of the car races, thrown back by high walls, the sound waves of traffic on Burrard Bridge, city buses, the sky train, impatient car honk, the voices of Chinatown and the surreal sound of the old Royal Hudson steam train. Those who engage with the calls, signals, the noise and the music of the city, change inside this urban rush, which continuously threatens to devour the ear and then lets it emerge again. Like a niche: The acoustic density recedes in a quiet residential area, along 18th Ave which probably does not sound much different from the way it did twenty years ago. In the garden of composer Hildegard Westerkamp, a small water trickle and a wind chime. A tennis court nearby. Once in a while a siren on the acoustic horizon.
Contradictory processes are apparent everywhere, an appearance and disappearance of ear and sound, in nature and city, where growing ecological awareness and economic growth are involved in a bitter clinch.
While the environmental movement fights for quiet valleys and forests and the city of Vancouver with its short history only now begins to develop space and niches for urban cultures, both are invaded and changed by the globally-influenced growth of the region. The acoustic flaneur, the sound searcher, stops for a moment and listens through his microphone. His recorded sound becomes a frozen movement, a sound current from inside the city. Like in a dream. Or in a sound memory from the future?
Bob MacNevin is a composer, sound designer and filmmaker. When, in 1996, the Vancouver Soundscape Project was re-visited successfully, it was due to his remarkable input in the 90ies. Following the precise catalogue cards of the Original World Soundscape Project WSP, he re-recorded the different audio situations and new spaces. And standing still, non-acting, while the city rushes by, was a remarkable experience for the ear:
'Vancouver is one of the least 'Nordic,' in my opinion. My storehouse of sound memories that evoke the North harkens back to parts of Canada where I experienced winter for at least 4 months of the year (Ontario & Prince Edward Island). Vancouver generally experiences rain in winter, with some snow on some years. It always feels more west than north to me. However, there are a couple of sounds in Vancouver that do say 'North' to me. One is the sound of sea-planes taking off, or passing overhead.
They are very often heading in a northerly direction. I imagine them sometimes landing on remote lakes in the wilderness. When snow does fall on Vancouver in any quantity, it is the lovely silence of the city that impresses itself upon you. This is especially surprising when one wakes to it in the morning. Exactly as one's consciousness arrives, the revelation that something is very different arrives as well. The city is silent. Nature has returned (or should I say retuned) to dominance over the machine. One may take a walk and listen to one's scrunching footsteps as the dominant sound - if it is cold enough. Very satisfying.
I hope this helps. Really, you should be asking Eastern and truly Northern Canadians this question. More than 75% of Canadians live within 100 miles of the American border, but Canada ('the True North Strong and Free,' as we sing in our national anthem) stretches for thousands of miles north of here, and is populated by true northerners.'
Vancouver, opened to the north, its nature and the rural mentality even in the city, is also a 'new world city' with a strong impact from the West-Asia. In the heart of the people living there, the nature, the sense of water, the climate and the open space with wide acoustic horizon are frames for their intensive relationship to the environment. They appreciate the comfort of the metropolis, which swallows natural resources around it. Their verbal imagery seems to be very well developed when they speak of places to go outside their homes. Pictures of a lonely lake with loons, a remote valley, the distant chord of a train echoing civilization. Martin Gotfrit is a composer and sound designer who teaches music at Simon Fraser University. Having come from Montreal decades ago, he is a keen acoustic observer of the changes within the city soundscape:
'The mountains to the north of the city are the strongest visual cue that we are a Northern city. They evoke a still and powerful presence I've come to associate with the idea of North. The strongest sound 'impression' for me is that of the small, single engine planes which take off from the inner harbour and fly low over the city, heading off to places where there are no roads. The history of the north in Canada is interwined with the stories of brave pilots and small planes. These planes have the names of animals: Beaver, Goose, Otter. Some are twin engines, others single, but they all have a sound which reaches deep into my soul. The sound often has a very clear pitch (fundamental) with rich overtones not unlike two sawtooth waves which are slightly out of sync. Mixed with echoes from the water and possibly from nearby mountains, it is a melancholy song of adventure, rescue, and exploration. It is the music of a fragile machine lazily rising into the clouds, barely skirting the tree tops, cradling three or four humans and a small bit of gear, heading for a still lake somewhere north.'
'Hamburg Hoeren', as Jens Matthiesen indicates, could mean a set of different things:
A soundwalk with cross-media artist Marianne Greve starts with the sound and on the specific location of her ELBSINFONIE, where an instrumental quartet performed a 'lament song' of the river, based on the chemical codes of the water. Marianne Greve, both trained artist and biologist, 'translates' environmental data into artistic motion. Her projects are multimedia, touch all senses, and use many different modes of production: from the Earth books to the snow images, from the musical aquarium to
installation and cross-disciplinary communication.
Hoerspiel-Tonmeister Jutta Liedemit practices Hamburg Hoeren very much in the rich cultural context of the city, producing for radio or listening for example to Bob Wilson's light&soundscapes at Thalia Theater. Her colleague designer and composer Gerd Bessler organized sound for Wilson, a rich palette of song and music, of subtle moments and heavy audio storms.
'Sound Design', he said years ago when still living in the ciy, 'for me is the working sound of the harbour. It is the sound of a complete world, maybe not perfect, but functioning.'
Gretchen Manz, born in Hamburg, is a nordic painter, a cloud and landscape artist. Her pictures emphasize a wide open transitional zone, the coastal line between land and sky, a thousand variations of a deep blue, mostly, with a nearly explosive epicentre of orange and red. The intensive color behind the clouds and their interplay form an atmospheric Rorschach test, where the observer reads his or her own deep mood into the pictures. The Halligen islands, Sylt, the German Nantucket, Arenshoop, Worpswede - the German Woodstock, ambiences along the Elbe river and Hamburg's harbour itself are a center of her memory. The steel skeletons of the harbour give the structure to a painting, but it is the - inner colour - of red skies that reveals the psychic energy of space and place. The city as it transforms out of the surrounding coastal lines - like Chicago out of the prairie.
And Jens Matthiesen, a young (and by name a nordic) sociologist and musicologist, derives the acoustic layers of the City from their core in the harbour area. It is a soundscape that spreads out into many neighborhoods, into the flow of foreign voices, sounds of business, culture, leisure (and drugs you might want to add).
With his Audioteam, he outlined practical Metropolis listening - from the EarGuide along the water to art installations. Equal in importance, training the senses seems to complement his modelling of sonic interpretations of mostly visual planning material.
Hamburg nourishes the image of the 'green city', he says, where the 'natural' experience of parks, waterways, the sea and the 'hinterland' is melting with the harbour area and image. Harbour sounds invade many parts of the city and the strong sources like the horns are unique sound marks for water transportation and trading. But much of the urban work, living, mobility, private and public space, the 'foreign sound' of other voices and organizations are extensions and networks of maritime past and present. In many neighbourhoods proprietary and the 'other' soundscapes touch each other and form cultural interfaces. Blendings, transitions, conflict zones, available in every city but with a unique pattern. They are dynamic songlines; or, as Matthiesen says, 'a multicultural soundmix', the always different song of a migrative, mobile world.
Monika Pauler is researcher at Hamburg University and teaches media work with a strong emphasis on Hoerspiel and Sound. She has lived in Hamburg for nearly a decade and has experienced many sonic situations: the fog horns that touch wide urban areas, the harbour sounds that mix and compete with leisure time, when people sit along the water. The Alte Elbtunnel, built at the beginning of the century, once the core sound for Bill Fontana's audio composition at Northern German Radio, combines strong reverberation with a variety of the vocal forms of pedestrians. The 'fish music' in the vocals of the harbour market people has a unique Hamburg style, as do the voices of the announcers in the public transport stations.
'I have the feeling', Monika Pauler adds, 'that here in Hamburg you listen into and out of the distance very often. The people talk soft and not very much mostly. Wind is there and the water, seagulls, sirens from a distance.
Every neighborhood and every time of the day provides particular sounds.
Reeperbahn and Altona are very vivid with many different languages. Hamburg shows there a completely un-unified character of building styles, of life styles'.
Oeland in the Baltic Sea is the sunny summer island of Sweden, here and in Gotland you will find many visitors and vacation home owners from all regions of Sweden itself. They are at once familiar and foreigners in their own culture, the rhythm of their presence is symbolized in the stop and go summer traffic over the impressive bridge that connects the Festland with the island life. The island of 'Green and Stone' is a small continent in itself, with forest in the north and open landscape in the south, with an infinite horizon towards the sea, where hundreds of old windmills are overlooking the sound towards the continent.
Oeland is a set of little sound worlds, islands themselves in the subtle but dominant natural environment of the water, the Alvaret, the flat and flowering land, in the south cut by the earlier king's wall. The relaxed audioculture of vacation homes with many different dialects, the vivid life on the beaches, where children play with and in the shallow and somewhat motionless water, small villages like Hamarby with laconic farmers and a relaxed rural soundscape day with jet-like circling birds, flat, functional cities with their often empty, sometimes vivid plazas. The summer castle of the Royal family is a favourite tourist's aim with a carefully designed garden soundscape. The protected niches and special environments with their own tone from birds and insects. The sound of stones and earthy surfaces. Little, silent harbours with an adjacent beach feature relaxed solo voices of the summer: a seagull, individual voices of kids, lapping waters, cicadas, a bicycle. An abandoned scenery with rotten boats and a horse corral nearby, suddenly changes through the electronic beeps of the omnipresent mobile telephone. Perhaps a call comes from another maritime soundscape in the southwest and passionate callers share their feelings about their beautiful surroundings. The 'nalle', the teddybear is everywhere. Idyllic scenes on this island are contrasted by intensive sonic contrasts on every scale, from the personal beep to the big boom. Both sound types, the rural tradition and the postmodern, mix and overlay each other in a nearly casual, unpretentious way. The biggest continuous drone comes from the cement factory in one southern corner of the island, a strange chord reaching far into the adjacent rural areas. If you listen for a moment, you can hear the modern wind mills, the windfarming ventilators that produce a wonderful resonant singing above the waves. It may be aching after a while, but as the wind comes and goes the rhythm is variable. The small country shop - an auditive communication epicentre - has intensive drones of freezing machines, TV displays, electronic signals from scanners and bottle machines, which overlay the casual, familiar atmosphere. The post office or the pharmacy in the mall add some strong signaling for queueing clients. The casual rhythm of summer house life is often cut by functional work: dividing wood blocks, mowing lawns, steady repair and re-building, all done with noisy machinery during the week or on weekends. Farming areas look like colorful earth waves and might feature sounds like a warm breeze, songs of the locust and distant birds. Suddenly the roar of a harvesting machine, that can handle the wide spaces, builds up from a distant sound source to a very big soundwall.
For me there is a strong contrast, nearly a contradiction, between the subtlety of voice communication in Sweden, the proverbial inner desire for natural environments and the easy acceptance of noisy inserts in island life. People don't compete on the decibel scale, but the wide open acoustic space resonates by sound messages of modernity.
Ektorpe, the re-constructed fortress and medieval village in the Alvaret, is a little niche of traditional sound. Experimenting archeologists have carefully designed buildings and ways of the old habitat and - choking - lived for a while within the old house under the earlier conditions. Today half-tame animals and hand-driven water pumps suggest the acoustic atmosphere, the 'smellody' of that time; and, on summer weekends, a Swedish musician guides workshops with self-built musical instruments of the past.
Skruv is some hours land inward, a scenic car ride into 'Glass-Reich', the center of Sweden's artisanal glass production and design. Extended woods, wavy landscape and a net of smaller villages and houses are woven around the factories, the commercial input and impact of the region. In 1975 Composer Murray Schafer from Canada and his World Soundscape Project produced a comparative study of five European villages in Scotland, Germany, France, Italy and Sweden. For each village the archive at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver still contains all the descriptions and data, many hours of recordings, interviews and sound diaries. Skruv was the first place the group visited in winter. So one of the elementary sounds is the steps of soundscapers on icy surfaces, researching within that rural environment of about 2,000 souls, a train station, a brewery and a glass factory. Murray Schafer's guide was the cantor, composer and teacher, Yngve Wirkander, who, now in his 80ies, came to Skruv fifty years ago and unfolded a strong impact on the cultural life of the village. He was and is today a very energetic 'gestalt', an independant character and artist, a writer and a painter, art-working together with his wife Mona.
He is a composer with an own (nordic?) idiom in his string quartets and vocal compositions for community choir. And as musical educator he has experimented with auditive communication and sound operas for children. For more than 35 years he has cruised through the village and the region as organ player from church to church, driving the same big American car, ' which does not consume much gasoline,' he says with a smile. In the 70s he was Murray Schafer's guide, and we can hear his voice in the interview section of the Skruv recordings and in a rehearsal for one of his compositions.
In summer of 1997 we were passing through Skruv, on our way to Stockholm to experience first acoustic impressions of the cultural capital 1998 and the future home of the planned Stockholm Soundscape Convention. The glass factory and the brewery are still there behind the former train station, now containing some stores. The Hotel were the soundscape team lived is still the only accomodation in the village. A bit worn out, it is not far from the Wirkanders well cared-for home, a 'Gesamtkunstwerk' of pictures, books and music in a wonderful garden. Ingve Wirkander remembers very well Murray Schafer's visit and compares the soundscape of that time with today: the silence and keynote atmosphere are still the same, but new birds have arrived. The signals and sounds of the traditional industries which give the main work opportunities for the local people are complemented by a few new work places. Modern sounds come through the younger generation, from their background music and the boom box sound out of cars, the standard pizzeria, a new generation of scanner cashiers, the tennis court near the bathing lagoon, and the electroacoustic stadium nearby.
The sounds of seven regional diesel trains that stopped in Skruv determined the overall pattern of the day in the 70ies. Their punctuating motors are replaced by new generations of futuristic trains that rush through the village with a modern 'whoosh' and stop with a singing glissando only in the next bigger community, 12 km away. The trains connect the region very efficiently with other remote areas in the country, but the station now is no longer within walking distance. The newer people in town don't even know about trains anymore, but they bring different accents into communication. Polish voices, German pensionists, Estonian temp workers give a hint about cultural changes within the baltic context. I find it an intrigueing idea to come back to the microcosmos of the village together with Murray Schafer and to visit the same places as the group did in 1975. I imagine us cruising with Ingve Wirkander in his American car and interviewing them later in the comfort of a fast train to Stockholm about acoustical and social changes here and elsewhere - like seeing Virilio chatting about 'Rasender Stillstand' in a TGV. The World Soundscape Project recorded some urban scenes of Stockholm 1975 - meant to provide a contrasting image to the small world in the forest.
Listening to these old acoustic photographs with today's ears reveals a city of a moderate pace, a wide space and casual atmosphere. A vivid but overall quiet Metropolis along and in the water with a clear pattern of active and contemplative areas, adjacent to each other. This pattern is still valid today, but on a higher noise level. The contrasts appear sharper now. Parks, niches, quiet zones, canals and walking routes, little harbors and islands invite one to acoustic recovery. The country is in the city, the city is country with a wide acoustic horizon suddenly obscured by a controlling helicopter. The juxtaposition of a moody nature with urban activity is strong enough to cope with the density of sound during the water festival with its million visitors. Soundwalls which cover and overlay the fine tuned differences between neighborhoods and open areas. They are social messages as well, indicating in which direction the city and the inhabitants might want to modernize. Dense traffic, many private airplanes and the frequent 'tunelban' carry their strong rhythm on parallel sound-tracks into the city down from Kristinenberg, while on Djaergarden the old streetcar is starting for a more scenic ride into the center. The Water Festival produces a colorful electro-acoustic confusion. One stand adjacent to the next sales box, eating places, information booth, music, games and fast food entertainment. Boom-Box-Sound, a world heritage, covers all the subtle water sounds themselves, the daily bells, the bird songs, the casual voices. The festival is loud, joy is more important than relaxation. This constellation is not typical for the city, one Stockholm listener says, but I guess it is becoming more frequent, as similar entertainment processing is available around the world and is part of becoming modernized. However you still find the musical niches, especially in Oldtown Gamla Stan, where fantastic street musicians perform in all genres. The flow of pedestrians is multicultural, their many voices and languages are suddenly cut through by fast tuned motorbikes from the surrounding streets. It may be a superficial impression, but the visitor's flow is not a faceless melting pot. The eyes and voices seem rarely to connect with the 'other' stranger or the local. Many visitors stay encapsulated in their audiovisual world and their usual body text. Dense communication is done mostly between peer groups is done by 'walk and talk'. Again the 'nalle' is everywhere. The overall beeps and the strange monodic, but vivid talk is much more audible than in other modern cities and is interpunctuated by digital audio from traffic lights.
Thi s new acoustic communication guides us everywhere, through the contempt city and onto the idyllic beach in southern Sweden, where the dream of a life 'outside' comes true, not only in commerical advertising, but within the personal inspiration of most Swedish inhabitants.
And, being still in transition towards the total immersion of acoustic modernity, soundscape research and design faces an interesting challenge.
The planned convention on sound by the Royal Academy in Stockholm will emphasize 'awareness to action', the concrete layout of better sound conditions here in the city.
Chicago, Vancouver, Hamburg and Stockholm have maritime soundscapes in common. They are water cities, and provide powerful interfaces between cultures, as their harbours are traditional gates to other ethnic communities and markets. They are transitional areas, crossings. The fractal profile of their coastal waterline suggest blurring zones to Northland: zones, similar enough to the physical atmospheres of the North, and distinctive enough from the outer cliché of snow and solitude life.
North and South are subjective dimensions and conditions.
Sound geography is a personal navigation through 'relative' wind directions.
Sound biographies are an ensemble of interfaces between them:
-Nordic Soundscapes in the city and the hearts of listeners have several layers, interacting with each other as a metaphor in Northland, as a sound memory in Chicago. As the life in the dunes, juxtaposed in vision with the icy skyline of steel rocks.
-Understanding the Nordic City is nurtured by the comparison with Southland and by an intensive process and method of sound composition with media - or with your ears into your mental library, as Hildegard Westerkamp emphasizes.
-Nordic soundscapes appear even stronger in the inner images and inner sounds of people, in the demand of the urban individual to reach nature and in the symbol of the waterplane as the vehicle to get there.
-Northern sound patterns are not holy silent or romantic islands alone, but live from a contrast between the cultural noise of urban existence and the contemplative ability to shift over - at any given moment and in any small green area. Today we live polytemporal lifes. And a New World scenario and Global Communication touch the most remote areas. Nordic Soundscapes, if not reduced to a touristic scenery, is in strong connection with other parts of life and existence.
Transition is the key, comparison the mode.
Monographic studies or even the sound flaneur's moves are fascinating experiences I would not want to miss. But a more comparative mode leads into moments of listening, available in each culture, touched and passed by nearly every inhabitant once - in a lifetime or during one day. It is easy that you find these situations on a first look more often in Southern cultures.
The plaza of Los Llanos on island La Palma is a local epicentre, a performance stage and a cross-communication platform for a micro-culture. This special space reflects the whole, by attaching it to moments of birth and death, trading, eating and drinking, living and mobility, music and sacral experiences, media and communication with a holistic quality.
If you re-visit the night life of a neighbourhood flamenco bar in Madrid, you still have to learn how to decode the flamenco culture musically. But you experience and understand the atmosphere, the heavy smoking and drinking, the collective soundscape of voice, handclaps, foot rhythm, movement, dance and animation, the role- taking, when the guitarist sings, the singer plays, the listener dances. When the alternating sound of soloist and group is oscillating and the ears start to dance and to sing.
I think that these micro worlds of sound re-appear in other soundscape cities, not in a faceless pattern of compatibility, but in their own unique urban 'KLANGUAGE'. The focal elements of a TOWNSCAPE (Gordon Cullen) like a public plaza, a blues club, a street or a workplace are part of the repertoire in the city and give structure to it. They are open in two and more ways.
For the fine-tuned soundscape listener and the analyst who wants to create a catalogue of urban situations along the life, along all our lives. Between both of them is a third, a virtual Nordic space still to be explored. It is a melting of stonefrozen landscape, architecture and electronic structure with the fugitive dancing of the ear, a melting into a contemplative mode we might not have named and discovered yet.
Footnote:
This urban montage combines different cities and encounters with people living in them.
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I owe a homeopathic proofreading and the 'klanguage' of his poem to George Drury and the sound memory to his father, George Drury; a lot of inspiration to Kathy Cowan, David Carlson and Geof Benson in Chicago; a criticial preview to Bob MacNevin, additional support to Andreas Kahre, Martin Gotfrit and Hildegard Westerkamp in Vancouver, Jens Matthiesen, Jutta Liedemit, Marianne Greve, Gretchen Manz, Monika Pauler, Klaus Wittig from Hamburg; Yngwe and Mona Wirkander in Skruv and Henrik Karlsson from Stockholm. Special thanks Justin Winkler and my nordic editors, R Murray Schafer and Helmi Jaerviluoma, welcoming (with a sigh) my radiophonic design within the state-of-the-art of this yearbook.