Things I heard in November.
In a converted warehouse space an unexpected whoosh followed by the briefest whine, form an object in the air. It's the spatial trail that catches my ear.
Connecting with Echo through making pitched down remixes of his favourite songs.
Outside a long, drawn out noise sweep moves into the distance and I listen to its tail trying to hear where it ends. In my imagination it continues, stretching like the freeze audio effect that sustains a sound forever. I can still hear it minutes later.
From upstairs I can hear pitched snare drums on every offbeat and Echo singing along to the slurred, slowed down vocals.
Today someone asked me if a sound carried on forever and if sound waves continue to oscillate, fluttering and vibrating into the ether, out into space. I imagine distant planets inhabited by beings with incredibly sensitive ears picking up Earth's din.
Liquid, bubbling and squelching bat echolocation. We try a human version, clicking using our tongues, exploring how our ears pick up spatial communication reflected from building’s surfaces.
Two residents describe their windows shrieking when the wind is strong.
Stomping on drain covers, listening to subterranean booms, touching railings to feel the sound of passing trains. A small child with very good rhythm uses percussion beaters to sound objects around her community. She clambers up onto an outdoor gym apparatus clutching a Zoom audio recorder, eager to record the resonant metal bars that run at intervals along the top.
I read out loud the lore about the king shouting his secret into the earth and I lose a metal spike that is meant to let me listen to those secrets.
Sizzling hiss and a fluffy, warm drone interrupted by a click. House sounds.
The plastic clunk and twang of the kitchen rubbish bin lid as it springs up and oscillates three times.
Drawn in soft, nasal click, then a whistling release.
A child's cough muffled by brick, plaster, wallpaper and countless layers of paint.
I'd forgotten about my tinnitus until I remembered, noticing its absence. This invites it back.
Across the tops of houses, cafes and shops, travels an electric drone in motion, east to west. I imagine the people aboard on their journeys to other places, other lives. It's soothing and I’m glad I'm not on a late night train.
She taps my stomach. I think she is listening for something. This big unknown right at the center of me.
The first of two conversations about listening is interrupted as a nearby trolley scraping and rattling blends with the deeper rumble of a dopplering lorry passing outside. The mix catches our ears, enough that we turn toward the source. Thinking about it now, I wonder if the addition of that deeper, bigger sound energy gave the trolley an unnatural, almost threatening appearance. It was unusual and unexpected in the context of our environment. I wonder if I can spot other examples like this.
A discussion about objects that generate rich sounds; materials, fabrics, toys, clicking of fertility beads, sticky floor, dried leaves on the floor, wrapping and unwrapping, bells and chimes. Invitations to listen and conjuring sounds in the mind.
On the train a tiny voice grows, taking up too much space, and I’m reminded that the sound character of a phone speaker is similar to the effect of air pressure on our ears. When a plane descends, everything becomes thin and harsh.
Beep / Door slide / Outside / Train pass / Beeps / Door slide /Inside.
Outside = air, space, open activity. Softer movement. Inside = container, manufactured air, mechanical, drone movement, engineered.
On Saturday a workshop participant described the trains passing her apartment as creatures. Now I'm riding in the belly of a metal eel, slithering through cuts in the earth, grinding across green fields and now over a grand bridge. Sometimes when I cross this bridge I twist my head around to get a glimpse of a stately home I spent a weekend in recording foley for a radio drama. For a moment I’m over there, listening to me over here.
The sweet spot. Beyond the sweet spot.
I find myself wondering about that sweet spot. How sweet is it? Is it really that much sweeter than here?
I notice the light behind me casting my shadow into the sweet spot.
Watching the slow creep of the playhead. I can hear all the plug ins. I wish I could move around and let my ears lead me.
Sophie drips and splats behind me.
Later a gurgling sink emptying draws me to the back of the space.
The delicate moments are the best. They are so fleeting, interspersed with cacophony barrages of tumbling sound effects, as if a sound librarian’s sack of sounds exploded.
For a moment, I went inside myself, got a bit lost.
I think about my Nan and what she would make of these sounds and the magic of a 40+ spatial speaker setup. I think she would love it.
Last night, feeling intrusive. Hearing a distraught voice, distant and thin leaking from a phone earpiece.
Eyes weary but ears sensitive, registering outside sounds of night time activity, multiple raised voices. Is it anger or drunken play? I can't tell, but I'm happy to be under a blanket with a hot water bottle. Then a creak, a structural movement from the hall way, and in an unfamiliar space I'm alert and anxious. I dare not peer out of the adjoining door into the dark.
Huge horns, three or four meters long, blast low, rasping pitches.
A train announcement is fuzzy and burnt in contrast to the chill air it ripples through.
I find some biscuits, but in this quiet lecture hall I can't eat them, fearful the wrapper’s crackly rustle will travel through the space.
A frigid scrape and thin shower of tiny frozen particles, booms of drum and cheesy organ, short interrupted clips of good music thrown around Alexandra Palace on PA speakers, all bouncing off glistening polished ice.
Jett's favourite sound is the impact of a hockey puck on hardboard and protective plastic screens.
Becky's favourite sound is the echoey organ of course.
‘Weaving attention through landscape’.
‘Watching the faces of listeners’.
Is this Mickey Mouse’ing?
Clicky, clicky in the lecture hall.
I register how often COVID has been mentioned in the early formation and development of projects, either as a creative intervention/disruption or adaptation to unusual circumstances.
Non spaces. Is there anything here? What is there in nothing? I've asked these questions too.
He fills a ‘non space’ with electronic sounds. Slow motion clips of his bike ride through a ‘non space’ (though hugely significant personally).
Cameron Clark talks about doing weird stuff in town.
The pathways to someplace else.
Simon Emerson talks about removing his glasses so he can hear the sounds better.
Fiona Brehony reads a poem and then speaks about ‘The unknown and aliveness of a place’, and I feel a connection to these words.
Two waves of panic precede my talk, enough to make me consider running away. When the time comes I suppose there is a part of me that switches into autopilot, supported by a script this time. But I shared honestly and vulnerably and was heard. I was touched by the people that came up to me afterwards to show support and encouragement.
A nearby phone tapping sounds like a mouse playing tiny wood blocks.
The acoustics of the Old Street Station tunnels adding an exciting spatial dimension.
Distant Underground trains moving past. I’ve not heard London Underground like this. The familiar low rumble at distance and then a higher pitch, warbling and moving from left to right.
I imagine the sound waves channeled around the maze of passages before they reach my ears, whilst subsonics transmit through the deep earth and brickwork to my body. It feels old down here and I think again of the animal - worms burrowing and slithering through the earth. It’s quiet, which is rare for an underground station, and the long gap between trains on my platform allows me to enjoy these distant structural vibrations that seem to rise from beneath and engulf me. It's really wonderful. I could sit all day and listen. It's the best spatial performance I've heard all weekend.
She works in darkness, a small torch in each hand. She directs flashes of light at a clear perspex box containing things I can't make out from my seat.
I imagine it holds magical crystals.
The movement, distance and various colors of her tiny lights conjure different sound textures and timbre from the mysterious formations. Strobes trigger rhythmic pulses, and the room becomes like a ‘90s nightclub. At one point she retrieves from under her table a mini stand with what look like tiny gongs swinging from it. She places it on her perspex box and begins fiddling with one of the gongs. It glows red, and the illumination triggers a roar of thunder. Each of the gongs is a tiny coloured light, and each triggers further peels of thunder over a growing rainstorm. She ends her performance using a child's toy projecting kaleidoscopes of color onto the screen behind her.
A scratching curve back and forth, filling a page with color.
Echo asked me for drawing inspiration, so I suggest a creature with super hearing.
A restless night. Three loud knocks jolt me awake. I’m startled and confused and waiting for more knocks to confirm what I suspect. I'd like to write more about sounds and listening in dreams. I suppose my dreams do have sound, but Simon in that world, isn't actively listening. In future, I will go to sleep with intention to listen.
Sounds and smell clouds are borderless. Fleeting, hard to pin down, sonic vapour. Ear worms, nose worms. Phantom sounds and phantom scents.
The roar of the sea is filtered as behind me thundering, metal clanking trucks pass on glistening roads.
Crooked, jagged sea defences like harsh amplitude envelope shapes and sharp, painful feelings.
The car vibrates and my body resonates uncomfortably. ‘I always make it happen through the panic and fear though’. Those words in a boxy acoustic. A small space. Angled shatterproof glass reflecting truth, shame, fear, and hope.
'The old house, for those who know how to listen, is a sort of geometry of echoes’.
Recording room tones at a friend’s place. A converted Ice House on Baltic Wharf overlooking Shoreham port. Thinking about Bachelard.
A cobweb flutters in the autumnal light. It looks delicate. A strong blue crane is in the same frame of vision, flexing like a mechanical dinosaur before coming to a standstill.
That thing again, keeping perfectly silent and erasing myself to keep the recording pure.
Wondering about the listening power of the walls and structures of rooms and homes and what they hold, what they soak up. This isn't my home, but the family home of friends. I can hear their voices here in happier times, projected from the thick high walls.
I'm here listening and recording this space in a moment of transition, with some sadness, loss, letting go, and I hope some looking forward.
The space will transition too. Some of the features will remain and the structure will be the same, but the air and the atmosphere will be new. It becomes someone else's space and can no longer be readily accessed by old inhabitants.
‘A house that stands in my heart, my cathedral of silence’ Jean Laroche
I've been playing a big set of curtains. They run on tracks that curve around the edges and into the center of the space, allowing the expanse to be transformed with long clicking sweeps. As I perform, gently pulling and manipulating fabric, I hear creaks and squeaks of flooring flexing and stretching under my movement. It irritates me at first, and then I remind myself that it's this house’s sound. Maybe a familiar and in the future, missed sound. Later I ‘play’ the floorboards, pacing back and forth, trying to imagine the routes my friends have taken here.
If I heard the sound of my old bedroom or lounge now I wonder what I'd feel. Would it be familiar? Would it matter or hold any significance? This converted industrial space had a history before this one. It existed in time with different soundscapes. Ice cold, sharp, jagged reflections, clouds of breath, workers in thick clothing hacking at the glistening dripping formations. The soundscape here would have sounded very different and I strain my ears in to the past trying to hear it.
The blue crane has changed position now, neck stretched out, slowly turning south.
My friend popped in and commented that this thing could be a service/product we could offer for people who want to take something of a place with them. You might not want to listen right now, but down the line in 15 to 20 years, you might wonder what your old bedroom, lounge, garden or whatever sounded like. Acoustics, floorboards, front door, gardens.
As I was recording the bathroom, my clothing brushed against the resonant metal sink and work top, ringing. I wondered how many times this had happened before.
‘At the door of the house who will come knocking? An open door, we enter. A closed door, a den. The world pulse beats beyond my door’. Pierre-Albert Birot
My fear of who might come knocking, and that world beyond my door, transported to me, to my head through the pillow, through structural pulses, fears and irrational imaginations of spaces.
‘You hear everybody, but you never see anybody’. Peter Cusack.
A Peruvian flute performance - pocketing. Two players facing each other. Forest spirits summoned by sound. A Berlin courtyard, community sounds reverberate and city sounds blocked by the structure. A black bird uses the courtyard acoustics to amplify its song. Peter Cusack plays sparse, distant chords. Bird song that appears random at first soon reveals patterns, a three part poly rhythm. I can't figure out the numbers, but the players are definitely listening to each other.
A Walker weaves their way through an oil field.
A neighbour’s garden emits ultra high frequency pulses. They catch my ear every time I walk past. The experience is uncomfortable. Is it an anti cat device? I'm tempted to record to see what frequency the pulses are.
Mournful voices float high above the clock tower. Rippling, billowing waves of intensity wrap around Boots, imprisoned in metal scaffolding, covered in plastic sheets. Me and Echo stop to listen, trying to repeat the voices we hear. Later, we walk beneath the huge structure, and I'm scared that something might become dislodged by the powerful wind.
I can still hear ghostly howls as we walk away and enter Churchill Square shopping center,
‘Millers, who are wind thieves, make good flour from storms’. I’ve recorded a lot of wind. Does that make me a wind thief?
I can’t stop thinking about the singing building and so I return early Sunday morning and make a recording.
High pitched, high altitude whistling and a howl in the mid range. A two part clack clack rubber on metal precedes throaty engines, rattling, clicking and ticking. When the wind speed reaches a peak the mid range howl jumps up an octave. Screeching hydraulics. A soft pat pat pat pat moves past me.
Ragged plastic sheets balloon and swell, rippling as gusts blow through them. High buildings reflect the piped wind and it appears to come from everywhere. People pass by, and I'm the only one listening. No, that's not true. Hotel guests, fresh from checking out and dragging wheelie trolleys, look up for a moment.
Soft, warm flanks rise and fall, rumble and crackle. I imagine inside there where my ear is pressed close, the fur, flesh and bones a calming, reverberant Cathedral. The steady rhythm interrupted by my soft touch. That he came and positioned his body like this right up against my ear feels intentional. Like he knows I need to hear it.
He's sleeping now, curled up in a tight ball.
Baltic Wharf Ice House again. Speakers to the walls spill feedback. Pillar vibrations - voices, cars and other movements excite 45 Hz structural tones. The faintest sources amplified.
I pull heavy curtains to encircle the tones I'm trying to conjure in the air. Frequencies glow in the space, merging and bleeding color into what follows.
Feedback pulses like bouncing balls hitting walls and cardboard boxes piled high and full of family belongings.
I don't feel like I belong in this space. I've been made to feel welcome, but here now alone, I'm nervous, out of plac
The impulses rise and fall, scattering in arcs of pitched granules. The slower the frequency, the stronger the flow, threatening threat.
I recall my words from Dungeons and Dragons last night. The quicker we get into character, the better. It's quite powerful that.
I notice the way loud engines are thrown, bouncing off warehouses and appearing to come from across the canal.
At the hospital the other night visiting my dad, I hear new sounds - a straining pump out of sight, clipped electronic alerts and overheard medical conversations that draw me in.
The worrying crunch of a metal key forced into a resistant lock, jagged teeth scrape across sharp indentations in the barrel, the sweet spot so small. I slowly rock the teeth back and forth, waiting for the give, the release. The force needed is enough to hurt my fingers.
I'm in an unfamiliar house at night trying to raise unfamiliar tones in the air through the structure. There are ghost tones, unwanted poltergeists that I banish with tight cuts in the spectrum. They creep up on me slowly in this unfamiliar space, swirling into phantasmagoria clouds that, if left alone, will swell and take over.
Unfamiliar sounds in an unfamiliar space. The clicks, scrapes, scritches, bumps, stretching, expanding, constricting, pressured gurgles of a building settling down for the night with a new guest at play.
We talk about 'no threat’ in terms of sonics but for me sounds and beyond are so filled with terror, especially when alone in an unfamiliar space. I don't like the curtain, or rather, I don't like what could be behind it.
Tonight I'm going to a talk, ‘Recording Architectures’ by Jan St Werner at the RCA. One of my oldest friends Dom is meeting me there, and more recent friend Angela, who I did the IKO speaker workshop with a couple of years ago. Jan posed a question about sonic versions of the visual term ‘overlooked’. I wonder if ‘under heard’ could work.
Reverb off. Room tone only.
Remembering the train door that sounded like a baby crying,
Inserting Bucha gates into the feedback circuit. A feedback rhythm disruptor.
The swirling digital noise of Bucha amplified by infinite trips around the feedback loop, this quiet sound world needs quiet tools.
Tonight's wooden pulse rhythms became more alien as the evening went on. Then I noticed an almost spatial 3d effect when I played the recording I just made in the space, back into the space. Acoustics multiplied and overlaid. The pulses seem to come from all around. I must experiment with some different mic and speaker placements.
Foxes shriek outside the Ice House, their calls echoing around the dock, first off huge metal warehouses and rippling water, then caught in the feedback circuit. It collects everything, even the dusty air becomes a noise loop rhythm like the laboured breath of the building
Distant barking enters the tall space, injects the feedback circuit and rings spectral trails in the wake of the original, like a thin shadow following close behind.
Five hours alone with feedback.
My voice slating takes, describing details of what I’m about to record, shudders, ripples and glistens with spectral shadows.
I’m sure I hear a metal staircase ping, and I’m trying to work out where it is on the site. The room now filled with anticipation and the feeling that I'm going to be joined by someone or something. Do you hear how my imagination works?