The Piece
Once one has relocated, expatriated, escaped, the first time, it seems harder
and harder to remain in one place. I believe this is a function of memory:
anywhere can seem more interesting, more comfortable, cheaper rents, better
food, or have more inviting company in the imagination, but we know we are
dreaming when we idly speculate about the joys of living in a place we do
not know. Fantasy is fantasy, one says, and it can be comfortably put on
the shelf with the travel books. But once one has been somewhere for a month
or a year, it lodges oneself in the memory. Once one has left, memory is
there (more often than not heavily flavored by fantasy), and those places
have become real. These realities accumulate in oneself, and call out for
both more new realities to join them. The old realities, the places one has
lived, the person one has been, long for recapitulations, reanimation.
Every city has a chord resonating in it, below our range of hearing. It
is the combination of its acoustic signature and the activities that take
place within it -- the cars, the people, every activity of life reverberating
nd being shaped by architecture and landscape. There are some people who
believe that sounds, like memories, never completely dissipate, merely growing
quieter and quieter, sinking below the noisefloor and merging with the hum
of the city. This piece is an exploration of those chords, an attempt to
extract the resonances, the pitches that remain, the audio memories and accumulations
of cities and their chords.
Technical Details
The idea is to migrate the sound, this chord lying beneath the city, from one place to another. By analyzing sound coming in from a microphone, it is a simple matter to extract the most prominent harmonics from the general background noise of the city. As new measurements are taken, the resulting new frequencies are added to the initial sound as the older ones are gradually faded out, invoking the spectral qualities of the space through time. As the nature and level of sonic activity changes, so will the predominant chord.
I would propose taking such a system of sonic extraction, and dividing it in two: In one city, installing the microphone and analysis software, sending the analyzed data to another, and resynthesizing it in a gallery there. Since it only analysis data, the bandwidth is minimal -- one could bring the chords of several cities into one gallery.
Most of the technical issues involving the data transfer have been worked out -- contact me directly for more information.
