“Sound-Seeker is a map that privileges the ear over the eye. The project reaches across the city’s geographic, economic, educational, cultural and racial divides. It is at once a historical record and a subjective representation of the city. It is what each user wishes it to be and it is ever growing, ever changing and totally interactive.” www.soundseeker.org
Andrea Polli, along with the NYSoundmap project and The New York Society for Acoustic Ecology, created this wonderful collaborative sound map of the city. The project asks users to document sounds throughout NYC and plot them on a map. We’re exploring a similar collaborative approach to sound gathering for the Colors of New York, with a different style of documentary-based mapping. Instead of mapping sounds to specific locations in the city, we’re interested in mapping sounds to a color palette.
“The peculiar sounds of transit are the signature tunes of modern cities. These sounds that remind us the city is a sort of machine. The diesel stammer of London taxis, the wheeze of its buses. The clatter of the Melbourne tram. The two-stroke sputter of Rome. The note that sounds as the doors shut on the Paris metro, and the flick, flick, flick of the handles. The many sirens of different cities.”
Walter Benjamin, One Way Street and Other Writings
Mass transit’s sound landscape travels alongside passengers as a constant companion, familiar and steadfast, often whittled down by the senses to a comforting hum. A familiar commute becomes background, marked by the sound of stops. The ping of doors opening and closing denotes stops on a map, alerting passengers to the passage through space within the city.
Each time I travel to a new city, I record the sounds of public transportation. These sonic landscapes are as unique to the city as its architecture, pavement and accents. The smooth rubber wheels of Mexico City’s subway alert passengers to the arrival and departure differently than the elevated clang of Chicago’s El Metro. After these recording ventures, I travel home to New York City and ride the subway listening on headphones to the sound of other city’s trains. Traveling in cities outside one’s own brings about a heightened state of awareness. My aim was to experience this state of consciousness at home.
While playing the sound map of Mexico DF over the existing sounds of the subway in New York, I found that I braced myself when the wheels in my headphones alerted me to an upcoming stop, even if the real subway was between locations. I became less aware of my position within the city, yet more aware of my surroundings within the car.
At the 2006 Conflux festival in New York City, I experimented with the idea of using headphones to enhance the attentiveness of passengers to the sounds produced by daily travel.
I decided to time the subway stops from many of the mass transit systems around the world to stops along the G-train in NYC. With this global sound map of mass transit overlaying an existing system, it’s possible to examine how much one relies on sense of hearing to know his or her location on a map. How does the journey from point A to B change if the normal ding of the door opening and the announcement ““Einsteigen bitte. Zurückbleiben bitte.” is replaced with, “Stand clear of the closing door please?”
