Special Section

Sound and the SocialOrganization of Space

Guest Edited by Tara Rodgers

Fifteen Years of LMJ CDs

A WORD OF THANKS

Volume 1 Anthology of Music for the 21st Century Curated by Larry Polansky Works by K. Atchley, Larry Austin, Marc Battier, Graeme Gerrard,Daniel Goode, Craig Harris, Sarah Hopkins, Ed Osborn, StevenPaxton with Paula Claire, David Rothenberg, Simon Running, I Wayan Sadra, Erling Wold, Amnon Wolman

Volume 2 Interaction: New Music for Gamelan Curated by Jody Diamond Works by A. W. Sutrisna, Barbara Benary, I Wayan Sadra, LarryPolansky, Rahayu Supanggah, Lou Harrison

Volume 3 Vocal Neighborhoods: A Walk through the Post-Sound-Poetry Landscape Curated by Larry Wendt Works by Brenda Hutchinson, Paul Dutton, Valeri Scherstjanoi,Amanda Stewart, Trevor Wishart, Henri Chopin, David Moss

Volume 4 Música Electroacústica de Compositores Latinoamericanos Curated by Ricardo Dal Farra Works by León Biriotti, José Augusto Mannis, Carlos Vázquez,Roberto Morales-Manzanares, Pablo Freire, Andrés Posada, AdinaIzarra, Ricardo Dal Farra

Volume 5 Innovation in Contemporary Japanese Composition Curated by Marc Battier with Mamoru Fujieda, Hinoharu Matsumotoand Kazuo Uehara Works by Ichiro Nodaira, Masahiro Miwa, Mamoru Fujieda, YujiTakahashi, Hinoharu Matsumoto, Shigenobu Nakamura, KazuoUehara

Volume 6 The Lyre’s Island: Some Australian Music, Sound Art and Design Curated by Douglas Kahn Works by Percy Aldridge Grainger with Burnett Cross, Rainer Linz,Sherre DeLys, Joyce Hinterding, Jodi Rose, Frances Dyson, PaulCarter

Volume 7 Cocks Crow, Dogs Bark: New Compositional Intentions Curated by Larry Polansky Works by Warren Burt, Laurie Spiegel, Daniel Goode, GordonMonro, Christian Wolff, Tom Johnson, Charles Ames, Mary Simoni

Volume 8 Ghosts and Monsters: Technology and Personality in Contemporary Music Curated by Matthias Osterwold Works by Alexander Abramovich Krejn, John Cage, Paul De Marinis,Robert Ashley, Cornelius Cardew, Henning Christiansen, AlvinLucier, Peter Cusack and Nicolas Collins, Shelley Hirsch, FriederButzmann, Oval, Michael Snow

Volume 9 Power and Responsibility: Converted to Streaming between Machines Curated by Guy Van Belle Works and Images by Anne Wellmer, Audiorom, Barbara Held,BMB.con, Chris Brown, Clay Chaplin, Elisabeth Schimana, GNUsic,Greg Schiemer, Hannah Bosma and Boris Nieuwenhuijzen, HeikoRecktenwald, Jane Dowe, Kim Cascone, Lowell Cross, Miekal And,Phill Niblock, Piet Van Wijmeersch/Sola Produxies, AtauTanaka/Sensorband, Sergi Jordá, Stevie Wishart, SukandarKartadinata, Terre Thaemlitz, Todor Todorov, Software by ScotDraves, Andi Freeman/Deepdisc, Chino Shuichi, Atau Tanaka, Tom Demeyer

Volume 10 Southern Cones: Music Out of Africa and South America Curated by Jürgen Bräuninger Works by Lukas Ligeti, Diego Luzuriaga, FELEMA (Feya Faku, MondeLex Futshane, Mark Grimshaw), Eduardo Reck Miranda, DanielWyman, Damián Keller, Aldo Brizzi, Jürgen Bräuninger, RodrigoSigal, TIMELESS (Bruce Cassidy and Pops Mohamed), Didier Guigue,Kurt Dahlke

Volume 11 Not Necessarily “English Music” Curated by David Toop Works by AMM, Max Eastley, Intermodulation, Frank Perry, MichaelParsons & Howard Skempton, Daphne Oram, abAna, Hugh Davies,Robert Worby, Lol Coxhill & Steve Miller, Spontaneous MusicOrchestra, The People Band, Evan Parker & Paul Lytton, JohnStevens, Steve Beresford, Cornelius Cardew & Jane Manning, RonGeesin, Gentle Fire, Rain in the Face, Ranulph Glanville, DerekBailey, The Campiello Band, Mike Cooper, A Touch of the Sun, TheScratch Orchestra, Frank Perry, Mongezi Feza & Chris McGregor

Volume 12 From Gdansk till Dawn Curated by Christian Scheib and Susanna Niedermayr Works by tigrics, Olga+Jozef, Wolfram, nicron, EA, Daniel Matej,Borut Savski, Molr Drammaz, The Abstract Monarchy Trio, Arszyn,Vladimir Djambazov, Jeanne Frémaux, Arkona, Vapori del Cuore,Martin Burlas

Volume 13 Splitting Bits, Closing Loops: Sound on Sound Curated by Philip Sherburne Works by AGF, M. Behrens, Alejandra & Aeron, DAT Politics, StephanMathieu, Francisco López, Institut fuer Feinmotorik, Janek Schaefer,Steve Roden, Scanner, Stephen Vitiello

Volume 14 Composers inside Electronics: Music after David Tudor Curated by Ron Kuivila Works by David Tudor

Volume 15Vox ex MachinaCurated by Jaap BlonkWorks by Tomomi Adachi, Vincent Barras and Jacques Demierre,Christian Bök, Anne-James Chaton, Ricardo Dal Farra, KennethGoldsmith, Daniel Goode, Américo Rodrigues, Sprechakte X/Treme,Lasse Marhaug (with Jaap Blonk and Maja Ratkje), Jelle Meander,Julien Ottavi, Jörg Piringer

Leonardo Music Journal thanks the curators of and the contributors to our CD series for 15 years of fascinating music,sound, images and software. We also thank Tom Erbe, who has remastered and engineered all 15 years of LMJ CDs.

Visit leonardo.info to order back issues of the journal (including CD). Also available via <www.cdemusic.org>.

LEONARDO MUSIC JOURNAL, Vol. 16, pp. 49–50, 2006 49

This section collects recent projects that address “the spatial relevance of sound andthe sonic relevance of space” while foregrounding sound as cultural process and product [1]. Theworks speak to such questions as: How can cultural or natural patterns produce sounding spaces orinspire musical form? How might we read sounds and silences as indicators of social practice andimplicit power structures? How do sounds affect our navigations of physical space and reverberatewithin the spaces of personal and cultural imagination?

Carrie Bodle’s Sonification/Listening Up is a grand gesture that uses sound to connect the socialspace of architecture with oscillating waveform patterns in the upper atmosphere. Of particularinterest to me are the social interactions that occurred around the installation’s setup and presenta-tion at I.M. Pei’s Green Building at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Bodle negotiatedwith MIT to resolve public safety issues, with fabricators to construct the speaker fixtures and with acompany of window cleaners to hang the speakers on the 23-story facade. While these preparationsare not unusual in mounting a large-scale installation, in this case the bustle of human activity thatthe project catalyzed—including students playing Frisbee at the opening—became an integral partof the piece [2]. Sound animated the social space around the building, lending another performa-tive layer to Bodle’s juxtaposition of the different temporalities that characterize cyclical soundwaves, the routines of human existence and the lifespan of an architectural form.

Social patterns congeal into musical structure in Matt Volla’s BARTology. BARTology is a manifesta-tion of what Jane Jacobs called “the art form of the city,” or of complexity theorist John Holland’sobservation that “a city is a pattern in time” [3]. The project began with a series of 80 drawingsdocumenting movements of BART commuters. From these patterns and situations, Volla derived a musical syntax and series of scores for instrumental duets [4]. While 20th-century avant-gardistslike Russolo and Schaeffer embraced the “dynamism” and mechanical roar of the train, Vollainstead amplifies the 21st-century social routines that occur within the spaces of public transpor-tation—-the overlaps and near misses of human contact, the fluctuant crowd energy at differenthours, the loops we repeat day after day.

Sound and social aspects of space are likewise central to artist and experimental geographerTrevor Paglen’s work, but in the Recording Carceral Landscapes project, it is the cultural power ofsilence that is most deafening. Paglen set out to explore the soundscapes of California prisons inpart to seek an aural response to the visualist discourse that dominates the history of prisons. What he uncovered was the sound of a “banal uneventfulness” that reveals both the dominationand silencing of the incarcerated and the disgraceful silence of a society in which prisons are aprofitable industry.

The sounds captured by Paglen’s Prison Infiltration and Surveillance Suit might well be meta-tagged and included in Chris Kubick and Anne Walsh’s database. Indeed, the American culture that pro-duces and perpetuates an imprisoned underclass is the same one that obsessively catalogs the soundeffects of violence and death that feature prominently in Kubick and Walsh’s work. In rescuingthese cultural objects from their usual commercial functionality, Kubick and Walsh pull back thecurtain on a typically unexplored aspect of Hollywood film production, and reveal the degree towhich sound effects construct our knowledge of the “real” world. Our relationships to landscapesare in fact layered with the cinematic experiences of space that populate our imagination.

The “shifting and subjective geography” that Kubick and Walsh describe also characterizes thework of Beth Coleman and Howard Goldkrand. Beginning with their SoundLab multimedia eventsin the mid-1990s, Coleman and Goldkrand have conducted many experiments at the nexus of

SPECIAL SECTION INTRODUCTION

Sound and the Social Organization of Space

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©2006 ISAST

sound, electronic interface and architecture. Their work evokes the intersections betweenour perceptions of space and our relationships to technology. The Vernacular software offeredusers the opportunity to mix multimedia objects in 3D virtual space and thus explore “theinterface ecology in which we already exist” [5]. In the same spirit, Waken, their installation atthe New Museum of Contemporary Art, uses generative code to create a “sonic prairie”—aspontaneously evolving landscape that emulates patterns in nature. Here, the code itself is asprawling built environment, a pregnant space that spawns sounds and structures of its own.

By rendering aspects of living systems in sounds and silence, each of the artists includedherein re-informs our perceptions of the geospatial and political landscapes we inhabit. A centuryafter the Futurists embraced the cacophony of modern urban life, these artists offer powerfulcommentaries on sound, space and contemporary human experience.

TARA RODGERS

McGill University853 Sherbrooke Street WestMontreal, QC H3A 2T6E-mail: <info@safety-valve.org>Web site: <www.safety-valve.org>

References

1. Achim Wollscheid, “Does the Song Remain the Same?” in Brandon LaBelle and Steve Roden, eds., Site of Sound: of Architecture and theEar (Los Angeles: Errant Bodies Press, 1999) p. 6.

2. Carrie Bodle, personal correspondence with the author, 7 January 2006.

3. Quoted in Steven Johnson, Emergence (New York: Scribner, 2001) pp. 51 and 27.

4. Drawings and musical examples are available at: <www.xaul.com> (accessed January 2006).

5. From the Vernacular project summary: <http://connected.waag.org/projects.html> (accessed January 2006).

Tara Rodgers (Analog Tara) is a musician and writer. Her work has been recognized by organizations including theInternational Songwriting Competition, the Frog Peak Experimental Music Prize, the Webby Awards and the FulbrightProgram. She was recently a visiting professor of Sound at the Museum School in Boston, and her book Pink Noises:Women on Electronic Music and Sound is forthcoming from Duke University Press.

50 Special Section Introduction

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©2006 ISAST Bodle, Sonification/Listening Up 51

SONIFICATION/LISTENING UPCarrie Bodle, 1054 Summit AvenueEast, Seattle, WA 98102, U.S.A. E-mail: <cbodle@alum.mit.edu>. Web site: <www.sonifications.com>.

Received 25 December 2005. Solicited by Tara Rodgers for the Special Section“Sound and the Social Organization of Space.”

Sonification/Listening Up was installed9–16 September 2005 on the Massachu-setts Institute of Technology’s Building54. In this temporary intervention, I focus on my interest in working in thepublic context with sound througharchitecture. Thirty-five public-addressspeakers were distributed across the 23-story façade of I.M. Pei’s GreenBuilding (known to the MIT commu-nity as Building 54) (Fig. 1). By invitingpassersby to listen, this project utilizedsound as a representation of data pat-terns in the ionosphere, the upper partof the atmosphere, recorded by theAtmospheric Science Group at the MITHaystack Observatory. Changes in thefabric of ion/electron distributionacross several layers of altitude in theionosphere are transformed intosounds that make research conducted at MIT audible to the public. I createdSonification/Listening Up in collabora-tion with Philip Erickson of the Hay-stack Observatory.

The speaker arrangement on Building 54’s façade resembles a down-ward-sloping graph. This pattern isrepresentative of the spectral frequencydistribution of the sounds, which varyboth by duration and in pitch. Thebroadcast sounds are in fact frequency-scaled versions of ion-acoustic pressurewaves within the hot ionospheric gas,which changes in a complex interactionwith the sun’s varying output. Sevendifferent altitude levels in the iono-sphere have been used to construct ion-acoustic sounds that are broadcast fromseven layers of speakers on the build-ing’s façade. The ion-acoustic datareflects the makeup of the ionosphereabove Building 54, ranging from 100km to 800 km, hence the seven subdivi-sions of speaker rows on the building.

The Haystack Observatory is cur-rently the only observatory in the conti-

sions. Knowing and predicting theconstitution of the ionosphere hasbecome an integral goal for commer-cial interests as well as a driver of thenational Space Weather effort (seewww.haystack.mit.edu/atm/mho/index.html>) funded by the NationalScience Foundation. Sonification/

nental United States that uses ground-based sensing techniques to mapchanges in the makeup of the iono-sphere. Such changes, especially duringperiods of disturbance caused by solarwinds, can affect the precision of GPStechnology and other human-madelong-distance and satellite transmis-

Sound and the Social Organization of Space

Fig. 1. Carrie Bodle, Sonification/Listening Up, ground view, 35 public-address speakers attached to the façade of MIT Building 54, Cambridge, MA, September 2005. (© Carrie Bodle)

Listening Up puts a spotlight from an artist’s perspective on nearly fivedecades of study by the Haystackresearch group at MIT.

Sonification/Listening Up is part of mylarger interest in projects that take theform of temporary large-scale publicart installations and explore multichan-nel sound setups. My interventions aresituated in outdoor spaces and aretypically installed across architecturalfacades. The repetitive grid of rationalarchitecture is characteristic of thefaçades I choose. Employing the gridsystem used by the architects, I placemy speakers so that spatial placementwould correspond with sonic distribu-tion. Listeners are engaged to look upas they listen. What they see is Building54, host of the Earth and PlanetaryScience departments. They see thegeometric arrangement of 35 speakersthat temporarily occupy the façade.What they hear are varying tonalitiesderived by ion-acoustic patterns. Thesesounds resemble pulsing tones thatchange in pitch and volume at constantduration. Each speaker is driven by aseparate sound channel that emits aunique sound.

and 1,000 times per second, the archi-tecture that hosts the interventionremains at first glance unchanged since 1964. What has changed is themindset behind the building. Once anicon for the newly established field ofmeteorology, Building 54 today is veiledwith the neutral look of the researchinstitution. The temporary speakerarrangement casts an acoustic light on what is hidden behind current sci-entific research as it makes the invisibleaudible.

Carrie Bodle’s work explores history, memoryand social dialogue in architectural contextsthrough artistic interventions. Recent worksinclude Sonification/Listening Up (2005),Oscillations (2004) and Boltworks (2002),which take the form of temporary large-scalepublic-art installations that explore multi-channel sound setups. Recently she was anartist-in-residence at IBM Watson Collabor-ative User Experience Group through Bos-ton Cyberarts with her piece Wikipedia/Soundscape (2005), exhibited at the DeCor-dova Museum. Her work has also been shownat the Location One Gallery in New York Cityand was webcast internationally by radioarte-mobile through the Center for Advanced Vi-sual Studies at MIT.

The outside locations for my soundinstallations are of particular interest to me since the listener is no longerfrontally exposed to the piece. Thesound origin affects interior inhabitantsin different ways than it does outsidelisteners who have come specifically to experience the piece. Due to itsscale, the installation’s sounds extendfar beyond the perimeter of the build-ing. Witnesses told me that soundscould be heard across the Charles Riverinto downtown Boston. Perhaps a win-dow washer across the river hangingfrom a downtown high-rise heard afaint “weoo-weoo-weoo” and was puz-zled by its origin. The sounds thatoriginated from above are now pervading below.

I am interested in this notion ofintentional listening and accidentalhearing; perhaps this is part of mymotivation in working with architec-ture. Architecture serves as habitat and omnipresent environment—-always surrounding, always present.What fascinate me are the differenttemporal scales of architecture andsound. While the sounds that were usedfor the installation cycle between 200

52 Bodle, Sonification/Listening Up

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ANATOMY OF ANAMALGAMATIONBeth Coleman, P.O. Box 991, New York, NY 10002, U.S.A. E-mail: <info@soundlab.org>. Web site: <www.soundlab.org>.

Howard Goldkrand, P.O. Box 991, New York, NY 10002, U.S.A. E-mail: <info@soundlab.org>. Web site: <www.soundlab.org>.

Received 25 December 2005. Solicited by Tara Rodgers for the Special Section“Sound and the Social Organization of Space.”

Waken. One finds the disruption of the moment between: informationtrails, activated polymers, vibrations.The equation is set. The outcome is not.

Waken is a full-room installation that is constructed from multimedia thatinclude cardboard, shellac, gold leaf,six-channel surround mix, the audioand design softwares Max/MSP andRhino, and a topographical “map” inthe form of digital animation. It is agenerative sculpture that utilizes threedistinct algorithms through which thecomposition is created. Waken con-structs a sonic prairie where diversity,accident and spontaneous growth hap-pen in sound. The six-channel audiomix is dispersed through 24 speakersgrouped in four arrays. The arrays wehave named “flower clusters” (Fig. 1),for they are designed to simulate theorganic behavior of flower interactivity.The movement of the sound, fromspeaker to speaker, is run from analgorithm, the Beesim patch, whichtakes its cue from the honeybee. Whena “bee” arrives to sample the “pollen” ofa flower cluster there is an exchange ofenergy and information. The pollinatoras information activist.

The Beesim patch is a fraternal twinto the flower cluster, in the sense thatboth are modeled on interrelated phe-nomena in the natural world. One doesnot exist without the other, yet theirstructures and effects strongly differ.One algorithmic set lets loose the beesin the terrain—the pollinators. This setarticulates the rules for the movement/distribution of the sound to the speak-ers. The other algorithmic set desig-nates the parameters for generativesound modules, the “flowers.” Thethird patch system generates the semi-random synthesis of Waken audio sam-ples (pre-recorded music composed forthe piece). This is a granular synthesismodulation that is more or less the

Waken builds across a network ofgenerative signals. This is all within the parameters of the “man made,” yetone starts to doubt the total mastery of knowing and instead to trust theintuition of making something that is becoming itself. It is funny how themore technology we get involved with,the more we come into contact with the workings of the natural world . . . or at least our metaphors of it. “Arethere any borders?” becomes a perti-nent question for us. Is technology inour nature? Daily we are saturated byinvisible waves carrying tons of infor-mation. Our lives are impacted by this material. Sometimes it is nice toimmerse ourselves in the questions ofcommunication and watch our robotsgrow up.

The New York–based artists Beth Colemanand Howard Goldkrand began collaboratingin 1995 with the SoundLab Cultural Alchemyproject, a nomadic multimedia installationand event (see <www.soundlab.org>). Cole-man and Goldkrand work with diverse mate-rials including sculpture, installation, sound,code and text. Their collaborative and indi-vidual projects have been exhibited interna-tionally in venues such as the WhitneyMuseum of American Art, P.S.1 Museum ofContemporary Art, Mirror’s Edge interna-tional exhibition, James Cohan Gallery, theVenice Biennale 2004, ARC/Musée d’Artmoderne de la Ville de Paris, MIT ListGallery, EAI, and Lincoln Center, and withthe work of architects Johnston Marklee & Associates.

audio equivalent of throwing seeds into a field.

Our project starts with these algo-rithmic impulses. In Hive City, the sculpture that sits in the center of theinstallation, a variation of this impulseis woven together with stretchy, stringyand fleshly polymers, catching a shake,a shimmer of movement. We were looking for a dynamic material to workwith for the physical installation of thepiece that would echo the morphologi-cal characteristics of the sound field.For the sculpture to behave as a part of the Waken system, the material hadto be flexible yet weight bearing, like arubber band. We met with Lorna Gib-son, of MIT’s Department of MaterialsScience and Engineering, and shesuggested polymers that are beingdeveloped to be used as synthetic mus-cle. The concept floored us—of course,an actuating polymer to create thesynthetic movement of a mathematicalawakening.

The set of the sculpture, its densebody of finite situation, should some-how formally relay the infinite messageof the audio. That is to say, the algorith-mic, or generative, aspect of the projectis also manifested sculpturally, wheremateriality spans the visible and tangi-ble as well as the invisible and intan-gible of sound. The code of behavior isthe same, but the forms are generatedacross a continuum of media. The 3Dmap of Waken, housed within the instal-lation, is an animation.

Coleman and Goldkrand, Anatomy of an Amalgamation 53

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Fig. 1. Beth Coleman and HowardGoldkrand, Waken, multimediainstallation and generative sculp-ture, 2005. (© Beth Coleman andHoward Goldkrand) Waken is asonic prairie where diversity,accident and spontaneous growthhappen in sound. The six-channelaudio mix is dispersed through 24 speakers grouped in fourarrays. The arrays are called“flower clusters,” for they aredesigned to simulate the organicbehavior of flower interactivity.

SOUND LIBRARY: A MOTION PICTURE EVENTChris Kubick, 345 Kroeber Hall #3750,University of California at Berkeley,Berkeley, CA 94720, U.S.A. E-mail: <info@doublearchive.com>.Web site: <www.doublearchive.com>.

Anne Walsh, 345 Kroeber Hall #3750,University of California at Berkeley,Berkeley, CA 94720, U.S.A. E-mail: <info@doublearchive.com>.Web site: <www.doublearchive.com>.

Received 25 December 2005. Solicited by Tara Rodgers for the Special Section“Sound and the Social Organization of Space.”

In our recent works, including SpiritArray, Full Metal Jackets (Fig. 1) and Flesh ++ Blood (all 2005), we workedwith and investigated libraries of soundeffects. These sound effects have namessuch as:

• Globe Pulse Electronic Purr Element

• Ghost Voice—-Spirit in a Bottle—-Electronic_Unpleasant Feeling

• Evil Spirits Rise, Version 2• Eerie Descending Voices as

Angels from Hell Gather Together

• Disembodied Souls Scream andWhoosh Around for Bordello ofBlood

screams appropriated for new lives,whether as voices for other camels or asan element to be used in combinationwith other sounds to create the voice ofKing Kong. The fact that the creators ofthese sounds are generally not creditedand retain no creative control overtheir work is more evidence for the lackof respect these sounds command asaesthetic objects.

Since the early days of sound cinema,the potentialities of the sound effecthave been reviled and degraded. RenéClair was skeptical, writing that “theusefulness of such noises is often ques-tionable. . . . After we have heard acertain number of sound films, and thefirst element of surprise has worn off,we are led to the unexpected discoverythat the world of noises seems far morelimited than we had thought” [1]. TheRussians, led by Eisenstein, furtherarticulated the avant-garde’s distrust ofsynchronous sound, adding that “soundrecording will proceed on a naturalisticlevel, exactly corresponding with themovement on the screen . . . to usesound in this way will destroy the cul-ture of montage” [2]. That was then,however, and this is now—-how couldthey know, in 1930, that the humblesound effect would actually change theway we hear the world and, in so doing,change the world itself ?

Hollywood productions these daysare much, much bigger than life. No

• Gliss Made from Charm Very HighEndy

• Dark Spooky Jungle AmbianceThe libraries that are collections of

these sounds are both products of andtools for the film industry. They exist ascatalogs of previous productions or ascollections made specifically to supportthe making of films.

The library that we are working withis a large, searchable digital database of more than 300,000 discrete files.This is a rather mind-boggling number,quite a bit larger than the “10,000things” that ancient Chinese literatureused to refer to all of the physicalworld. Then again, this library is notlimited to this world alone: It is also fullof the sounds of distant galaxies, dreamworlds, the future—-and, of course,ancient China too. It is an archive thatseeks to represent the entire spectrumof sound and to put that world at theeasy reach of sound designers who usethese sounds to make sneakers squeakin chase scenes at a theater near you.

Are these sounds, however, sounds at all? It cannot be denied that there issomething pejorative in the term soundeffect. The term seems to suggest thatthese are just the shadows of sounds,effects that serve as stand-ins for realsounds. They are stand-ins, in a sense,because they are recordings, and per-haps still more so because they aresounds removed from context, camel

54 Kubick and Walsh, Sound Library: A Motion Picture Event

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Fig. 1. Chris Kubick and Anne Walsh, Full Metal Jackets, a multichannel, generative sound and text installation, 30 × 12 × 12 ft, 2005. (© Chris Kubick and Anne Walsh. Photo © Anne Walsh.) The sounds and texts are pulled from a large commercial database of Hollywoodsound effects and are output using proprietary software over a 32-channel array of 1-inch neo-dymium speakers [3].

longer content to show us the world,they participate in creating the worldwe live in, as well as the ones we imag-ine. The sum of one’s understanding of the sound of the Saharan desert iscontained in one’s cinematic experi-ence. What does South Central LosAngeles sound like at midnight? AskHollywood. Even simple things, such as the squeak of a sneaker being chased some paragraphs ago, are super-enhanced, ultra-vivid and ultra-presentin today’s blockbuster. These are subjec-tive worlds set free and superimposedon our own. As we consume andinhabit this culture, it consumes andinhabits us. For, as we remember whatbranches against a window sound likein movies, we notice them beating onthe glass outside our bedroom in ever-greater detail in our everyday world.That dripping sound in the night? It could be the faucet, but then again, it might be coming from the snarky guynext door, who just had his throat cutby Jason.

There is a shifting and subjectivegeography being developed here, andwould it not be fun if the next tenseinternational thriller were set inFrance, with cameo appearances byeverybody from Debord to Barthes toBourdieu to Baudrillard? The subject

Death. Since its debut at the 2002 WhitneyBiennial, the Art After Death audio CDs,entitled Conversations with the Countessof Castiglione, Yves Klein Speaks! and Visits with Joseph Cornell, have been heardon public radio in the U.S.A., Germany, Denmark, Australia, England and Canada.ARCHIVE has given performance lectures atmuseums and other institutions throughoutthe U.S.A. and Europe. In 2005 ARCHIVE’ssound-library works were seen at San Fran-cisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, at Bal-timore’s Center for Art and Visual Cultureand at the Royal Academy of Art in London.

References

1. René Clair, “The Art of Sound,” in ElizabethWeis/John Belton ed., Film Sound: Theory and Prac-tice (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1985) pp.92–96.

2. Sergei M. Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin and G.V.Alexandrov, “A Statement on the Sound Film,” inSergei Eisenstein, Film Form (New York: HarcourtBrace, 1949) pp. 257–260.

3. The keyword used to pull sound and texts fromthe database is “shell casings”; this search located ap-proximately 500 discrete files. These are the soundsof various types of empty bullet casings falling onmany different surfaces: They are the empty ghostsof Hollywood’s epic firing squads. Removed fromtheir usual mix, however, they are delicate, gentlypercussive metal pings that rain down a wall in or-ganic patterns. A nearby video monitor displays thelibrary file names of these sounds as they play, dis-tinguishing .32-caliber rounds from .44s, concretefrom dirt and “Eliminator” bullets from “Old West-ern Scroungers.”

of this film would be, of course, mean-ing itself. Its main character: a personcharged with archiving and namingevery sound in a sound library that willbe sent into outer space in 2010 as atime capsule. The taxonomist of sonicrepresentations up against the forces ofmythology, futurology, political science,religion, sexual politics, popular enter-tainment, corporate culture, databaselogicians, sound designers, etc., etc.:How many “swooshes” will she include?Will there be an equal number of maleand female monsters? Will the sound of suicide bombings in Lebanon bemeta-tagged in the same way as suicidebombings in Baghdad? What adjectiveswill describe them? Will she include thesounds of psychic surgery? What stor-age format will she choose? Will anyonelistening hear the difference between aslow, medium or fast stab? You will haveto watch Sound Library: A Motion PictureEvent to find out.

Artists Chris Kubick and Anne Walsh cur-rently live in Oakland, California, and workcollaboratively under the name ARCHIVE.ARCHIVE works with a variety of formatsand tools, including performance lectures, spoken-word CDs, video games, exhibitionsand works on paper. From 2001 to 2004ARCHIVE produced the project Art After

Kubick and Walsh, Sound Library: A Motion Picture Event 55

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RECORDING CARCERALLANDSCAPESTrevor Paglen, Department of Geography, 507 McCone Hall #4740,Berkeley, CA 94720-4740, U.S.A. E-mail: <tpaglen@berkeley.edu>. Web site: <www.paglen.org>.

Received 25 December 2005. Solicited by Tara Rodgers for the Special Section“Sound and the Social Organization of Space.”

After a sharp hiss of compressed air, thevault door slams shut with the sharpbang of metal on metal. Concrete corri-dors reverberate like the walls of anancient and long-forgotten tomb. A distorted voice on a small speakermomentarily fills the hallway, followedby the click of a walkie-talkie shuttingoff. A guard’s keys jangle on a ringagainst his leg. However, the most dis-tinctive thing about Pelican Bay StatePrison, the nation’s premier Supermaxprison, is how quiet it is. There are noshouts, no rambling televisions, noblaring radios. There is a delicate calmin the Security Housing Unit (SHU), an underground chamber where morethan 2,000 prisoners are kept in solitaryconfinement 23 1⁄2 hours a day for yearsat a time. The tape is rolling.

The Recording Carceral Landscapesproject began with a simple idea: tomake field recordings at a handful ofCalifornia prisons, compare them toone another and situate the resultantsoundscapes within a history of prisonarchitecture and penal policy. Thepoint was to ask whether an investiga-tion into prison soundscapes wouldcomplicate, undermine or somehowaugment the unquestioned “ocular-centrisms” and “panopticisms” thatanimate so many discourses around the history of prisons [1].

When I began to make phone calls toarrange the recordings, I quickly real-ized that the project was not going tobe so straightforward. The Departmentof Corrections informed me that therewas no chance that they would allow meto make the recordings I was interestedin. Now I was very interested: The proj-ect was moving out of a textual regimeand into a legal one. Over the nextseveral years, I made contacts withinthe prison system and in legal andactivist communities—-all the whiledesigning and refining a high-qualityyet stealthy recording apparatus thatanyone with enough gumption coulduse to make covert field recordings.

nation. It is silence about the fact thatthe state has constructed over 20 newprisons since 1984 and has filled themby inventing new crimes, by puttingpeople in prison for things thatrecently entailed no jail time, and by creating longer and even longersentences [3]. The silence of the SHUis the silence of a society organizedaround the myth that public safetycomes not from a “chicken in everypot” but from “three strikes and you’re out.”

Yet for all the ways in which thesilence of this underground prisonarticulates the unspoken and unac-knowledged structures of the state,there is little else to learn by listeningto Pelican Bay. In seeking the core ofthe prison-industrial complex, I hadassumed that I would find it in thedarkest recesses of the state’s mostnotorious prison. I was wrong. To“record” California’s carceral land-scapes, I would have to look far beyond the state’s prisons and seek out their social, economic and culturalarchitects.

These experiments with micro-mics,wireless transmitters, customized pre-amps and other gadgets evolved intothe Prison Infiltration and SurveillanceSuit (Fig. 1), a cheap suit complete withclip-on tie (standard attire in Californiaprisons), an American flag pin andhidden hardware for audio and videorecording.

After reviewing tapes from the SHUat Pelican Bay, it was the silence thatstruck me most: the banal uneventful-ness at the core of one of the mostbrutal prisons in the California sys-tem—-a system that is the paradigm ofthe “Prison Industrial Complex” [2].The recordings revealed no sinistersecrets, no hidden truths, no smokingguns. The silence of the SHU is thesilence of both “business as usual” andtotal domination. The tapes seemed todocument the silence of 165,000 prison-ers quarantined in the poorest andremotest corners of the Golden State,and the shameful silence of a societythat spends more money on incarcera-tion than higher education and hassome of the worst public schools in the

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Fig. 1. Trevor Paglen, Prison Infiltration and Surveillance Suit, business suit, pinhole camera,micro-microphones, recording devices, 2001–2005. (© Trevor Paglen)

I spent the next couple of yearsattending legislative hearings and meet-ings in the State Capitol, haunting thehalls of the California CorrectionalPeace Officers’ Association (CCPOA,the powerful prison guards’ union),and tracking municipal financiers suchas Siebert, Branford, Shank and Co.,who helped fund California’s newestprison in Delano. My goal was to docu-ment the ways that the prison-industrialcomplex extended from distant prisonsin the hinterlands back toward thestate’s political and cultural centers,and to listen to the ways in which massincarceration is constitutive of—andconstituted by—the quotidian workingsof the state. The silence of the SHUhad taught me to seek out the banaland boring—the economic and politi-cal dynamics that are in plain sight, yetsomehow even more invisible than thecavernous chambers of the Supermax.

1995) p. 229. For the best analysis of California’sprison-industrial-complex, see Ruth Wilson Gilmore,Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Oppositionin Globalizing California (Berkeley, CA: Univ. of Cali-fornia Press, 2006).

3. Gilmore [2].

Trevor Paglen is an artist, writer and exper-imental geographer working out of the De-partment of Geography at the University ofCalifornia, Berkeley, where he is working ona dissertation/book about the spatial aspectsof military secrecy. His work involves deliber-ately blurring the lines between social science,contemporary art and a host of even more ob-scure disciplines in order to construct unfa-miliar yet meticulously researched ways tointerpret the world around us. In the springof 2005, Paglen completed Recording Car-ceral Landscapes, which was first shown asa solo exhibition at the LAB in San Francisco.He is now working on a sustained investiga-tion of secret military bases and activities inthe American Southwest. Documentation fromthese and other projects are online at <www.paglen.org>.

In order to hear the architecture of the prison system, I had to listen to the places where prisons rose with the stroke of a pen, where racism wasmanufactured and fostered for privategain, and where one person’s gain inthe abstract world of finance meantthat the state would have more prisonbeds to fill. To record the prison sys-tem, in other words, I only had to walkdown my own street, with the tapesrolling.

Documentation of my RecordingCarceral Landscapes project is available at <paglen.com/carceral>.

References and Notes1. The obvious and most famous example is, ofcourse, Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: TheBirth of the Prison, Alan Sheridan, trans. (New York:Vintage, 1995).

2. The phrase “prison-industrial complex” first ap-pears in Mike Davis, “Hell Factories in the Field: APrison-Industrial-Complex,” The Nation (20 February

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BARTOLOGYMatt Volla, 63 Yosemite Avenue, Oakland, CA 94611, U.S.A. E-mail: <matt@xaul.com>. Web site: <www.xaul.com>.

Received 25 December 2005. Solicited by Tara Rodgers for the Special Section“Sound and the Social Organization of Space.”

BARTology began as an investigationinto the space of public transportation.Every day, geography forced me to rideBay Area Rapid Transit (BART), thesubway system of the San Francisco BayArea. I drew maps that documented thepaths of every commuter on my car ofthe train (Fig. 1): the doors from whichthey entered or exited and the seatsthey sat in or the places they stood. I drew a bird’s-eye view of the car andmade four rows of seats that filled thecar. Months later a cello player namedHugh Livingston asked me to composea piece of music for cello and trumpet.When we met for the first time to play,

on the time of the day in which the ridetakes place: During rush hour the musi-cians might be instructed to play as fastas they can; for late-night trains theymight be instructed to play as thoughthey are drunk. Each train ride isscored for string-and-horn duet; oneplayer “plays” the people that are seatedor standing and the other player playsthe people that are entering and exit-ing. The nature of the instrumentdetermines which role each playerplays: Strings are generally good forrepresenting seated passengers becausethey can be plucked to create individ-ual sound events. Horns provide a goodlong or short sustained tone that cre-ates a trajectory like that of a walkingpassenger on the way to a BART sta-tion. The duets have included: AliciaByer on bassoon and Honde Erdem onviolin; Matt Volla on trumpet and HughLivingston on cello; Daniel St. Andreon double bass and Patrice Scanlon onclarinet; and Jen Baker on tromboneand Brett Larner on koto.

The movement of people on public

I noticed the four rows of strings on thecello. As Livingston plucked the stringsI thought about people walking downthe rows of seats and sitting down.Choosing one seat over the other on an empty train was like choosing onenote over the other on a long string. I decided to translate the drawings intoa musical score for Livingston on celloand me on trumpet to play. It laterevolved into a series contained in abook called BARTology.

BARTology is a series of 10 drawingsmapping out people’s movements onBART at all hours of the day and nightin order to capture different types ofcommuting. Each map has an accompa-nying sound composition. The mapsdocument where people sit, the doorsthey enter and exit and at which stopsthey enter and exit. This information is transposed to music notation usingsyntax based on the physicality of thetrain. For example, the seats located atthe very front of the train are pitchedhigh; seats located at the back of thetrain are pitched low. Tempo is based

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Fig. 1. 7.11.02, 10:35 PM, 16thStreet, San Francisco, to 19thStreet, Oakland, pencil onpaper, 2002. (© Matt Volla)

transportation provides an example ofthe contemporary nomad—-or rather,the unnomad. Nomads usually travel on a trajectory of a path in which anyreference point is between two lines(the location of the point is undeter-mined and can be fulfilled by a multi-plicity of points), whereas the route ofthe unnomad is a line in between twopoints (all entities are constant andimmobile). Nomads travel dependingon what they need at a particular time.When they need water, they traveltoward water. Their travel rarelyrepeats. The commuter is a good exam-ple of the unnomad. The latter’s highlyrepetitive trajectory illustrates thestructure of contemporary life. The

sions throughout the passage: i.e. stairs,escalator or elevator; waiting for thefront of the train or the back of thetrain. The rows become quantifiablewhen the commuter sits down. Thecommuter’s path, juxtaposed withother commuters’ paths, creates anorganic and flowing movement withinthe rectangular and static space of atrain station—-for string-and-hornduet.

Matt Volla received his MFA in electronic mu-sic at Mills College in Oakland, California,and now teaches film studies in San Francisco.He currently composes and produces music forfilm and video and drives to the beach in abiodiesel-fueled automobile.

time of movement is controlled andrepeats 5 days a week; the place ofmovement is controlled and repeats 5 days a week; there is financial controlover who can travel; the way in which totravel is controlled. The layers are stri-ated with control and regulation fromhome, to the train station, to the train,on the train, to work and back again.

Within these layers of striation (rowsof passengers, rows of seats, rows ofdoors, rows of trains, rows of entrancegates, rows of ticket machines, rows ofadvertisements, rows of security) move-ment is manipulated and its trajectoryis forced into rows. The movementfrom ticket machine to train seat is arow designed by the commuter’s deci-

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