A new school of sound gardening!
Jan. 18th, 2005 10:44 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusCitizens of Hakodate, Hokkaido! Students of the Future University! Please listen for a few minutes!
In fact, please listen for six weeks! Starting now and lasting for six weeks, we are making a listening project in Hakodate. It's called Lost Radio, Found Sound and it's happening at the Art Harbour and the Future University, as well as on the internet and all over town. My name is Momasu, pleased to meet you! Normally I'm a musician, but here in Hakodate I am a kikushi or 'head listener'. I want to listen to sounds, raw sounds. The sounds of nature, the sounds of work, the sounds of trains, the sounds of people. Your sounds, my sounds. I want to listen to everything. Everything except music! And I need your help.
Have you ever listened to random sounds just for pleasure? For instance, have you listened to the sound of cars passing on the street and tried to imagine it as waves on the sea? Has the sound of your footsteps in the icy snow sometimes reminded you of the sound of a bear snapping its mouth open and shut? Have you ever listened to the sounds made by the man fixing your computer – he goes 'um?' and 'ah!' – and thought of it as a kind of song? What if you could record that sound and play it back to people in another place, people who didn't know the real origin of that sound? You would make them use their imagination, right?
You know the back door, the place where people go to smoke? It's cold out there in the ice and snow, right? Well, what if we hid some tiny speakers there and played the sound of summer insects to those smokers? Maybe it would make them feel a little warmer in winter. Maybe it would bring summer images to their minds as they looked out over the snowy landscape.
If you ever had ideas like these, our project Lost Radio, Found Sound is the perfect excuse to carry them out. This is your chance to play with sound! We are interested in listening to sound recordings you've made – anything, as long as it's not music! With your recordings and our recordings we want to make a big bowl of 'sound soup', or perhaps – yeah, that's better – a 'sound garden'.
Let's be gardeners of sound! Let's take natural sounds and make something artificial out of them! Let's found the Hakodate otoniwashi-ryu, a new school of sound gardening! Let's make 'sound arrangements' and put them on a website and on speakers hidden here, hidden there, hidden around town. For six weeks, let's make Hakodate a place of surprising sounds, sounds that can make people dream. Let's take the normal sounds of one room and put them into another room where they are less normal. What's normal in one room is surprising and exotic in another. Let's take practical sounds and make them artistic. Let's take summer sounds and play them in winter. Ne?
So bring us your sounds! Bring them to our sound collection points at the Art Harbour and at the Future University. Record sounds with your keitai, with your digital camera, with your video camera, and bring them to us. We'll download them from your devices and upload them to the web, to the 24 hour streaming Lost Radio, Found Sound website.
We'll give your sounds a place in our sound garden. We are people who love all sounds, any sounds. (But not music. I mean, of course we really love music, but not now. Just now we are giving the other sounds their chance.) We love simple sounds, boring sounds, repetitive sounds, stupid sounds, sounds which are almost silence. It's fine to play our sounds in the background, just let them colour the air. We don't expect you to give them 100% of your attention. Our sounds are quite empty, but when you play them they fill the room subtly and give it a new feeling. They are humble sounds, but for six weeks they are the stars of Hakodate. They are sound weeds, but for six weeks we will make them sound flowers, found sound flowers. Let's wander through them, pleasantly lost!
In fact, please listen for six weeks! Starting now and lasting for six weeks, we are making a listening project in Hakodate. It's called Lost Radio, Found Sound and it's happening at the Art Harbour and the Future University, as well as on the internet and all over town. My name is Momasu, pleased to meet you! Normally I'm a musician, but here in Hakodate I am a kikushi or 'head listener'. I want to listen to sounds, raw sounds. The sounds of nature, the sounds of work, the sounds of trains, the sounds of people. Your sounds, my sounds. I want to listen to everything. Everything except music! And I need your help.
Have you ever listened to random sounds just for pleasure? For instance, have you listened to the sound of cars passing on the street and tried to imagine it as waves on the sea? Has the sound of your footsteps in the icy snow sometimes reminded you of the sound of a bear snapping its mouth open and shut? Have you ever listened to the sounds made by the man fixing your computer – he goes 'um?' and 'ah!' – and thought of it as a kind of song? What if you could record that sound and play it back to people in another place, people who didn't know the real origin of that sound? You would make them use their imagination, right?
You know the back door, the place where people go to smoke? It's cold out there in the ice and snow, right? Well, what if we hid some tiny speakers there and played the sound of summer insects to those smokers? Maybe it would make them feel a little warmer in winter. Maybe it would bring summer images to their minds as they looked out over the snowy landscape.
If you ever had ideas like these, our project Lost Radio, Found Sound is the perfect excuse to carry them out. This is your chance to play with sound! We are interested in listening to sound recordings you've made – anything, as long as it's not music! With your recordings and our recordings we want to make a big bowl of 'sound soup', or perhaps – yeah, that's better – a 'sound garden'.
Let's be gardeners of sound! Let's take natural sounds and make something artificial out of them! Let's found the Hakodate otoniwashi-ryu, a new school of sound gardening! Let's make 'sound arrangements' and put them on a website and on speakers hidden here, hidden there, hidden around town. For six weeks, let's make Hakodate a place of surprising sounds, sounds that can make people dream. Let's take the normal sounds of one room and put them into another room where they are less normal. What's normal in one room is surprising and exotic in another. Let's take practical sounds and make them artistic. Let's take summer sounds and play them in winter. Ne?
So bring us your sounds! Bring them to our sound collection points at the Art Harbour and at the Future University. Record sounds with your keitai, with your digital camera, with your video camera, and bring them to us. We'll download them from your devices and upload them to the web, to the 24 hour streaming Lost Radio, Found Sound website.
We'll give your sounds a place in our sound garden. We are people who love all sounds, any sounds. (But not music. I mean, of course we really love music, but not now. Just now we are giving the other sounds their chance.) We love simple sounds, boring sounds, repetitive sounds, stupid sounds, sounds which are almost silence. It's fine to play our sounds in the background, just let them colour the air. We don't expect you to give them 100% of your attention. Our sounds are quite empty, but when you play them they fill the room subtly and give it a new feeling. They are humble sounds, but for six weeks they are the stars of Hakodate. They are sound weeds, but for six weeks we will make them sound flowers, found sound flowers. Let's wander through them, pleasantly lost!
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
Where
Date: 2005-01-18 02:22 am (UTC)I want to hear. I want to play.
Re: Where
Date: 2005-01-18 02:29 am (UTC)I wish I could take
Date: 2005-01-18 02:23 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-01-18 02:38 am (UTC)oh well.
here is a sound project i did this summer:
http://goteborg.seths.se/viktorsjoberg/diary/
”A Gothenburg Diary (Summer 2004)”
...available for download in *.mp3 format.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-01-18 05:12 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-01-18 05:22 pm (UTC)the birds
Date: 2005-01-18 02:52 am (UTC)where when how....
Date: 2005-01-18 04:10 am (UTC)Kim
(no subject)
Date: 2005-01-18 05:21 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-01-18 07:03 am (UTC)NYC or LA?
(no subject)
Date: 2005-01-18 09:37 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-01-18 08:12 am (UTC)I used to really dig the sound of the cord/chain on the flagpole in grade school, it was all kinds of things, but you reminded me of bears.
My heartbeat used to scare hell out of me at night, because I didn't know what it was and all I could picture were bears shoveling snow.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-01-18 11:48 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-01-18 12:15 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-01-18 09:35 pm (UTC)You can't buy used schoolgirl panties any more, at least not in Tokyo. The mayor, erm, clamped down.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-01-18 09:58 pm (UTC)That is such a pity...maybe it's time to start trading through ebay...do japanese men like german women?
(no subject)
Date: 2005-01-18 01:20 pm (UTC)Oh, and the brief plop that rocks make when you drop them into water from a great height! Accidentally dropping a xylophone is interesting as well.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-01-18 02:33 pm (UTC)A recording of New Year's Even in Kyoto (http://www.geocities.com/sparkligbeatnic/joya_no_kane.mp3), for your garden.
(From Ubud, Bali Island. Would post some of my binaural recordings but the bandwidth is pitiful.)
(no subject)
Date: 2005-01-18 09:39 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-01-19 08:56 am (UTC)The Kyoto Joya no Kane was recorded with one of those new fangled 24 bit Edirol recorders which is meant to be a flash-memory replacement for Dat-tape recorders. My intern bought one when it first came out.
I'm still recording with an MD recorder and homemade (not by me) binaural mics I bought in '98. Unfortunately a infuriating, intermittant loose connection has developed in the cord so that one channel is flakey. When it does work, the binaural mics give a very good rendition of auditory space. I've got smoe old Joya-no-kane recordings. It's a question of whether to hunt down a soldering kit and fix them or give up and make a plan to return to Bali (hopefully soon).
The restaurant I ate lunch in had a wonderful soundscape. Tropical birds, running water in a rice field, bamboo wind chimes, roosters, the odd motorcycle, and wind in the grass.
Spoiled by some really crass pop music playing at the bar, which I asked them to turn off, as we were the only customers there. They did - all for about 5 minutes. The staff could bear their soundscape no longer and put on an Enya disk. I have to come all the way to Bali to hear some Celtic new age drivel.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-01-19 09:00 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-01-18 10:22 pm (UTC)If music is Platonic, sound is Pavlovian. It always has an immediate physical effect on us. It connects directly to our physiological systems because it evokes experiences we've had, or might have. Sound relates to our bodies and what they've done or might do in the world. Sound doesn't seem to be art, it seems to be something we'd use to navigate through the world, to make sense of the environment we're in. When we encounter the 'wrong' sound for the environment we're in, it can be truly odd, uncanny, surreal. It can derange our senses in a druglike way far more than music can, precisely because we expect real sounds, raw sounds, to have a source in real objects around us, and to tell us something real, immediate, practical. A found sound piped into the 'wrong' environment is non-art becoming art. It's a bit like a Proustian rush or a repressed memory, someone else's memory. It wouldn't be so strange to encounter this in a film because, like music, a film is 100% artificial, although it's rather more literal and referential than music. But in real life, to encounter the sound of other real life is truly strange, disorienting, evocative, powerful.
That's my justification for all the CD players and little speakers we bought yesterday, anyway.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-01-19 09:45 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-01-18 03:28 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-01-18 05:22 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-01-18 05:41 pm (UTC)I don't know if it would qualify as 'raw sound' rather than music, but I always used to love the sound of the potato vendor singing, "Yaki-imoooooooo, ishi-yakiii-imoooo, o-imo."
Anyway, very much looking forward to hearing the results of the project.
soundgarden
Date: 2005-01-18 08:50 pm (UTC)Do you think people's musical tastes would ever shift to the point where the public would actually buy ambient noise in lieu of music? Arguably that goes on some now (nature sounds) but rarely much else.
I think you should pitch the idea to hospitals, imagine the psychological effects that could have...
Compost
Date: 2005-01-18 09:39 pm (UTC)Perhaps you can open things up to the community of people who read this blog. I can imagine contributions of "soundbytes" from all over the globe adding some found sound compost for your students to use in their gardens. Or is that outside of the remit of the work ?
RichardG
(no subject)
Date: 2005-01-18 10:47 pm (UTC)http://www.luckykitchen.com/tliyl_05/watson.html
(no subject)
Date: 2005-01-19 04:26 am (UTC)and move the japan, to attend said university.
but it IS a great idea, Greater even than Frosted Flakes.
Re: A new school of sound gardening!
Date: 2005-01-21 03:26 pm (UTC)Good luck to you, your new office is beautiful! Michael
"Kranberry Spires" A sound recording made with a hand-fashioned instrument, which was constructed from an aluminum exhaust pipe approx. 2.5' x 1.2', with 4 bolts attached by magnets inside and outside the resonating tube, through which heavy gauge guitar strings were pulled around the outside and through the middle of the resonating chamber. This instrument was designed to make a sound that was fluid and abrasive at the same time. What you are hearing is 8 seconds of recorded sound, edited with Sound Forge to highlight several aspects of it's tonality and percussive nature. The instrument was destroyed after 1 year of use in a tragic car pulling into a garage accident.