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Thursday, October 22. 2009Brian Eno, Peter Schmidt, and CyberneticsBy Geeta Dayal on Wednesday, October 21st, 2009 at 1:00 pm.
Eno was first exposed to concepts in cybernetics as a teenager in the mid-1960s, during his days as a student at Ipswich Art College. Several art schools in the UK in the '60s were incorporating ideas from cybernetics into their pedagogical approaches, mainly via Roy Ascott's infamous “Groundcourse” curriculum. Ipswich Art College, where Eno studied in the mid-'60s, was run by Ascott, an imposing presence who incorporated cutting-edge cybernetics principles into his offbeat teaching style. Before Ipswich, Ascott had been head tutor at Ealing, a nearby art school where a young Pete Townshend was studying. "The first term at Ipswich was devoted entirely to getting rid of those silly ideas about the nobility of the artist by a process of complete and relentless disorientation," Eno recalled some ten years later, in a guest lecture he gave at Trent Polytechnic. Ascott's teaching philosophy involved countless mandatory group collaboration exercises -- an echo of cybernetics' emphasis on “systems learning” -- and mental games. Very little of the teaching at Ipswich had anything to do with what the teenage Eno had ostensibly set out to do -- study the fine arts. Instead of daubing canvases with oil paints, Eno and his fellow students were instructed to create "mindmaps'' of each other. Eno became very interested in cybernetics, and possible ways to apply those ideas to music. As an art school student, he had gotten into observing life on a “meta” level, and looked at his own creative process with a bird's eye view. Cybernetics concepts challenged Eno to think in different ways about the process of making music, and these ideas infiltrated Eno's thinking on many of his 1970s albums in key ways. Groups of musicians working in the studio could be conceptualized, in some general sense, as cybernetic systems. A piece of music composed using feedback, or tape loops, could be construed using cybernetics principles, too. One of Eno's favorite quotes, from the managerial-cybernetics theorist Stafford Beer, would become a fundamental guiding principle for his work: ''Instead of trying to specify it in full detail," Beer wrote in his book The Brain of the Firm, "you specify it only somewhat. You then ride on the dynamics of the system in the direction you want to go." Eno also derived inspiration from Stafford Beer's related definition of a “heuristic.” “To use Beer's example: If you wish to tell someone how to reach the top of a mountain that is shrouded in mist, the heuristic ‘keep going up’ will get him there,” Eno wrote. Eno connected Beer's concept of a “heuristic” to music.
Schmidt served as the music adviser to curator Jasia Reichardt for the landmark exhibition "Cybernetic Serendipity" at London's ICA in 1968, and his selection of computer music for the ICA show proved extraordinarily prescient. Schmidt had long been intrigued by electronic music, systems, and their connections to the visual arts. "Cybernetic Serendipity" showcased pathbreaking work by hundreds of artists, including John Cage, Nam June Paik, and Jean Tinguely, and was a huge success for Reichardt and the ICA, drawing somewhere between 45,000 and 60,000 viewers and foreshadowing multiple major trends on the interfaces between art and technology. “Cybernetic Serendipity” also galvanized the interest in systems-based art. "The very notion of having a system in relation to making paintings is often anathema to those who value the mysterious and the intuitive, the free and the expressionistic, in art,” wrote Reichardt in 1968. “Systems, nevertheless, dispense neither with intuition nor mystery. Intuition is instrumental in the design of the system and mystery always remains in the final result."
(Courtesy of Lisson Gallery)
Eno and Schmidt released the Oblique Strategies cards together in 1975, when they realized that they had both been independently developing sets of ideas to help themselves come up with creative solutions to trying situations. “The Oblique Strategies evolved from me being in a number of working situations when the panic of the situation – particularly in studios -- tended to make me quickly forget that there were others ways of working, and that there were tangential ways of attacking problems that were in many senses more interesting than the direct head-on approach,” explained Eno in an interview with Charles Amirkhanian in 1980.
The work of Eno and Schmidt, and of many other artists who took inspiration from ideas in cybernetics and other ideas from the sciences, was never a literal interpretation of scientific principles. That was part of what made it interesting. "One night at dinner, John Cage handed me a copy of Cybernetics by Norbert Wiener, and said "this is for you"," remembered John Brockman in his book By the Late John Brockman, published in 1969. "Robert Rauschenberg encouraged me to read about physics, recommending The Mysterious Universe by Sir James Jeans, and One, Two, Three, Infinity by George Gamow." Rauschenbergian physics and Cagean cybernetics were not, perhaps, the genuine article. These garbled transmissions from the sciences, mixed in ad-hoc ways into the arts, allowed for strange mutations to take root in culture, taking a life all their own. Geeta Dayal is the author of Another Green World (Continuum, 2009), a new book on Brian Eno. She has written over 150 articles and reviews for major publications, including Bookforum, The Village Voice, The New York Times, The International Herald-Tribune, Wired, The Wire, Print, I.D., and many more. She has taught several courses as a lecturer in new media and journalism at the University of California - Berkeley, Fordham University, and the State University of New York. She studied cognitive neuroscience and film at M.I.T. and journalism at Columbia. You can find more of her work on her blog, The Original Soundtrack. ----- Via Rhizome.org Related Links:Thursday, July 02. 2009Interactions interviewThe following “interview” with me appears in the July/August 2009 issue of Interactions magazine, the ACM’s journal on interaction design. I say “interview” because it’s basically an edit on the sprawling chat Tish Shute had with me for her site, back in February of this year; as we know, even minor editorial alterations can produce disproportionate shifts in tone and emphasis, and that’s certainly the case here. I should say from the outset that I don’t have much use for the ACM, and in particular greatly dislike their stance on access to publications, which flies in the face of my own conviction that the point (and power) of knowledge is to share it. Accordingly, I’m republishing the piece in its entirety here. For the sake of accuracy, I’ve left the editorial characterization of me and my work intact, but you should never, ever construe this as an endorsement of same. As ever, I hope you enjoy it. “At the end of the world, plant a tree” Adam Greenfield is Nokia’s head of design direction for service and user-interface design, and the author of Everyware: The dawning age of ubiquitous computing and the upcoming The City Is Here For You To Use. He is also an impactful speaker and articulate blogger, and has become a major authority in the thinking about the impact of future ubiquitous technologies on people and society.Interactions Magazine. In a lengthy interview with Tish Shute recently published on UgoTrade.com, Greenfield ranged over topics including augmented reality, Usman Haque’s Pachube project, the networked book, the networked city, and what to do at the end of the world. The interview is dense and rich, with many of the questions raised relevant to our audience. We asked Adam to expand on some of his answers for TS: The legal scholar Eben Moglen has identified three elements of privacy: anonymity, secrecy and most importantly autonomy. How do you see Moglen’s three elements being worked out in a ubiquitously networked world? Are there ways we could design ubiquitous systems that might support personal autonomy? AG: If we accept for the moment a definition of autonomy as a feeling of being master of one’s own fate, then absolutely yes. One thing I talk about a good deal is using ambient situational awareness to lower decision costs – that is, to lower the information costs associated with arriving at a choice presented to you, and at the same time mitigate the opportunity costs of having committed yourself to a course of action. When given some kind of real-time overview of all of the options available to you in a given time, place and context – and especially if that comes wrapped up in some kind of visualization that makes anomaly detection a matter of instantaneous gestalt, to be grasped in a single glance – your personal autonomy is tremendously enhanced. Tremendously enhanced. What do I mean by that? It’s really simple: you don’t head out to the bus stop until your phone tells you a bus is a minute away, and you don’t walk down the street where more than some threshold number of muggings happen – in fact, by default it doesn’t even show up on your maps – and you don’t eat at the restaurant whose forty-eight recent health code violations cause its name to flash red in your address book. And all these decisions are made possible because networked informatics have effectively rendered the obscure and the hidden transparent to inquiry. And there’s no doubt in my mind that life is thusly made just that little bit better. But there’s a cost – there’s always a cost. Serendipity, solitude, anonymity, most of what we now recognize as the makings of urban savoir faire: it all goes by the wayside. And yes, we’re richer and safer and maybe even happier with the advent of the services and systems I’m so interested in, but by the same token we’re that much poorer for the loss of these intangibles. It’s a complicated trade-off, and I believe in most places it’s one we’re making without really examining what’s at stake. So as to how this local autonomy could be deployed in Moglen’s more general terms, I don’t know, and I’m not sure anyone does. Because he’s absolutely right: Bernard Stiegler reminds us that the network constitutes a global mnemotechnics, a persistent memory store for planet Earth, and yet we’ve structured our systems of jurisprudence and our life practices and even our psyches around the idea that information about us eventually expires and leaves the world. Its failure to do so in the context of Facebook and Flickr and Twitter is clearly one of the ways in which the elaboration of our digital selves constrains our real-world behavior. Let just one picture of you grabbing a cardboard cutout’s breast or taking a bong hit leak onto the network, and see how the career options available to you shift in response. This is what’s behind Anne Galloway’s calls for a “forgetting machine.” An everyware that did that – that massively spoofed our traces in the world, that threw up enormous clouds of winnow and chaff to give us plausible deniability about our whereabouts and so on – might give us a fighting chance. TS: Early theorizing of a “calm,” “invisible” ubicomp seems out of synch with the present-day reality of services like Twitter and Facebook, where active, engaged, contact-driven users continually manage their networked identity. How will the processes of contact and identity-sharing that have seemingly captured the popular imagination be or not be part of the city that is Here For You To Use? AG: Let’s remember that ubicomp itself, as a discipline, has largely moved on from the Weiserian discourse of “calm technology”; Yvonne Rogers, for example, now speaks of “proactive systems for proactive people.” You can look at this as a necessary accommodation with the reality principle, which it is, or as kind of a shame – which it also happens to be, at least in my opinion. Either way, though, I don’t think anybody can credibly argue any longer that just because informatic systems pervade our lives, designers will be compelled to craft encalming interfaces to them. That notion of Mark Weiser’s was never particularly convincing, and as far as I’m concerned it’s been thoroughly refuted by the unfolding actuality of post-PC informatics. All the available evidence, on the contrary, supports the idea that we will have to actively fight for moments of calm and reflection, as individuals and as collectivities. And not only that, as it happens, but for spaces in which we’re able to engage with the Other on neutral turf, as it were, since the logic of “social media” seems to be producing Big Sort-like effects and echo chambers. When given the tools that allow us to do so, we seem to surround ourselves with people who look and think and consume like we do, and the result is that the tools allowing us to become involved with anything but the self, or selves that strongly resemble it, are atrophying. So when people complain about K-Mart and Starbucks and American Eagle Outfitters coming to Manhattan, and how it means the suburbanization of the city, I have to laugh. Because the real suburbanization is the smoothening-out of our social interaction until it only encompasses the congenial. A gated community where everyone looks and acts the same? That’s the suburbs, wherever and however it instantiates, and I don’t care how precious and edgy your tastes may be. Richard Sennett argued that what makes urbanity is precisely the quality of necessary, daily, cheek-by-jowl confrontation with a panoply of the different, and as far as I can tell he’s spot on. We have to devise platforms that accommodate and yet buffer that confrontation. We have to create the safe(r) spaces that allow us to negotiate that difference. The alternative to doing so is creating a world of ten million autistic, utterly atomic and mutually incomprehensible tribelets, each reinforced in the illusion of its own impeccable correctness: duller than dull, except at the flashpoints between. And those become murderous. Nope. Unacceptable outcome. TS: What new imaginings or possibilities do you see when pixels anywhere are linked to everyware? AG: Limitless opportunities for product placement. Commercial insertions and injections, mostly. Beyond that: one of the places where shallowly Weiserian logic breaks down is in thinking that the platforms we use now disappear from the world just because ubiquitous computing has arrived. We’ve still got radio, for example – OK, now it’s satellite radio and streaming Internet feeds, but the interaction metaphor isn’t any different. By the same token, we’re still going to be using reasonably conventional-looking laptops and desktop keyboard/display combos for a while yet. The form factor is pretty well optimized for the delivery of a certain class of services, it’s a convenient and well-assimilated interaction vocabulary, none of that’s going away just yet. And the same goes for billboards and “TV” screens. But all of those things become entirely different propositions in everyware world: more open, more modular, ever more conceived of as network resources with particular input and output affordances. We already see some signs of this with Microsoft’s recent “Social Desktop” prototype – which, mind you, is a very bad idea as it currently stands, especially as implemented on something with the kind of security record that Windows enjoys – and we’ll be seeing many more. If every display in the world has an IP address and a self-descriptor indicating what kind of protocols it’s capable of handling, then you begin to get into some really interesting and thorny territory. The first things to go away, off the top of my head, are screens for a certain class of mobile device – why power a screen off your battery when you can push the data to a nearby display that’s much bigger, much brighter, much more social? – and conventional projectors. Then we get into some very interesting issues around large, public interactive displays – who “drives” the display, and so forth. But here again, we’ll have to fight to keep these things sane. It’s past time for a public debate around these issues, because they’re unquestionably going to condition the everyday experience of walking down the street in most of our cities. And that’s difficult to do when times are hard and people have more pressing concerns on their mind. TS: The science-fiction writer David Brin sees two potential futures: in the first, the government watches everybody, and in the second everybody watches everybody. (The latter he calls sousveillance.) It has been suggested by the artificial-intelligence enthusiast Ben Goertzel that providing an artificial intelligence with access to a massive datastore fed by ubicomp is the first step toward effective sousveillance. What do you think the role of AI in ubicomp will be? Is it worth thinking about what the first important application of such technologies might be? AG: I don’t believe that artificial intelligence as the term is generally understood – which is to say, a self-aware, general-purpose intelligence of human capacity or greater – is likely to appear within my lifetime, or for a comfortably long time thereafter. Having said that, Goertzel seems to be making the titanic (and enormously difficult to justify) assumption that a self-aware artificial intelligence would share any perspectives, goals, priorities or values whatsoever with the human species, let alone with that fraction of the human species that could use a little help in countering watchfulness from above. “Hooking [an] AI up to a massive datastore fed by ubicomp” sounds to me more like the first step toward enslavement…if not outright digestion. Sousveillance – the term is Steve Mann’s, originally – doesn’t imply “everybody watching everybody” to me, anyway, so much as a consciously political act of turning infrastructures of observation and control back on those specific institutions most used to employing same toward their own prerogatives. Think Rodney King, think Oscar Grant. TS: You seem to be skeptical about the role everyware can play in sustainable living. And yet at the moment it seems that – in the hacker and business communities at least – the role of everyware in reducing carbon footprint/energy management, etc., is the great green hope. Will everyware enable or hinder fundamental changes at the level of culture and identity necessary to support the urgent global need “to consume less and redefine prosperity”? AG: I’m not skeptical about the potential of ubiquitous systems to meter energy use, and maybe even incentivize some reduction in that use – not at all. I’m simply not convinced that anything we do will make any difference. Look, I think we really, seriously screwed the pooch on this. We have fouled the nest so thoroughly and in so many ways that I would be absolutely shocked if humanity comes out the other end of this century with any level of organization above that of clans and villages. It’s not just carbon emissions and global warming, it’s depleted soil fertility, it’s synthetic estrogens bio-accumulating in the aquatic food chain, it’s our inability to stop using antibiotics in a way that gives rise to multiple drug resistance in microbes. Any one of these threats in isolation would pose a challenge to our ability to collectively identify and respond to it, as it’s clear anthropogenic global warming already does. Put all of these things together, assess the total threat they pose in the light of our societies’ willingness and/or capacity to reckon with them, and I think any moderately knowledgeable and intellectually honest person has to conclude that it’s more or less “game over, man” – that sometime in the next sixty years or so a convergence of Extremely Bad Circumstances is going to put an effective end to our ability to conduct highly ordered and highly energy-intensive civilization on this planet, for something on the order of thousands of years to come. So with all apologies to Bruce Sterling, I just don’t buy the idea that we’re going to consume our way to Ecotopia. Nor is any symbolic act of abjection on my part going to postpone the inevitable by so much as a second, nor would such a sacrifice do anything meaningful to improve anybody else’s outcomes. I’d rather live comfortably – hopefully not obscenely so – in the years we have remaining to us, use my skills as they are most valuable to people, and cherish each moment for what it uniquely offers. Maybe some people would find that prospect morbid, or nihilistic, but I find it kind of inspiring. It becomes even more crucial that we not waste the little time we do have on broken systems, broken ways of doing things. The primary question for the designers of urban informatics under such circumstances is to design systems that underwrite autonomy, that allow people to make the best and wisest and most resonant use of whatever time they have left on the planet. And who knows? That effort may bear fruit in ways we have no way of anticipating at the moment. As it says in the Qu’ran, gorgeously: “At the end of the world, plant a tree.” TS: The concept of autonomy is signaled clearly in the title you have chosen for your next book, The City Is Here For You To Use, and seems to be a consistent theme in your writing. While you have in the past (notably in Everyware) discussed the possible constraints to presentation of self and threats to a flexible identity posed by ubiquitous computing, your next book signals optimism. What are your key grounds for this optimism? AG: It’s not optimism so much as hope. Whether it’s well-founded or not is not for me to decide. I guess I just trust people to make reasonably good choices, when they’re both aware of the stakes and have been presented with sound, accurate decision-support material. Putting a fine point on it: I believe that most people don’t actually want to be dicks. We may have differing conceptions of the good, our choices may impinge on one another’s autonomy. But I think most of us, if confronted with the humanity of the Other and offered the ability to do so, would want to find some arrangement that lets everyone find some satisfaction in the world. And in its ability to assist us in signaling our needs and desires, in its potential to mediate the mutual fulfillment of same, in its promise to reduce the fear people face when confronted with the immediate necessity to make a decision on radically imperfect information, a properly-designed networked informatics could underwrite the most transformative expansions of people’s ability to determine the circumstances of their own lives. Now that’s epochal. If that isn’t cause for hope, then I don’t know what is. -----
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Architecture, Culture & society, Territory
at
08:32
Defined tags for this entry: architecture, culture & society, interaction design, territory, theory, ubiquitous, urbanism
Thursday, May 14. 2009Cars b/w Are Friends ElectricAn article in The Economist suggests that electric cars should generate a noise to compensate for the loss of combustion engine noise, as they are so quiet. Despite noting there is little research (thought I’ll note some later), The Economist says “Some drivers say that when their cars are in electric mode people are more likely to step out in front of them. The solution, many now believe, is to fit electric and hybrid cars with external sound systems.” Their subtitle - “Sound generators will make electric and hybrid cars safer“ - indicates this is their position too. Where to start?
Let’s quickly deal with the safety issue first. People will adapt easily enough. We’ve adapted to numerous successive modes of transport in the past without the need to artificially increase the noise that mode of transport generates (though the first automobiles required a man with a flag walking in front of them. Is this not the aural equivalent of that, and so equally likely to fade away?) One of the numerous reasons why bicycles are a more civic mode of transport is that they do not make much noise. Even at the speeds cyclists can get up to, this near-silent mode is apparently still safe enough not to warrant a pedal-powered drone, say. A bell suffices, and after that it’s about taking due care and attention on both sides. As bikes slowly become the dominant mode of personal transport in cities, this shouldn’t change. Cyclists, a few idiots aside, have to rely on individual responsibility to a greater extent than motorists, partly due to their relative fragility. This is not a bad thing necessarily - it forms a thin undulating layer of civic substrate. This first aspect of The Economist’s article is borne of auto-centric thinking, and so the concomitant desires for speed and freedom … and often irresponsibility. Speed and freedom are not intrinsically problematic, but they can be. Cars moving at speed in urban areas are indeed dangerous - they are responsible for truly horrifying numbers of fatalities and injuries, and it’s a bit rich to suggest the solution to that particular problem is fake engine noise. Presumably, if people had genuinely wanted to solve this problem they’d have tried a little harder before, rather than apparently relying on the side effect of a noisy carburrettor. A user comment from The Economist article:
Quite. And another comment, pointing to interesting-sounding research:
On more general safety, the congestion that cars cause also limits their average speed in cities (currently down to about 30km/h in Sydney at the moment). There’s an argument to make them slower than this. Someone will suggest a GPS-enabled limiter fitted to cars at some point i.e. enforcing a low top speed when the GPS indicates it’s in particularly built-up areas (e.g.). However, the whole point of cars is freedom rather than inhibition, and I'd prefer to see these issues solved through ‘shared space’ strategies, such as those espoused by Hans Monderman. Here, drivers are responsible for negotiating urban space alongside others, with few if any demarcations or regulations of space between cars, pedestrians, bikes etc. It’s been proven to make streets both safer and more effective. In terms of the way streets might feel it’s closer to this film of George Street, Sydney in 1906. (The version I’ve uploaded here allows you to first compare it with the Sustainable Sydney 2030 strategy for a pedestrianised, light-railed George Street.) Without wishing to romanticise aspects of that 1906 film (yer actual bubonic plague had been lurking in that same city a few streets to the north only a few years before that film was shot) it does indicate a more progressive system, based on interdependent real-time responsive actors negotiating space far more fluidly than the averaging effects of mid-20th-century road design, where everyone eventually comes off worse. This is hardly a cityscape without noise, and note how these blurred lines of George Street enable pedestrians, bikes, trams and carts to occupy the same spaces, relying on multi-sensory feedback but essentially with shared responsibility for being aware. Remaining alert and riding the horn might become more relevant than the constant (and therefore less useful) hum of engine noise. Regarding shared space and horns, a passage in Geoff Dyer’s typically enjoyable latest Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi reminds us that not all urban traffic and noise is the same. "Jeff/Geoff" is in India:
Back in 'Western' cities, private car use will likely drop anyway, for reasons which I hope are by now obvious. (I can see that the loss of engine noise might be an issue for blind people, but would look for a solution for them specifically - perhaps a non-visual alert only they can perceive as a car approaches - rather than reduce the quality of the urban experience for everyone (ethically dubious perhaps, but still). Beyond autocentric, the second aspect of The Economist’s article is borne of what Juhani Pallasmaa would call ocularcentric thinking - an inability to perceive the city, or much at all, in terms of non-visual senses. If the safety issue resolves itself - through fewer cars, and people adapting - and understanding that engine noise is hardly keep the streets safe in the first place, let’s move on to two more interesting implications. One, if naturally quiet cars should generate a noise, what should that be? And two, if that doesn’t happen, what might increasingly quiet cars do for the urban soundscape? On the first point, The Economist quotes a Dr. Rosenblum who is researching this area:
Leaving aside the spurious idea of giving people what they want, reproducing the sound of the internal combustion engine would be ridiculous. It would be a skeuomorph too far - a feature designed to nod back to an earlier functional incarnation, with absolutely no need to. At some point a function has to replaced, and slowly takes its idioms and by-products with it. The car industry is traditionally loath to do this of course. One of the most exciting features of the MIT CityCar project is that in suggesting a new driving experience. it implicitly indicates how little has changed about interface design of cars - ignition, accelerator, throttle, brake, steering wheel etc; all remain essentially unchanged for decades (save a few brave attempts from Citroën et al). This is not an issue of icon design - as with an old telephone handset representing the function to make a call on the iPhone - but an entirely new functional mode. These are new forms of mobility, potentially, and suffuse with possibility - unnecessarily tying them to vestiges of the previous mode may prevent them realising their potential. Doing this with sound would generate aural externalities that simply don’t warrant that level of intrusion. A floppy disk icon still meaning ‘Save’ in Windows 7 is anachronistic and doesn’t augur well for the Microsoft brand, but it hardly changes the essence of the immediate urban area. Electric or hybrid cars do make a sound of course. It’s just a different noise to the combustion engine. It's a whine, a hum, a whoosh. Even the ugly Prius is a joy to hear in comparison, if not to see, noiselessly reversing out of a drive. As one of the comments on The Economist article brilliantly points out, there is potential for a rather more progressive sound choice here:
(I’m imagining that as the vehicles in Woody Allen’s magnificently silly Sleeper. This too is a form of nostalgic projection, though.) Yet if electric cars do have to make a specifically designed, generated noise, let’s at least explore that a little. Brian Eno once suggested that horns in cars should have a little more variation in their noises - that they could play a variety of audio signatures, depending on context. The car is the same. Just as the lovely Honda Puyo concept car suggested its bodywork could glow different colours to indicate different states, so the audio signature of the car could be malleable and responsive. Akin to an instant messaging status indicator, the car’s noise would indicate modes or states that the user wishes to convey, or change in tone as it passes the phone of a friend in the street (admittedly, a feature that would need an off button, for sure.) This is akin to the ‘I Crossed Your Path’ Facebook app from MIT’s SmartBiking, but in real-time. Perhaps the sound is a filtered rendition of the music playing in the car - RJDJ externalised rather than internalised - or is simply the music playing directly across the bodywork (one of the more appealing sounds associated with cars in cities is that of a crunching, throbbing sub-bass so impossibly distracting that one looks across and notices that the back seats have been surgically removed to create a giant bass-bin, with the entire chassis becoming a sound-generating devices. These cars also often have a glowing UV light under their skirts, and thus we can only assume the drivers are clearly amongst the most safety-conscious on the streets, announcing their imminent arrival to the blind and deaf alike.) Whether the sound of the streets is improved or further diminished by more clearly hearing this collective cacophony will depend on the musical literacy of your city. While most signals are necessary for the driver only - battery life indicators, personal messages etc. - and so best directed inwards, there may be some possibility in cars as broadcasters of something rather more enriching than the dull roar of internal combustion. As these cars will be located, addressable and responsive (sooner or later) there’s possibility of creating an interplay between their sounds and the urban environment. Cars could communicate with each other in real-time, as they pass, and so shift their sounds in response to each other to create discordant atonalities or shimmering consonant harmonies. As you drive across 110th Street in Harlem, your car cheesily fades up into the bassline from ‘Across 110th Street’, with a passing Fiat joining in on percussion while two Nissans emulate the horns and electric guitar. (Pedestrians hanging on the corner are destined to suffer the most annoyingly intermittent cover version imaginable). An array of pipa and guan strike up as you drive through Chinatown, sounds commissioned by the local tourist board. Kyoto’s pedestrian crossings are scored with the engaging knock-knock of doppler’d shishi-odoshi. Better, some urban areas commission sound designers to ‘prime’ their streets with latent compositions, which are then performed by passing cars. SND score Sheffield as a series of pulsing, jittery staccato tones; cars pausing at a stop-light in Ginza are suddenly part of a DJ Signify tune; Steve Roden pins up a series of aleatoric triggers across Echo Park; Janek Schaefer creates fields of static and broadcast fragments aurally hung across car park exits throughout West London in homage to JG Ballard, marking up the Westway and its concrete islands, whereas Burial positions a layered series of sub-bass tones along Hackney Road; Steve Reich re-scores City Life - and most of his work for that matter - for city streets, cars chattering back and forth to each other in fragments of conversation, strings and piano; Filastine sees cars as an intercontinental echo chamber between Barcelona, Kyushu and Marseilles, bodywork rippling with live feeds from distant city streets; Juana Molina plants her sinuous sounds across Buenos Aries, activated as cars drive through her invisible urban space. Drivers begin to follow the threaded patterns through the streets, attempting to stay ‘in tune’ … Sound is so affecting - often far more distracting than visual interrupts - that its use and abuse should be of primary concern. It is certainly another arena of urban informatics that could be mishandled by a pervasive surveillance culture, even one trying to affect behavioural change ‘for the better’. (The pitch of the car’s electric whine shifts depending on the collective energy or water consumption of the area it’s driving through, and so residents receive constant, nagging aural reminders of their performance. The nuances in local crime levels are played out, a form of Oakland Crimespotting with cars generating aural heatmaps, incidentally increasing the nervousness of all within earshot. Perhaps the noise of the car changes if the driver is talking on their mobile, the driver’s speech patterns triggering exact echoes in the car’s hum (so you can tell an Italian driver from a New York driver from an Indian driver ..) Perhaps the car’s whine increases in pitch if the driver has had a drink or two. Russell Davies appears in my thoughts, with respect to urban spam …) I actually think that, given half a chance, we won’t miss the noise of cars (as we know it) in our cities at all. When we (Arup) design new cities, and are able to design without private car use, our city models and simulations indicate noise levels that are far more appealing. I don’t mean quiet, as cities are always noisy - as people are, and this is one of the glorious things about both - but that it was possible to hear more, in more detail, and over a wider range. When Geoff Manaugh interviewed Arup’s Neil Woodger (in Dwell, June 2008) about new cities and the SoundLab aural modelling tool, Woodger said, “These cities are an opportunity to think about a new urban sound experience, including the ability to bring sounds back into cities. People haven’t really known that they can change the sounds of a city …” Masdar, outside Abu Dhabi and predicated on light rail, personal rapid transit and no private cars, affords the same possibilities as the Dongtan design. (I’ve previously speculated about the kind of urban SoundLab approach.) Cities should not be quiet, or only replete with so-called ‘natural’ sounds - whatever that means post-nature, and post-industrialisation - but the urban soundscape is something that could use a little more room for manouevre, dynamically. To be clear, I'm not averse to cars or car noise. Some car noises are hugely appealing. It’s just best experienced as a distinct note and timbre in a richer, more dynamic city symphony, as opposed to the pervasive ambient roar of thousands of combustion engines. This latter has a totalising suppressing effect on urban sound, akin to the scourge of overusing the compressor in contemporary music production. If everything is loud, nothing is. Buses – the public transport mode that car-based cities tend towards - are often the worst offenders. Sydney buses are particularly egregious, amongst the loudest I’ve heard in any city. As I’m that way inclined, I’ve taken to sporadically measuring the decibel level on city streets using the promising but currently flawed iPhone app WideNoise (see also NoiseTube), and find levels well over 100dB when a bus or two roar by, even on an open street corner. This is akin to standing in a sheet metal workshop, and you can watch people actually grimace, subconsciously feeling how unpleasant it is. It leads to iPod users turning the volume up further as a form of aural arms race (a lose:lose scenario). More importantly, it flattens the possibility of varied urban sounds. (That people have started to cover their ears for the last few years, denoted by white headphones, may be telling in itself.) That buses are allowed to be this way is due to an endemic lack of understanding of sound - it simply isn’t valued by many policy-makers and so rarely measured. In the case of public transport planning and procurement, travel times is seen as far more important than experience. Again, this is the outcome of an ocularcentric culture to some degree, but also a culture that suffers from a paucity of understanding of the urban experience in general. City and state government officials need not be conversant with the works of John Cage, but basic qualitative probes into the urban experience are surely important. (Programmes like the London Ambient Noise Strategy are unusual, yet even when they do exist they are usually about noise abatement rather than ‘positive soundscapes’.)
When Jan Gehl's team were focused on Sydney's CBD, with predictable results, they also came to the conclusion that the city was particularly noisy, and due to the combination of buses and urban form (tight canyons). In an article in the Sydney Morning Herald's glossy (sydney) magazine last year focusing on noise, Gehl said "Sydney has tremendous noise levels in most streets and squares ... The main cause is the buses that create a tremendous roar when they accelerate and a shrieking sound when they brake." The Herald measurd decibel levels in several places in Sydney's CBD and also managed to record over 100 decibels outside the Queen Victoria Boulevard, noting "any exposure to noise above 85dB can permanently damage your hearing - any exposure above 120dB, however brief, can have far greater consequences. High noise levels are also associated with hypertension, stress, heart damage and depression." Oh joy. However, this focus on volume (and decibels) as a measure of sound is a little crude, leading naturally to noise abatement rather than a more expansive palette of sound. How high and low frequencies might interact, or more qualitative, descriptive aspects of sound, are rarely discussed or devised. So with heavily car-scaled cities like Sydney, or Los Angeles say, it's almost impossible to imagine how different these streets might sound without cars. Amazing photographs of road infrastructure in Los Angeles, by Benny Chan (Good Magazine) With a new suburb like Vauban in Freiburg, Germany, which has been planned to effectively function sans autos, the aural possibilities should be fascinating. Typically, this New York Times article on Vauban makes very little reference to how different it might sound. There is only the tantalising line: "When I had a car I was always tense. I’m much happier this way,” said Heidrun Walter, a media trainer and mother of two, as she walked verdant streets where the swish of bicycles and the chatter of wandering children drown out the occasional distant motor." It would be interesting to explore how a city’s sound might be articulated, either naturally or by design, without the presence of pervasive engine noise. If conversation is as loud as, say, 55db, should an electric car be about the same? Or should a car's engine be effectively silent, so our streets become defined more by the sound of an espresso being made, the grind and whirr of contemporary industrial machinery, chatter, whistling, a parakeet, trees in the breeze, lapping water in the harbour, chimes of ringtones, the rumble of trains and the foghorns of distant ships, a record shop or a violinist tuning up, a pub argument and sundry art installations, the bells of a clocktower, prayer calls etc.? The Positive Soundscapes project indicates the range of noises that people may find appealing is actually far broader than this - "car tyres on wet, bumpy asphalt, the distant roar of a motorway flyover, the rumble of an overground train and the thud of heavy bass heard on the street outside a nightclub, a baby laughing, skateboarders practising in underground car parks and orchestras tuning up." And though I note “the distant roar of the flyover in that list”, I’d rather hear more about the results of their research than Dr. Rosenblum’s. I don’t think we’ll miss the noise of cars much, apart as something special. And cars can be something special in the urban environment (as I hope my decision to illustrate this piece with snippets of Sisek make clear). Cars are essentially about freedom not transit. Cars are for fun, not for the daily grind. They may increasingly be seen as out of place in a busy city on a Tuesday morning at 0830. The idea of them as mass transit, for most people, given ever-increasing urbanisation, is faintly ludicrous. Instead, they're for casual use, for the sheer enjoyment of the driving experience. Something for the weekend, if you like. In that respect, their sounds can be considered as something special too. We can more fully appreciate the throaty purr of a 1969 Ferrari Daytona or the brawny roar of a 3.5 litre 1978 Ford Capri or the lawnmower rattle of a 2CV or the saucy throb of an old DS, lifting skirts and all, just as we’ll always appreciate the sizzle and hiss of tyres on wet road. The corollary of this is that we won't particularly miss the sound of a 2002 Mazda 323 or a 2007 Honda Jazz or a 2004 Holden Barina or 1998 VW Golf. These kind of cars are, after all, by far the most prevalent on our roads. Peter Cusack’s Your Favourite London Sounds - a favourite indeed - also lists a few traffic noises (”16th floor up, London roar from the top of a tower block, Holloway Road, on a damp evening”; ”Taxis waiting at Euston Station, squeaky black taxi brakes”; ”Under the flyover, Hackney Wick”). But they’re by far in the minority. (Have a listen to the archive; see also Beijing and Chicago.) Removing cars would enable the other sounds to be picked out more clearly, also accentuating urban difference, in that cars tend to be a somewhat homogeneous globalising force - due to their high production costs, they are essentially the same across the world; the platform for a VW Golf not only services the Golf, but the Skoda Octavia, Seat Leon and Audi A3. Other sounds are also global in provenance of course, but many more sounds are local. Note how Cusack picks this out in his thoughts on his Favourite Beijing project:
Toyotas are largely the same in each city; pigeon whistles are not. Yet rather than position this as old (local) versus new (global), it may be that the ‘electric car as noise generator’ discussed above provides an opportunity to create new local sounds. Scoring the city is an interesting idea, whether via discrete car-based sounds or taking advantage of the absence of car-based sounds. Strong urban places already have their own signature, through their behaviour, a point made by William H. Whyte in his 1980 book Social Life of Small Urban Places, when he and his team rendered the patterns of movement through the plaza at Seagram's in New York as a form of graph. He noted that this could be perceived as "music of sorts":
The opportunity to genuinely explore the sound of the city without this blanket of private cars is compelling, whether through sculpting sound through active intervention or simply through enjoying a level aural playing field for the everyday sounds that already conjure the city. At first glance, taking The Economist to task for suffering from a severe lack of creative imagination might seem a little like admonishing Cristiano Ronaldo for not spending his Sundays reading Zizek. But let’s at least discuss how sound and the city should best intersect given the emergence of this new mode. We can slowly fade down the volume on that wall of noise - what might we want to hear its stead? What lies beneath? What might we hear on streets without the sound of combustion engines? An old man and his battered stereo, playing distorted easy listening to the street (Bondi Junction, Sydney, May 2009) The sound of silence [The Economist] ----- Via City of Sound
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fabric | rblgThis blog is the survey website of fabric | ch - studio for architecture, interaction and research. We curate and reblog articles, researches, writings, exhibitions and projects that we notice and find interesting during our everyday practice and readings. Most articles concern the intertwined fields of architecture, territory, art, interaction design, thinking and science. From time to time, we also publish documentation about our own work and research, immersed among these related resources and inspirations. This website is used by fabric | ch as archive, references and resources. It is shared with all those interested in the same topics as we are, in the hope that they will also find valuable references and content in it.
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