[mp3 .zip archive / 12MB]

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'I am writing this sitting in a laundromat listening to the low chorus of the dryers and the tinfoil whispers of the radio. I am looking out at a Greek restaurant across the street, the dinner crowd just starting to make their way in. I can see it all through the double panes of the windows. I have a visual sense of the interior of the restaurant, the shape of it, the colours, the movement. I have a sense of its space, its light space. But its aural space remains, at best, an approximate imagining of what some of the things I see might sound like'.

This is one kind of scenario that gave rise to Hearing There: The possibility of extending aural space (or, more accurately, creating an experience of its extension) in the manner that bay windows extend visual space.

Hearing There is an interactive soundwalk along a stretch of Boulevard St. Laurent in Montréal. The idea is simple: the listener, wearing headphones attached to a small PDA (see below for details), walks along the street and the sound they are hearing at any given moment is a binaural recording of the interior space closest to where they are standing. Walking by the grocery store, one hears the electronic beeps and plastic rustles of the checkout counter, moving on past the Portuguese bakery, the hum of the ovens and the animated conversation of the bakers comes to the fore. One's movement along the street is imbued with a sonic projection, as if one were in fact moving through the interior spaces themselves - through the normally sound-isolating walls of the storefronts.

Sound Walking

I began experimenting with GPS-based sound works while completing a masters' degree at Queen's University, Belfast. I had the opportunity to work with developers at HP labs in the UK who were working on a new version of the Mobile Bristol Toolkit which would later become Mscape. The toolkit is a software environment that creates location-based sound events. It allows the programmer to map sounds (and associated attributes like volume level, fading etc...) over a two dimensional map area. A listener, equipped with headphones and a GPS-enabled PDA running the software, then moves through the given space and the aural contents of the map are revealed according to their position and trajectory.

The aim of the first such piece I presented (Soundpoints: Belfast, 2005) was to construct a rough model of something like a sonic panorama of the city. Starting with a bank of recordings made at points spread around Belfast, I re-mapped the sounds to a scaled (collapsed) map of a centrally located park. Moving through the space of the park, the listener traverses the sound spaces that correspond to her position relative to the map of the city: the north end of the park becomes the industrial sector, the west borders on the river etc...

[A selection of sound points spread around the city re-mapped to the space of Botanic Park - The circular areas on the map at right represent the areas in which the recordings are heard]

In The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau opens his essay on walking in the city with a meditation on the view from the 110th floor of the World Trade Center. He writes: "The gigantic mass [of the city] is immobilized before the eyes. It is transformed into a grand texturology in which extremes coincide".¹

There is no real sonic equivalent to the top floor view from the WTC. Unlike the clean lines of light, sound waves lose energy relatively quickly in their passage through the air, dissolving into a barely discernible morass. What Soundpoints proposed was an easily traversed space that would give the listener a sense of the city's extended soundscape, allowing the ear to move relatively quickly over large sound distances - extending the breadth hearing in a manner somewhat analogous to the experience of moving our gaze over a distant landscape.

When soundscape is wed in this way with an interactive locative system, the variable that becomes extremely interesting is that of spatial correspondence. Most experiences of listening to field recordings involve what Murray Shafer calls "shizophonia": we hear the recording in an entirely different surrounding from the one recorded. What the locative element creates is the possibility of correlating the two situations in interesting ways; dictating exactly where the listener will be when they hear a given recording. A simple statement of the possibility: When you are here, you are Hearing There

Sill Pals

Hearing There exploits this principle not in order to gain access to distant sound spaces, but to reveal the sounds in our immediate vicinity that are occluded by the sealed spaces of buildings. In this sense the piece is as much about architecture as it is about soundscape. It could be argued that, from a sonic point of view, the modern city is charactersied by two principle elements: the combustion engine whose rumble is ubiquitous, and the presence of an intricate system of absorptive barriers in the form of the walls of the buildings that make up the city's architectural form.

[Gordon Matta-Clark / Conical Intersect - detail / 1975]

From this architectural perspective an important influence on Hearing There was the work of Gordon Matta-Clark, specifically the cut pieces from the mid-seventies. While there is no lack of speculation as to the interpretation of these works, my personal impression is of the immense shift they engage in us vis. how we perceive architecture in its capacity as spatial segregation. The fundamental dichotomy that is set up in the construction of a building, and as such one of the fundamental principles on which urban space is ordered, is the distinction between interior and exterior. The experience of walking along a city street is, in large part, an experience of the facades of the buildings that constitute the form and texture of our visual horizon. The cut pieces (e.g. Conical Intersect, 1972) violently subvert this model, the building's interior projected through large circular cuts into the space of the street.

In discussing some of the early influences on his work, Matta-Clark remembers a childhood spent interacting with neighbors from the window sills of the Manhattan loft he grew up in:

'Sill Pals. That's the way I made contact with a lot of people ... It's interesting, the space I remember the most is not so much the floors and shelter as openings onto other spaces and other people's realms. A window punctuated world'.²

Last year I spent time living in a old colonial apartment building in Rio de Janeiro, and one of the most striking physical features was a small central atrium connected via windows onto the surrounding apartments. While it created a certain amount of visual interplay between the spaces, the really striking feature was the auditory porousness, the opening serving as a kind of amplifying corridor mixing the sounds of the building's various spaces. Lying in bed in the morning I was in contact with a dozen remote spaces through a sensing of their sounds.

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