27 May 2011

This Is Not A Soundwalk

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“Noli Me Tangere” is a ‘sound walk’ around Brighton Museum and Art Gallery that has been commissioned by the Soundwaves Festival 2011.

There are, I guess, two places where the origins of the ‘soundwalk’ might be located. One of these can be found in the area that Max Neuhaus mapped out in his efforts to answer the riddle “Why limit listening to the concert hall? Instead of bringing these sounds into the hall, why not simply take the audience outside – a demonstration in situ?”. With hands stamped with the inky word ‘Listen’, Neuhaus would guide groups on tours “through their everyday environment.” Neuhaus’ extra-musical territory bears interesting affinities with the idea of “derive” or drift developed in the preceding decade by the French writer and activist Guy Debord.

The other area to which the notion of the ‘soundwalk’ can be traced back are the pedestrian acoustic explorations pursued by Hildegard Westerkamp and others associated with the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology. As Westerkamp’s 1974 essay “Soundwalking” bears eloquent testament, play could well be an active element in the soundwalk. However, more serious intentions were also at work, intentions that related to the opening up of our ears to a fuller engagement with the heard world.

“Noli Me Tangere” is not a soundwalk in either Neuhaus’ or Westerkamp’s sense. Instead, it functions as a kind of audio guide to the museum where the vocal commentary normally supplying interpretative information has all been stripped out. In place of the guide’s beautifully modulated and perfectly recorded voice there is a range of strange sounds: loud and quiet, soft and sharp, sudden and prolonged, literal and abstract, limpid and murky.

Although I’m registering a little distance here from what is normally understood by the term soundwalk, in other respects, the term is quite apposite.

For one thing, the encouragement will be for the museum visitor to keep moving - shifting from one spot to the next, retracing their steps and going off at tangents, listening to their headphones but also keeping half-an-ear open to the changing acoustic atmospheres that are already present in the galleries they travel through.

For another thing, while recording new material for “Noli Me Tangere” and while going through hard-drives full of the cast-off audio from previous projects, I’ve realised that my own relation to sound is very much that of the walker’s. There is little in my work, I’ve come belatedly to appreciate, of the patient setting up of the microphone and the cabling back to a safe distance. Re-listening to my recordings – new and old - while piecing together what will be the visitors’ soundtrack, I understand now that everything is hand-held and mobile. Not the microphone as careful snare placed at a hole in the wire fence but the microphone as butterfly net, swept around in a dizzy chase.

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1 Jun 2011

In The Museum

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The “Noli Me Tangere” soundwalk takes place in the Brighton Museum and Art Gallery. The Museum is part of the complex of Royal Pavilion buildings and gardens constructed for the Prince of Wales as the eighteenth turned into the nineteenth century. Initially a thing of space and distance, with room for horses to gallop, the intervening years have seen the town close around the Museum and the Pavilion, with roads squeezing close and indifferent representatives of different architectural periods edging in.


As my children were growing up, I used to push each of them around the museum in their respective prams. My son liked the 1970s design of the leather Joe chair, formed in the shape of a baseball glove. I’ve just asked my daughter what was her favourite part of the Museum and she said it was “that fashion bit on the second floor.” They both liked the Punch and Judy booth.

The Museum’s contents are in many ways just as impressive as the building in which they are housed. Organised around the large central space that rises up for two complete floors to a curved ceiling are a variety of galleries, each with their own distinctive character. From the museum map, the captions given to each room offers a sense of the collections: Ancient Egypt, Local History, World Art, 20th Century Art and Design, Mr. Willett’s Popular Pottery, Brighton History Centre, Performance, Body, Fashion and Style, Art Galleries and Exhibitions.

The whole feels pretty much right: the right balance between new-fangled interactive displays and the established conventions of lit and shelved cabinets; the right mixture of local focus with the acknowledgement of wider horizons; the right inter-play between permanent exhibits and temporary or touring shows. As my daughter said, “that fashion bit” is very impressive, particularly in its negotiation of the intricate connections between styles of vernacular clothing (primarily donations of full outfits from local inhabitants) and more recognisably designed dress. But this pitch is a personal one, reflecting little more than my own interests. Other areas have their own excitements. It is one of the great luxuries offered by a local museum that those who live here have the opportunity to return again and again, noticing something for the first time or finding, with the passage of time, something different in what had become familiar.

Of course, when you are visiting somewhere with a specific purpose, as I began to in the Spring while scouting out possible routes for this strange audio guide, things shift again.

1 Jun 2011

Sounding Touching

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There was one particular way that I experienced the Museum differently on my little reconnaissance missions in March and April. This new dimension of experience related to hearing the space with fresh ears, actually listening at last to its special atmosphere.

Wandering around the galleries in an effort to find the most appropriate route through which to guide those experienced “Noli Me Tangere” became as much a question of paying attention to the acoustic fate of vibrating air molecules - energised by my movements, by those of other visitors, by the Museum’s staff, by the sounds that stole their way in from outside – as it was a question of looking at structures and objects.

One aspect of how the Museum made sound dynamic was through the different flooring surfaces, their material qualities and the ways that they were constructed. Each offered their own resistance to the weight of a footfall, each absorbed or reflected the report of my shoe flexing my bulk down.

Over the weeks that I had spent thinking about how to respond to the Soundwaves commission, I became interested in the idea of touching. What crystallised this purely provisional notion came from an unlikely source. Making my way back from a trip abroad, I suddenly wanted to read something very different from what counted as my normal fare. At the airport newsagents, there was a deal where if you bought a newspaper then a book came with it, at greatly reduced price. I settled into my seat with a copy of John Connolly’s “The Whisperers”. Now, as I look at the cover of the book, there in muted tones next to me as I am typing this on my kitchen table, it is difficult to appreciate how I managed to miss a fuller sense of the genre conventions that might inform my read. But there I was, squeezed into my seat, enjoying writing of great pace and charge, surprised to discover that the thriller I thought I had begun steadily turned into a horror novel. Connolly is an excellent author and I have since eagerly sought out other books in his Charlie Parker series. In “The Whisperers” the narrative device that struck me, wrapped up in an intriguing plot with characters to match, was an artefact that ‘spoke’ to those who came into its proximity.

Here was something interesting. Perhaps, I thought, it would be possible to work on the idea that the objects behind a museum’s glass could reach out to the passing visitors and impart their truths through vibration. This could bring touch into contact with sound and give me the title of the work “Noli Me Tangere” or “Touch-Me-Not”. If you could not physically touch the objects on display, could hearing provide a surrogate access?

As I thought about this accidental impetus from John Connolly, I remembered that one of my students, Rob Mullender, had already delved much deeper into this territory. His work involves how “sound can be, and has historically been, made from other types of energy”. Rob’s writing and his artistic practice together open up the complex connections between sound and these other types of energy. He is one of those students from whom I will learn much more than I can ever teach him. Opening a draft document of his that is on my hard-drive, I’ve just found two great quotes. In ‘Edison’s Teeth’, Steven Connor writes that “…touch accompanies, mimics, performs sound rather than translating or defining it.” In “The Skin of Film”, Laura Marks has it that “…distinguished from optical visuality, which sees things from enough distance to perceive them as distinct forms in deep space: in other words, how we might usually conceive of vision… Haptic looking tends to move over the surface of its object rather than plunge into illusionistic depth, not to distinguish form so much as to discern texture.”

Walking in the Museum, I am constantly touching, but touching with my feet rather than my hands. This ‘touching’ is simultaneously a ‘sounding,’ in the sense of making noise – sharper, softer, fuller, more hollow – and in the sense of sounding out, of feeling a way.

Inspired by Connolly’s novel and by Rob’s work – but conscious that my reach will never match their own – I began to appreciate how this soundwalk could develop.

 

 

Angus Carlyle's Space

This is a blog that charts the progress of the "Noli Me Tangere" commission for the Soundwaves Festival 2011 in Brighton. Posts are 'live' in the sense that they will only appear while I am working on this project (and in its immediate aftermath). Posts are 'raw' in the sense that I am using this Posterous blog more as a thinkspace - a scrapbook, a sketchpad - than as anything more polished or resolved. There will be typos and mistakes just as there will be changes of tack and contradictions.

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Angus  Carlyle