Noli Me Tangere http://touch-me-not.posterous.com Project Blog for Soundwaves Festival 2011 / Brighton Museum and Art Gallery 'soundwalk' posterous.com Fri, 13 Jan 2012 03:35:00 -0800 Hutong Looming http://touch-me-not.posterous.com/hutong-looming http://touch-me-not.posterous.com/hutong-looming

Stretched out on a blond wood frame in Brighton Museum's World Art gallery is a Chinese woven robe with wide sleeves and a crossed-collar - technically a relatively recent version of a Han-style court yi I think.

I remember years ago pointing out this robe in the glass cabinet to each of my children on those days when a brisk tour of the Museum was a convenient staging point after a dip in the municipal swimming pool before we headed back up the hill home for a lunch of sandwiches with their crusts cut off, sliced kiwi fruit and chopped carrots.

Through a friend at London College of Fashion, I managed to get into a textile studio to record a student working at a Dobby handloom. It was strange indeed, for once, to be recording in an interior environment, not having to counter gusts of wind or directing the short shotgun mic away from unwanted sound events. All was otherwise quiet, just the sun at the window, the bright varnished parquet floor and the clattering, rattling sound of the loom in action.

For this Noli Me Tangere project for the Soundwaves Festival, I wanted to anchor the heard experience of craft activity - the loom's arrythmic cycles - within an environmental sense of place. I had been to Beijing once with work, interviewing potential students for places at our University. Everything about our short period there was conducted at such pace and pitch that down-time seemed, literally, a foreign concept. Nonetheless, we did get have a brief morning off before we had to board our flight home. After an excursion to the Yonghe Lama Temple and few rounds of haggling in the neighbouring street of shops selling religious tat - one of the results of which, a gold plastic, solar-powered prayer wheel I am looking at while typing this - I found my way into a narrow 'hutong'.

Having first visited a public urinal the size of small cupboard which had an ingenious thick khaki fabric door with a head height vinyl window stiched into it, I placed my little Zoom H2 recorder in my top pocket and set out to walk from the most deserted end of the hutong street to its busiest, moving steadily towards the traffic swirling around Dongsi North Road.

There was something very special about this little street. It was not as genteel as the hutong across the way where cafes selling beautiful teas rubbed shoulders with cool clothes stores and the Beijing Fixed Wheel Bike Shop. That other street was certain of its charms but my little hutong, in the half an hour I wandered around it with my tourist eyes and ears open, had a ruder, messier appeal, its miracles animated by the sounds of throats being cleared, goods arriving and being hawked, food getting cooked in the open, the voices of children and the elderly and the robust warmth of bodies jostling together in the grey cold morning air.

Layering these two recordings on top of one another - the loom and the hutong - gave me "Hutong Looming", the soundwalk that visitors to the Museum hear on their headphones when they entered the World Art Gallery.

 

Hutong_Looming.mp3 Listen on Posterous

 

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Fri, 13 Jan 2012 02:10:19 -0800 An English Pastorale http://touch-me-not.posterous.com/an-english-pastorale http://touch-me-not.posterous.com/an-english-pastorale

Crockery
The collection of creamware and enamelware, of cups, mugs, jugs and other artefacts that might be colloquially identified as pottery, form the substance of Henry Willett's bequest on which the Brighton Museum & Gallery built its initial collection. For Willett, and for subsequent curators, these items possessed an appeal that exceeded any purely formal, aesthetic properties. In a prototype of today's anthropologists concerns with material culture, for Willett these little things communicated something of the lived life of their owners and makers.

For the hotspot called "An English Pastorale", I wanted to literalise these objects' relation to the hedged lanes, cobbled streets, creaking wharfs, rustling copses and gentle valleys of their country of origin. I wanted to create a sly counterpoint to the more anodyne painterly depiction of the English landscape, something I had attempted to do before, both in sound and in video. But I also wanted to reach another hand out to feel, so to speak, the tactile qualities of these glazed objects, their thickness and thinness, their robustness of fragility.

Brushes_hammers
Assembling a collection of ceramic objects from the kitchen cupboard and a selection of brushes and hammers from other points in the house, I set about trying to release their vibrations, recording the results on a Schaller guitar pick up mic. I then processed the recordings. accentuate the

Guitar
 

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Tue, 14 Jun 2011 10:47:00 -0700 In The Fashion Store http://touch-me-not.posterous.com/in-the-fashion-store http://touch-me-not.posterous.com/in-the-fashion-store

In the basement of the Museum is a long white painted corridor. Behind what I remember as reinforced steel doors with their foundry’s name embossed on them, are a series of store rooms.

Inside the fashion store are some roller rack shelving units like those you now find in libraries and archives. Turning the wheel mechanism to part the stacks reveals full hangers and boxes one atop another. In the fashion store, as elsewhere in the Museum, there is that intriguing balance between objects of vernacular taste and artefacts that are seen to fall within the perimeters of high culture. Elephant collar Paisley shirts in limp synthetic fabrics of harsh hues hang not so very far away from the most delicate dresses of many centuries agoThe more precious items are contained in boxes and wrapped in tissue paper. It takes up to three weeks for garments to be readied to go into the stores, each item undergoing two processes of freezing to catch the moths.

I watched the Curator of Fashion, Martin Pell, and one of his colleague’s from Brighton University unwrapping a ‘sackback’ pleated court dress that had been loaned from another museum. Having put a neutral coloured protective cloth on a mannequin, the dress was lowered down over the dummy to give a sense of how the fabric would once have hung on a breathing body. As I leaned in to peer closely, I was able to see the incredible intricacy with which the silk had been brocaded and with which the finest of sprays of hooped silver had been dusted over the dress.

As I tried to find things to record, other than the roller rack shelves and the almost silent fabric steamer, Martin talked about the role of chintz in the industrial revolution, clothes and cloth in Empire and the fate of potentially historic garments that found themselves demoted to the costume chests of public school Drama Societies. As these stories unfolded, I realised again that with more time you could weave incredibly rich narratives around individual objects.

I did get some nice rustling of brocade and crinkling of tissue paper and, although I hadn’t been looking for it, some interesting conversation that might well work as part of the track in the Fashion and Style ‘hotspot’.

Throughout, of course, a prominent air conditioning unit hummed and grinded its time away. 

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Sun, 12 Jun 2011 03:56:00 -0700 Fake Murano http://touch-me-not.posterous.com/fake-murano http://touch-me-not.posterous.com/fake-murano

Murano

Ever since I saw the cabinet of glassware in the Brighton Museum and Art Gallery through the different eyes of someone who was no longer just visiting, I thought of Murano.


I have never been to Murano but believed I knew it: an island in the Venice lagoon renowned for its artisanal glass-making. Even though I had a sense of the island’s pre-eminence – wasn’t it once the only place in Europe where mirrors were made? didn’t its citizens accrue special privileges yet could never leave? – my imagination refused to cross the borders of the small scale. In my imaginary Murano, there were narrow alleys, open shutters spilling light, a lone voice bouncing of the walls, the occasional dog bark, lapping water, creaking wooden quays, a sea bird’s cry, a fog bank drawing in over the swamp just before the rude diesel of a barge swung past.

Talking about my ideas to the Soundwaves Festival director, Claudia Molitor, she presented a very different Murano. The island she spoke of was much, much bigger in scope, a finished town of wide canals, painted houses, bridges and churches, everywhere bustling with tourists, catered to shop after shop. The wooden quays were still there, though.

Returning home, I looked at my copy of Jan Morris’ “Venice” which I assumed must have been one of the sources of my fantasy Murano. Leafing through the pages highlighted in the Index, it became clear quite how far into whimsy I had drifted, perhaps tugged in that direction by some of Morris’ discussion of the smaller islands out in the lagoon.

“… For the rest, Murano is a clutter of small glass factories, rambling, messy, uncoordinated places, built of red or dingy stonework, with tall blackened chimneys and wooden landing-stages … The important thing to know about the Murano glass-makers is that almost everything they make is, at least to my taste, perfectly hideous. This has always been so”.

I find intriguing some of the kitschest excesses that emerged from the furnaces of Murano. I’m not sure I’d want any of them on my desk, but I’m glad that other people find a space in their taste for them and can do that without having recourse to ‘irony’. And of course, not all glassware that comes from Murano has the bilious colours and grotesques shapes that invoke such horrible fascination for Morris. Foscarini, for example, is based in Murano and theirs is understood to constitute a rather more refined aesthetic. I saved up and bought my wife a red Rodolfo Dordoni “Lumiere XX” lamp. And, through the strange way that objects move round houses, that has ended up on the table I’m using as a desk.

Even after Morris, I just couldn’t rid myself of the whole atmosphere of the fog-bound island, silted canals, wrecks, distant sea-birds and footsteps on stonework. Searching through my hard-drives, I began to find recordings that I’d previously made that could work together to fake the Murano of my dreams. Here were some scratching cicadas, distant voices and domestic sounds of a village evening in Crete; here was a wooden harbour creaking above a lake in Eastern Finland; here were some frogs in a rice paddy in Japan; here in a box I took down from the attic was a DAT tape of a barge chugging past on the river Cam that I recorded eight years ago while my daughter was asleep in her pram.

Shaping these recordings a little by raising or lowering their frequencies or shifting the distribution of energy (=volume) they contained and then layering them on top of one another, I’ve managed to create something whose acoustic contours approximated the fake Murano. In the four days that remain, I just need to find the right bugling call of a herring gull and decide just where to put it.

Diana_desk

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Mon, 06 Jun 2011 12:11:00 -0700 Henry Willett, Esq., Of Brighton http://touch-me-not.posterous.com/henry-willett-esq-of-brighton http://touch-me-not.posterous.com/henry-willett-esq-of-brighton

Willetts

1266. Mug. Cream ware, printed and coloured with ploughing with inscription “The Weathers fare, the Season’s now, Drive on my Boys, God speed the Plough”. H. 4 in. c. 1780

486. Plaques, a pair. Earthenware, with bos of Fox and Pitt in relief. 6 by 5.5 in. c. 1800

274. Pipe. Earthenware. A man astride a barrel. H 6.5 in. c. 1790.

Henry Willett was one of the Victorian characters behind the founding of the Museum. Willett, who was born in the local town of Newhaven, collected fossils before turning his attention to pottery and art. A friend of John Ruskin, to whom he offered some of his finds, his collection was enabled by the money made through his businesses, including brewing.

In one reference that I found, Ruskin praised the “magnificence … unsurpassable beauty [and] extreme interest” of the objects Willett had intended as gifts. But from what I understand of the Willett’s collection that was first lent to the Museum (in the 1870s) and then donated (in 1903), this sense of the rare and the splendid did not really animate his pursuit of pottery and porcelain. Rather than being constituted by unique treasures, the ceramic collection that Willett bequeathed to the Museum represented something more deliberately mundane. This was the “homely pottery”, that Willett believed could trace "the history of a country”.

Stella Beddoe, Senior Keeper and Keeper of Decorative Art at the Museum, gave me an copy of the 1899 catalogue that was produced for Willett’s collection when it was on loan to the V & A (though the collection “illustrating popular British history” was consigned to the Bethnal Green outpost rather than displayed in all its colloquial glory in the halls of South Kensington). Three entries from the catalogue start this post. The pages of the catalogue have turned the most delicate of browns that darken towards the stitching. The pages give off a slightly stale odour that is not at all unpleasant.

Willett’s perspective resonates with much more contemporary ideas. His identification of the values of a history learnt from everyday life chimes with some of what Richard Hoggart was saying in the 1950s in Uses of Literacy about mass and popular culture and with parallel ideas about ‘le quotidien’ from French thinkers in the 1960s like Lefebvre and De Certeau. There is also a sense that what Willett’s project – like Henry Wellcome’s – was a precursor to what late twentieth century archaeologists, and anthropologists came to call ‘material culture’.

 

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Mon, 06 Jun 2011 03:21:00 -0700 Craft http://touch-me-not.posterous.com/craft http://touch-me-not.posterous.com/craft

Bell_is_a_cup

It has proven difficult to track down some of the craft activities needed to supply some of the sound textures that I want to weave into each track.

Glass blowers, for example, seem particularly thin on the ground. I’d like to collect sounds of glass blowing for a hotspot located next to a cabinet of glassware in the C20th Art and Design room. The two glassblowers I did manage to track down each told me that their scientific work doesn’t involve all the shimmering heat, roaring furnaces and huffing-and-puffing that I had imagined. Potters, too, necessary for the hotspot near Mr. Willett’s Popular Pottery, all seem to have gone electric. What I wanted was the rasp and report of a foot-operated treadle pumping up and down.

I am cursing myself for spending so long thinking through what I wanted to do, rather than just getting on with things. I am trying not to be disheartened and have been putting the feelers out through as many friends as I can. I’m sure someone will come up trumps and I’ll soon be squatting down with a microphone next to a wet lump of spinning clay.

In the meantime, I’ve put Plan B into operation and, through a friend’s help, I manage to get a tour of the workshop facilities at City College Brighton. Early one morning, as the cleaners are finishing hoovering, I meet Chris Hill, the Course Leader of the Foundation Degree in Fine Art. Chris leads me around all the different machines that might be used in the construction of metalware: spot welders, grinders, drills, guillotines, anvils, polishers and buffers.

All most all of my previous field-recordings have been made outside amongst the wind and the elements; I’m also often struggling to isolate a particular sound from a clamorous background of other sounds. In the City College, though, once the hoovers were switched off, the workshops were actually very tranquil, with very little sound bleeding in from the road outside or from neighbouring rooms and corridors. It took be a good few minutes to adjust to the different approach to recording: to drop the recording level, to remove the windshield and to appreciate the great luxury of being able to ask for a sound to be repeated.

 

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Fri, 03 Jun 2011 16:35:00 -0700 Hotspots http://touch-me-not.posterous.com/hotspots http://touch-me-not.posterous.com/hotspots

Hotspot

After I had decided to shift scale from objects to atmospheres (see the “Object of Shame” post) and as the clock ticked down ever more insistently to the day to deliver the loaded mp3 players to the Museum and send the relevant files to Soundwaves (for those who want to listen on their own phone or player), I had very quickly to choose the locations for the ‘hotspots’ (the points where the different tracks should be activated). In terms of the personal appeal of objects (and the viability of accounting for their objecthood acoustically), the Fashion and Style gallery would definitely make the cut, so would World Art, two spots in the long and open C20th Art and Design space made a lot of sense and I couldn’t miss out Mr. Willett’s Popular Pottery.

I made some recordings up in the early morning wind at the Iron Age fort that marks the origins of the settlement of Brighton, thinking to use them for a track corresponding to one of the two Local History collections. Something wasn’t quite right about the recordings, even when assembled into a nice little blustery atmosphere, and I decided not to pursue that route. The two Ancient Egypt rooms were also promising but these – like one of the Local History rooms - had their own sounds from interactive and static displays and these existing sounds made them less receptive to the kind of intervention I’m contemplating.

This left five different hotspots.

In truth, part of the process of arbitration about which locations were included and which excluded related to the distribution of the spaces around the gallery. I wanted these to be as evenly spaced as possible even if I was going to leave to the visitor some choice about which order they would complete the hotspots in. I say ‘some’ choice because I’d like to direct the visitor to finish in the Fashion and Style collection on the Second Floor. Part of the reason I want the visitors to end up there is because (even with 14 days to go and no hotspot actually completed) I also have plans for a wildcard track, designed to be played to accompany the listener to “Noli Me Tangere” on their back out to the exit of the Museum.

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Fri, 03 Jun 2011 08:15:00 -0700 Object of Shame http://touch-me-not.posterous.com/object-of-shame http://touch-me-not.posterous.com/object-of-shame

Blurry_mic

In its earliest version – the version I pitched to the Soundwaves Festival and the Brighton Museum and Art Gallery – “Noli Me Tangere” was to focus on specific objects in particular locations amongst the glass cabinets, display cases and plinths. I wanted to choose identified artefacts and work outwards from these. Initial candidates included the shiny surfaces of a Michael Graves designed Alessi whistling kettle; an enamel creamware mug (with the wabi-sabi of a brown crack visible on its lip); an oat and orange Emanuel Ungaro dress and jacket cut from the same Space Age 1960s cloth that Pierre Cardin, André Courrèges and Paco Rabanne enjoyed; and a glass vase that looked like a distended cat’s eye marble.

Finding the right objects would be fun and, once found, they could provide an appropriate frame for the kinds of soundworlds I wanted to evoke. With a defined piece in mind, things would become more manageable. The kinds of sound I was thinking of presenting to the listeners’ ears included: sounds of the craft or industrial processes involved in the production of the object; sounds of the object in use and the places where the object might have been used; the kinds of sounds that could be heard were the object to be struck, scraped, brushed and stroked. I would record material for all these sources and use that material as the raw ingredients from which to cook up a ‘musical’ composition that could be heard while wandering the galleries.

This object-orientated approach would, in part, be a sly reference to the notion of the ‘sound object’, an idea that is talked about a lot within discussions in sound art and music. The ‘objet sonore’ was proposed by Pierre Schaeffer, a composer who used the Studio d’Essai in France’s national radio station as a laboratory of experimental practice. Working initially with phonograph recordings and then magnetic tape, Schaeffer used real-world recordings as the basis for a compositional strategy that had the potential (at least) for taking its listeners far outside the parameters established by the conventional orchestra.

I don’t think I ever really got what Schaeffer was up to. I remember talking to students about “Etudes aux Chemins de Fer” (= “Study on Trains”) as if what Schaeffer was after was the rich allusional resonance of the sound of railways in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War.  Shamefully, I’ve not actually read Schaeffer’s original book where he elaborates on the idea of the ‘object sonore’ but as I understand things now, these allusions were precisely what Schaeffer was trying to escape. For him, the sound object is “any sound phenomenon or event perceived as a coherent whole (...) regardless its source or meaning”.

Whatever the exact nuances of Schaeffer’s position – and writing these words has guilted me into going to the library to read up what he actually said – focusing on specific objects in the museum would allow me a sidereal (and slightly satirical)  reference to this concept of the ‘sound object’.

There would also be, in adopting this method, an opportunity to find myself in the dim shadow of another of those giants of sound art who block out the sun: John Cage. Cage, after an encounter with the film-maker who was the lyricist of the non-objective image and a contributor to Disney’s “Fantasia” learned the following:  Oskar Fischinger made a remark to me which dropped me into the world of noise. He said: ‘Everything in the world has a spirit, and this spirit becomes audible by its being set into vibration’. He started me on a path of exploration of the world around me which has never stopped. Of hitting and scratching and scraping and rubbing everything, with anything I can get my hands on”.

But things, as they always do with me, gang awry. Because I didn’t want to use a voice-over and because I wanted those who experienced “Noli Me Tangere” to wander around, it was very difficult to resolve how I could direct people’s attention to particular locations in the Museum. Sure, I could use a photo of the object and stick that on a map but that seemed to concede too much to the visual.

So I have moved from individual objects to collections of objects, from the condensed qualities of the particular to the broader, diffuse characteristics that can be attributed to the group. The listener will now hear the atmospheres that they trigger by selecting the track that a map associates with a particular ‘hot spot’. This solution loses a lot of what had initially inspired me. But it will be simpler to deliver technically; it will allow people to choose their own route through the museum (rather than having to follow a proscribed itinerary); will allow them to move about a particular room or corridor rather than standing stock still and peering; it will also allow them to decide how long they want to listen to each track.

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Wed, 01 Jun 2011 17:53:00 -0700 Room Tone http://touch-me-not.posterous.com/room-tone http://touch-me-not.posterous.com/room-tone

As I understand it, when you are collaborating on producing sound for moving images, it is important to record what is called ‘presence’ or ‘room tone’. Once the actors have delivered their lines, the set is cleared of its human inhabitants and the microphone is set to work recording the ‘silent’ atmosphere of the studio or the external location. The room tone recording can then be used in the soundtrack as a plausible underlay for any dialogue that needs to be re-recorded in the soft padded confines of a sound-proofed booth. Without this underlay, the voices – and more specifically, the gaps between them – would take on a strange interiority, as if they were heard inside the head rather than spoken in any real world environment with all its acoustic foibles.

I visited the Brighton Museum & Art Gallery on a day it was closed to the public armed with various microphones. I wanted to record the room tone in the galleries I had identified as potential places to direct the headphone listener of “Noli Me Tangere”. I had in mind the idea that if I relayed the recorded sound of the empty rooms back to the listener who was walking through them, I could give them the reassurance of a certain presence. This would allow me the freedom to leave gaps between sounds without these being perceived as awkward and to play with juxtapositions that contrasted what was heard and what was seen.

As a way of connecting the two spaces – the real, live museum through which the visitor was navigating and the virtual space assembled in software and then delivered through the headphones – I’m thinking about allowing the listener just half a headphone (one speaker for only one of the two ears) or limiting the playback volume or the insulation in the earpiece. Using such strategies might ensure that external events bled through into the composed soundtrack and everything becomes nicely porous. Not removing the listener from the Museum but drawing them closer.

The reality of the room tone recording experiment was very different from my expectations. In one sense, it was a disaster. The Museum refused to offer up its quietness to me. Rather than the anticipated pin-drop tranquillity, no amount of changing microphones or recorders, or scrolling through the various audio settings, could give me what I had been after. Even when all was still, light bulbs buzzed and air conditioning units made their presence felt. But stillness was a rarity, even in a Museum that was ostensibly shut. People moved – quite rightly – from place to place, creaking the floorboards or clicking the tiles with their heels and soles. They talked and whistled, rattled keys and polished, washed and vacuumed. But however far this was from what I had originally wanted, it was the Museum that I was listening to and recording and I think I can do interesting things with what filled up my little storage cards.

In a different sense, the morning spent recording was a great success. For one thing, I was able to spend an extended and undisrupted time close to the exhibits. For another thing, I got to talk at length with two of the curators and learned a great deal from them. Speaking to the curators was particularly inspiring in the sense that this little project took on an undeniable reality: having to explain what I was up to allowed me to understand what I was up to; realising how little time remained before I had to get everything together pushed me to move from thinking to doing. Finding a particular door closed only intensifies the struggle to find and then wrench open another.

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Wed, 01 Jun 2011 16:40:00 -0700 Sounding Touching http://touch-me-not.posterous.com/sounding-touching http://touch-me-not.posterous.com/sounding-touching

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.

 

 

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Wed, 01 Jun 2011 13:54:00 -0700 In The Museum http://touch-me-not.posterous.com/in-the-museum http://touch-me-not.posterous.com/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.

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Fri, 27 May 2011 08:07:00 -0700 This Is Not A Soundwalk http://touch-me-not.posterous.com/54654378 http://touch-me-not.posterous.com/54654378

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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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