A NEW IDEA with additional researches about soundscape

My new idea:
It is about site-specific-art. It's including two steps: firstly, I records the sound of Big Ben. Secondly, I replay it in the Greenwich foot tunnel and record the new sound with reverb effect. In this way, I can explore the relationship between the space and sound.
Site-specific art is artwork created to exist in a certain place. Typically, the artist takes the location into account while planning and creating the artwork.

Why I choose Greenwich foot tunnel is because I found a list of the UK's five weirdest sounding places on the website and I am influenced by this. I think it would be fun to explore the relationship between the sound and space through the special reverb effects.

l   St Paul's Cathedral Whispering Gallery, London

l   Wormit water reservoir, Dundee

l   Greenwich foot tunnel in London

l   Bitterns at Ham Wall, near Glastonbury

l   Anechoic chambers around the UK

I am inspired by an American composer, Bill Fontana who is famous for making sound sculpture. He has made works all over the world and has presented his sound sculptures extensively, including at the Venice Biennale (1999), the Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid (1995), The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1991), Tate Modern, London (2006), Madison Square Park, New York (2007), and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1987, 1997, 2010). Some of his more famous works include Distant Trains, Satellite Ear Bridge Cologne-San Francisco, Journey Through My Sound Sculptures, The Sound of an Unblown Flute,, Panoramic Echoes and "Acoustical Visions of the Golden Gate Bridge".

The Sound Sculptures, Acoustical Visions and Ideas of Bill Fontana

I have worked for the past 45 years creating installations that use sound as a sculptural medium to interact with and transform our perceptions of visual and architectural settings. These have been installed in public spaces and museums around the world including San Francisco, New York, Rome, Paris, London, Chicago,Vienna, Berlin, Venice, Sydney ,Tokyo, Barcelona, Linz, Manchester, Istanbul and Abu Dhabi.

My sound sculptures use the human and/or natural environment as a living source of musical information. I am assuming that at any given moment there will be something meaningful to hear and that music, in the sense of coherent sound patterns, is a process that is going on constantly. My methodology has been to create networks of simultaneous listening points that relay real time acoustic data to a common listening zone (sculpture site). Since 1976 I have called these works sound sculptures.

I have produced a large number of works that explore the idea of creating live listening networks. These all use a hybrid mix of transmission technologies that connect multiple sound retrieval points to a central reception point. What is significant in this process are the conceptual links determining the relationships between the selected listening points and the site-specific qualities of the reception point (sculpture site). Some conceptual strategies have been acoustic memory, the total transformation of the visible (retinal) by the invisible (sound), hearing as far as one can see, the relationship of the speed of sound to the speed of light, and the deconstruction of our perception of time.

From the late 90”s until the present my projects have explored hybrid listening technologies of acoustic microphones, underwater sensors (hydrophones) and structural/material sensors (accelerometers). Some of my most recent works I call Acoustical Visions and are explorations of the image that a sound makes and the sound that an image makes.

                                                                                                                            -Bill Fontana

This work is called "Speeds of Time", and is a musical deconstruction of the most famous acoustic icon and symbol of time, Big Ben. Live sensors and microphones are mounted on the clockwork mechanism and near the bells of Big Ben to generate a spatial- acoustic composition that is placed in an historic colonnade of the New Palace Yard, directly below and within earshot of the bells. The presence of the sound sculpture in this setting interacts with the natural sound of the bells, creating a multi-dimensional acoustic zone. While this work was installed in Westminster, a 12 hour multi-track recording of the sound sculpture was made that makes it possible to fully recreate the real time sense of this artwork, which can be realized as an 8 channel sound installation. This recording is fully accurate to real time, and if started precisely at five seconds before 10 o'clock, will faithfully keep time.

Main artworks:

White Sound: an urban seascape in Wellcome Collection, which is supported by Haunch of Venison

Harmonic Bridge, 2006

Speeds of Time, 2008

River Sounding, 2010

Organ of Corti

Subjective summary:

Fontana frequently rethinks the city space of London through acoustic art recently. Many of his artworks unceasingly examines the relationship between the sound and the city space from aesthetic, technological, historical and museum space level. It provides me a new entry point to consider the interaction between the sound and city space.  It is not only involves a single geography and historical context of the city, but also refers to the local artistic history, artistic comments to resonate with.

While visual media production and research have been carried out to a limit, the creation of the auditory can develop a more rich awareness to us. They put forward a methodology of listening for us to rethink. It is also a kind to listen and to identify the city's past, present and future time through mapping technique.  People can always close their eyes to watch, but it is very difficult to cut off their hearing. However, this difficulty makes efforts of the acoustic creators more important because they challenge the standard linear structure of auditory experience and open a hearing 'window' for people outside of their daily repetition-where people began to practice to reset the audio mode, to listen and to feel the gap between people and objects gradually.




Additional research about Peter Cusack and Susan Philipsz

Peter Cusack-Your Favourite London Sounds
It is a kind of field recording. His sound art works are often focused on ecology, environment, and the relations between the people, places, and sounds. One of his most popular projects is Favourite Sounds of London, which started in 1998 and has since spread worldwide.

Favourite Sounds has been influential in inspiring the recent proliferation of online sound maps, establishing a framework for producing collective ideas of soundscape, and suggesting approaches to urban sound that extend beyond noise pollution.

"People's ears are sensitive. They hear underneath and through the general hubbub"
                                                                                                                         -Peter Cusack


Subjective summary:

It's an odd way to think about a city. If you remove the language, I think it's a fair assumption to say that most Western cities sound pretty much alike. Indeed, going by what's here, London doesn't sound a whole lot different from New York: there are the screeches of buses, wailing of sirens, humming of power plants, whooshing of rivers and electronic bleeps at supermarket checkouts. Some of the pieces, recorded in language-laden places like markets or coffee shops, catch Londoners in conversation, bringing a specific local flavor to the tracks. And there is a trove of favorite sounds that one normally doesn't associate with any city?the unaccompanied chirping of birds or booming thunder?which, of course, are part of every urban environment.

Some of the sounds come with short descriptions, giving them more poetic weight: "Onions frying in my flat," "Rain on skylight while lying in bed," "Key in door," "London from near the top of a tower block, Holloway Road, on a damp evening," or a recording of an East London mosque, which is accompanied by the description, "The Music call to prayer is a recent addition to London's soundscape." The CD begins with the sound of Big Ben: "London's most famous sound is broadcast to the world daily from a microphone high in the tower. This is how it sounds from street level."

Peter Cusack's Favourite sound project inspires me to consider about the disappeared sounds and disappearing sound as he recored some disappeared sounds last century. (Disappearing sounds are generally those associated with social activity, although some natural species and their sounds have also become extinct. When the energy forms used in society change, many direct and indirect acoustic changes result.) Some of which are distinct sounds connecting a city to its heritage and people. It also got me thinking about preserving endangered sounds. What impressed people most might be daily sounds rather than soundmarks. For example, the trams in Manchester had recently been reintroduced into the city and were seen as a sign of renewal and regeneration.
His sound art works are often focused on ecology, environment, and the relations between the people, places, and sounds. In my opinion, it is the meaning of the soundscape production. The Favourite Sounds project provokes my interest in how we interact with our everyday environment.

What's more, I found a useful website called LONDON SOUND SURVEY.

close and remote: I am thinking about the locative and cognitive potential of sound and how sound shapes our experience of the environment.

I also get inspiration to think the importance of sound in our encounters with the city, the role of voice, memory in our listening exchanges.

Reference:
http://favouritesounds.org/
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-20773690
http://the-artists.org/artistsbymovement/site-specific-art
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Fontana

http://www.resoundings.org/
http://resoundings.org/Pages/Speeds_of_Time.html
http://www.artda.cn/view.php?tid=6946&cid=3
http://wellcomecollection.org/whats-on/exhibitions/white-sound
http://www.nypress.com/cusacks-favourite-london-sounds/
http://createdigitalmusic.com/2013/05/you-learn-a-lot-about-the-city-by-asking-about-its-sound-peter-cusack-interview/
http://www.closeandremote.net/portfolio/sound-city-talk/
http://www.sfu.ca/sonic-studio/handbook/Disappearing_Sound.html