Students of this course may try their hand at their own sound interventions and musical compositions, or simply focus on learning more about diverse musical traditions, sonic experimentation, and acoustic phenomena in everyday life. Designed by artist and Duke professor, Pedro Lasch, and UdK composer Mathias Hinke, this course is also co-taught by scholar and musician Jace Clayton (DJ Rupture) and curator Candice Hopkins (Documenta 14). The lectures link major artistic developments of recent decades to wider ideas about sound in specific social and spatial contexts. Also included are guest presentations from key thinkers and practitioners, like: Christopher DeLaurenti, Jen Delos Reyes, Tina Haver Currin, Quran Karriem, Christina Kubisch, Thomas Kusitzky, Scott Lindroth, Mark Anthony Neal, Bill Seaman, and John Supko. As the ‘ART of the MOOC’ title implies, learners and participants are encouraged to treat the MOOC itself as a public art medium. This happens mostly through the course’s optional practical components, local project productions, global exchanges, and critical feedback. While no prior sound production or musical experience is required, projects also offer challenging options for advanced learners. For other course offerings or language versions in this series, just search 'ART of the MOOC' in the Coursera catalog.
Buildings & Urban Spaces
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From the course by Duke University
Art of the MOOC: Experiments with Sound
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From the lesson
NOTATION, HOW MUSIC TRAVELS & PUBLIC SPACE
This lesson begins by focusing on the relationship between experimental practices and scores or notation systems. It also examines how sound has been used and understood by artists in specific urban contexts, such as ports, train stations, and airports, as well as rural settings, including forests, gardens, and the wider landscape. We conclude with an examination of how sound and music travel, be it through the populations who produce it, or the objects and digital files that are used to record and share it.
Meet the Instructors
Pedro LaschVisual Artist and Associate Research Professor
Duke Art, Art History & Visual Studies
Candice HopkinsDocumenta 14 Curator, Producer, and Author
Jace ClaytonComposer, DJ, Author, and Lecturer
Mathias HinkeComposer, Researcher, and Professor University of the Arts (UdK) - Berlin
We will begin this week's lectures focusing more on acoustics and
sound and the idea of buildings, spaces and architecture.
So starting with the idea of buildings,
you may remember that in our lecture with Candice Hopkins from earlier in the MOOC,
we talked about Alvin Lucier's,
I am sitting in the room.
We thought it's important to remind you of this example because it's a great artwork,
where a building like a room in this case is used to
basically filter only the resonant frequencies of the sound,
and so in some ways the room itself becomes a composer.
We also are going to present the notion of installations in a room.
Mr. Leitner, a Austrian composer and acoustic artist,
came up with the notion of sound to be a constructive material for architecture.
And only through sound,
you would be able to really get the sense,
and a complete sense of the room.
He described it to through sound spaces emerge.
These kinds of studies often are understood to
fall within what people call sound ecology.
Sound ecology has had a huge range of applications,
sometimes it's used to understand
health implications of a particular space and how the sound affects the health.
But also, it's been used to measure and improve productivity at the workplace.
Sound barriers that can be installed in certain office spaces have
been produced after this studies are made to understand the work environment.
And that's of course a very contemporary application.
But remember, earlier in the MOOC,
we even thought of an entire sound architecture through the idea of Archi acoustics,
and how ancient buildings were designed
very deliberately to produce a specific sound environment.
Like Mr Lietner said,
that sound is constructive material that allows
the room to emerge and to evolve properly.
There are many of these places and buildings being done.
One of these buildings is the Baptistery in Pisa where the echo lasts over 12 seconds.
So the building and the sound march completely.
You may even think
of very complex structures like shopping malls,
where people actually work as these malls get designed,
to understand how the different soundscapes works,
but there are different niches within these larger architectural constructs.
One area of the mall may want to have
a sound environment that is loud because children are supposed to play there,
whereas another area is supposed to be more quiet
because it could be disruptive to have a certain type of sound.
And of course, there is some manipulation in order for you to either dwell
longer in places and maybe get into the mood of shopping.
Our case study is the work done by an architect called Shea Trahan.
He has talked about the resonant form and he has been very very keen
on looking at the properties of buildings and the resonant qualities.
So the way he started doing his research is,
he took a metal plate and put some sand on it
and made these plates vibrate at certain particular frequencies.
By doing so he realized that at certain frequencies the shape
of the sound on the plate would change.
He saw that there were very very neat forms that were happening.
So he decided to do out of these 2D image of the vibration,
a 3D drawing and then
build a model that would be resonant to a real particular frequency.
In this case, this fellow, Shea Trahan,
being an architect devised a room or building and that became an instrument,
so that he himself becomes by the nature of what he's doing a composer.
This project by Shea Trahan actually is very
interesting to understand what we may think of as latent sound.
Within our analytical concept of the material frame,
the architecture itself in this case is a huge part of
the material frame because it contains within it potential sounds.
But you still are missing
another part of the material frame which is the actual production of sound.
People making noises, singing whenever they want to do in those frequencies.
So we have a latent part of
the material frame and a physically existing one that is always there.
So and it's also very neat to talk about the perspective
of things over who is listening what,
because the room resonates at the very particular frequencies,
it also filters out all those other frequencies that are not particular.
So you can have
very very intimate spaces at particular frequencies that are not resonant,
and then you have very local sounds which are those that are resonant within that room.
We've talked about sound inside buildings
and we're going to be talking about sound outside.
How do you carve public spaces acoustically?
Or how do buildings and public spaces shape the acoustic environment?
There's a very interesting group based in Berlin,
like a research team led by Thomas Kuzitsky,
who have been working on this idea of auditory architecture.
In this week we have a guest presentation with Kuzitsky.
So you'll hear from him and a lot of their concepts,
but they've actually studied specific public spaces in the city of Berlin,
to really understand how people perceive
the complex in that auditory environments in them.
So and the result of their analysis is that not the volume of the city noise if you may,
or the public space noise is what is really a problem.
It's rather the monotony and the monotony of it that seems to be the problem.
And this study with one of them at Ensoeta Platz actually came up with this conclusion,
that what people found so annoying or difficult about
that urban environment in terms of its acoustic nature, was actually unexpected.
People thought the result would be the volume,
the loudness and it was actually this just constancy of the sound.
Our case study is
a examination of the waterscapes and water games of the city of Sheffield in England.
In fact, two researchers named Jian Kang and YiYing Hao,
came up with a very interesting result.
Namely, that there's a neat relationship between construction and sound which is obvious.
But the functionality of that is what is really interesting.
Apparently the noise of water can be so loud that it serves as a,
like acoustic sound proof.
If you think about the situation of traffic passing by.
So if there is a fountain that is very loud,
that loudness of the sound water,
would become a sonic war.
And they also found out that the opposite is also true.
So, when the water sound is almost imperceptible,
that it also helps us a filter because if you're drawn to that,
then by putting attention just to that acoustic source,
then you filter out the rest.
So you can imagine how important it is to use our concept
of perspective specifically the idea of an intimate,
you know sound, as you walk through all these fountains in Sheffield.
It's a space that exists as a whole but,
it's the individual, the listener, right,
who depending on whether they're next to
the soft sound of water or one of the very loud fountains,
that actually through this intimate dimension of sound has the experience of a fountain.
Something else that is quite particular about this example,
is that there are some sounds that we have learned either culturally or
just our bodies as humans tend to filter out after exposure of time.
You know. So, people often when they hear water or ventilation systems,
there are very particular sounds that are easier to tone out,
you know, to filter out than others.
Which we need a perspective when you choose to focus out of it?
So, sound has been used to control public spaces.
It has been used by state regulators,
law enforcement, and the military for instance,
but also, by social interventions of
demonstrations and people against the government, for instance.
And, so we have a few of examples to make that very clear.
So if we start with the very intimate,
you might recall this movie from Stanley Kubrick, called Clockwork Orange,
where individual is forced to listen to music
and then his behaviors manipulated through the force,
the violent force of music.
A similar example in the military application of course,
is the non-lethal methods of torture,
that often use sound like Abu Ghraib and other detention centers like Guantanamo.
So, a lot of the learnings from military in the state,
in this regard about how sound can be used for
individuals have them been applied to crowds,
you know and kind of mass gatherings.
So in that sense this idea of social control through
sound has become weaponized in many cases.
Sound itself can become a sonic weapon.
Two very clear extreme examples that we may think of,
for sonic weapons are,
those whose sounds are so deep, you know,
so low in frequency that there is a weapon
that can literally disintegrate people's internal organs,
if it was to be used at its full capacity.
On the other extreme of the frequency spectrum,
we have sonic weapons these days,
that can isolate one individual in the crowd at
a great distance because of its high pitch and make that person's ears hurt,
because of the sound, without the people surrounding that person even hearing anything.
And then there is also this sonic control of
particular members of the society like teenagers,
as you were mentioning, these pretty high pitch things, too.
Yeah like them and malls they've been using that
since the 80s were like in areas where they don't want
teenagers to skateboard and loiter and hang out without buying anything.
They've created the sounds that the adults cannot hear.
So it doesn't bother them but teenagers feel be uncomfortable,
even if they're not even conscious why they
are but its because of this sound that only they could hear.
So our case study,
is a work done by a group of architects in the city of Hamburg Germany,
called the SPiNE architects.
And what they did is the following: Because in the city of Hamburg,
or for that matter in every city around the world,
train stations become a hub of many different people,
but also people with problems like drug addicts and prostitution.
So, the city of Hamburg decided,
we're going to sonically clean up the train station by,
you know blasting music in such a way that people will not want to stay.
We were just talking, right before.
So this SPiNE architect,
collective decided to build a massive Jukebox.
So, they were granted to play the train station over the period of three days.
And instead of them choosing the music or the sound that was going to happen,
they handed over that to the public.
So the general public could go,
and choose whatever music they were going to
listen or any sound for that matter so that they would take interest.
This project by SPiNE architects in
the train station in Hamburg is actually great to think more
about our concept of time frame as well as perspective.
For someone who, a passer by or someone who learned about the product and chose a song,
and all of a sudden sees a very appraisal song,
played in the entire train station,
the time-frame may be simply the duration or length of that song, right?
And in the sense of perspective,
the perspective has shifted from an intimate experience of sound that,
that person has with this music,
to one of a local level.
So though both things are happening.
For the group itself, for SPiNE architects,
you know, it's the entire duration of the roadways that become the thing.
What are other dimensions of perspective that you think are at played there?
Well I think that as soon as this whole project was filmed at times or recorded at times,
and then put it into the Internet,
then the perspective becomes global.
And it's on the demand which is another thing that we will be talking,
when we talk about the Internet.
And there's so many other things that place,
for example, people who work at that space,
you know who have a frequency of relationship with a space,
they have their own time frame, so we may think about it.
Right, because they go to work at particular times,
and they have their own perception.
Even the homeless people who weren't originally welcomed,
they may still actually sleep there and have this experience,
but of their own favorite music.
Right, if they get to play it.
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