Visualising Porto's soundscape

Back in January we saw the Stereopublic project, which crowdsourced the quiet, and used it as an inspiration for short musical pieces as well. The URB project in Porto, Portugal takes a more academic approach, very carefully measuring and analysing the urban soundscape.

URB is a soundscape storage and analysis system idealized by José Alberto Gomes and developed in partnership with Diogo Tudela. URB’s goal is to keep record of the sonic profile of Porto, allowing researchers and artists to use the dataset freely within their own projects.

Using four Raspberry Pi’s equipped with a soundcard and an electret mic spread throughout the city, URB constantly listens to the environment and stores sonic features in an on-line public database. See the map above for where they placed the listening spots.

The datasets are freely available online, but you can also navigate them using URB XY, a data visualisation tool by Diogo Tudela. It’s interesting to see the differences between day and night, for example. Analysed properties like amplitude, zero-crossings, irregularity, spectral centroid, etc. are all very easily viewable and the tool is great to get a grip on the urban soundscape.

What I really like about this is that the data can be used for multiple purposes. From giving the government insight on noise pollution in a city and using this info in city planning, to artistic purposes. Which is exactly what the We The Citizens project (above) is about; using the data from the URB-system in artistic ways to make the audience aware of the sound ecology of the city. I hope this’ll happen in more cities, as most citizens are still unaware of the effects of noise pollution and sound ecology.

Quotidian Record

Brian House created Quotidian Record, a great looking vinyl record on which he makes locational data audible:

As the record turns, the markings on the platter indicate both the time as it rotates through every 24 hours and the names of the cities to which I travel. The sound suggests that our habitual patterns have inherent musical qualities, and that daily rhythms might form an emergent portrait of an individual.

To record his location data he used the OpenPaths app, which records your location data privately. Listening to the sound of the record patterns can be heard, although it doesn’t really have a musical quality. An interesting concept nonetheless. 

Music for Forgotten Places

Wandering around a city we might encounter these forgotten places - a vacant lot, an old ruin, a building no one lives in anymore. These spots always fascinate me, make me fantasize about their history and former inhabitants. Inspired by their mystique, Oliver Blank composed pieces of music for them - Music for Forgotten Places. 

Visitors and residents can call a phone number found on a sign at the forgotten place they pass, and listen to its music. A mindful moment in a busy city. The project is created in Coruña, Spain, but Oliver will visit cities across the world to discover and compose for their forgotten places as well. 

Find out more and listen to a piece of music at musicforforgottenplaces.com.

Forgotten Songs

When I first saw Forgotten Songs by Michael Thomas Hill, I was struck by the beauty of the image. Watching all those empty bird-cages hanging over the street I automatically start hearing the sound of birds in my head, even though it isn’t there. The image is so strong, the installation doesn’t need sound. I was slightly disappointed when I found out the artist doesn’t leave it up to our imagination - it actually does make sound. 

There is a message though: the fifty birds that can be heard in this installation in Sidney, used to live there. But habitat loss is credited as the biggest threat to bird survival. The birds that can be heard in Forgotten Songs were forced out of the city by European settlers. At night, the sounds change to those of nocturnal birds. 

Via My Modern Met

Blind Date

Me wearing the Blind Date helmet, getting ready for an unusual sonic exploration of the city of Ghent

During our visit to TRACK in the beautiful city of Ghent, we were invited to discover the city in a whole new way. Blind Date is a project by the Belgian art-education organization Aifoon. Visitors are given a helmet equipped with headphones, a directional microphone and goggles blocking all visible impulses. Wearing these helmets we were guided through the city by Aifoon’s Jeroen van de Sande. 

Walking around while not being able to see anything is scary at first. But normally we use our ears a lot in our everyday navigation, listening to the reflection of sound on all kinds of surfaces around us and and we depend on our ability to hear where a sound is coming from. Blind Date shuts off these normal auditive senses and replaces them with directional hearing: it focuses your hearing (in mono) on wherever you turn your head towards and amplifies it. Here’s a video about the Blind Date experience:

At first I found this impairment quite frustrating, as I heard what seemed to be a very large truck passing by, but I wasn’t able to tell if it came from the left or from the right. I was just standing there helplessly. I wanted to listen to the world in stereo like I normally do. The trick is to fully trust the person that takes you by the arm and leads the way. You have to surrender to the experience and once you do, it’s interesting and surprising.

I wasn’t able to tell what the streets we walked on looked like, it was very hard to measure the distances we walked. We crossed a wide road, but to me it seemed very small. It was a windy day, which resulted in quite a bit of noise on the headphones at times. Normally I would hate that, this time it also disabled my sense of hearing for some time, making me completely dependent on tactile information from my guide.   

If you’d like to visit Ghent (I highly recommend it!) and experience Blind Date yourself, have a look at the agenda on the TRACK website for dates. 

A Balloon for Linz

I just came back from New York City, a place with an overwhelming sound, everywhere you go. And each location in a city like that has its own resonance, its own sonic identity. That’s hard to hear though if there is so much noise around it becomes a cacophony. But what if we could isolate this resonance and listen to the astonishing differences in the sound of urban spaces? 

Davide Tidoni did just that with A Balloon for Linz. Luckily Linz is not NYC, and he was able to find spots which were quiet enough to make a clear recording (using his nice helmet mount microphone). You might recognize the concept as Davide did something similar before.

Architecture like frozen music

What does sound look like? It’s a question we have seen answered by quite some artists, creating sculptures of sounds, frozen at one moment in time. Like Yes/No by Carsten Nicolai or the Rolex Tower soundwave sculpture. Never have I seen something like this Orproject design though. 

Christoph Klemmt, working for London based architecture and design firm Orproject, made this design for the Busan Opera House in South Korea, titled Anisotropia. The design is based on a twelve tone composition created by Klemmt, and while it remains unknown how exactly the composition is translated to the building, it is quite a remarkable sight, and I can only imagine the acoustic properties of a place like that. 

Thanks to Richard van Tol

Behind The Wall

A series of sound installations called Behind The Wall was set up in Stockholm, in May. A ten spots passers-by could plug-in their headphones in what seem to be mirror-less mirror frames, to listen ‘behind the wall’. What they would hear was a selection of binaural recordings.

A binaural recording is experienced best on headphones, it will really make you feel like you’re the one listening to the (recorded) world around you, you’ll hear sounds coming from all sides, including front and back. Behind The Wall is a nice promotion of sound-awareness, even though it was commissioned by a headphones brand (JAYS). 

Urban Remix

Urban Remix is another ‘soundmap’ project like we have seen before. There is more to this project than just recording and uploading audio though. As the name suggests, you are able to remix the sounds you, or any other participant previously uploaded to the Urban Remix website, by drawing paths on a map. 

The project, created by Jason Freeman, Michael Nitsche, and Carl Disalvo (all professors at the Georgia institute of Technology, is interesting but not unique (apart from the remixing feature maybe). That said, it is always good to raise awareness of sound in the environments we live in. This video gives a good impression of the Urban Remix project: 

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Silophone

Remember Tank-FX? Here’s another one in the same category, and this one has been around for more than ten years already! For those of you who don’t know it already, this is the idea: go to www.silophone.net and upload a sound file.

The file will be send to the speakers in a huge empty silo - the Silophone - somewhere in Montreal, then the sound gets broadcasted back to you via the website. Sadly that last part didn’t work for me, as the stream didn’t seem to work. 

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