This soundscape is the result of a collaboration with Francesca Recchia at the Soundscrapers studio on Friday, September 19th, 2014. Francesca wrote a score for a construction site in Kabul, Afghanistan. I interpreted the score using sounds found on the web, and spatialized them in my 8-speaker sound array.  Listen w/ Headphones for the full spatial effect!

Virtual Kabul

This is the sound of the Nightingale Floor of Nijo Castle, recorded underneath the floor while tour groups walked above. Nijo Castle is located in Kyoto, Japan, and is home to Ninomaru Palace, a building housing a series of large tatami-floored rooms where shoguns would meet with advisors and visitors. Long hallways of bare wood floors surround the rooms and connect the outermost public spaces with private interiors. There is no way to walk on the specially attached boards without triggering them to squeak or “chirp”. Legend has it that this sound deterred ninjas from sneaking in to assassinate a shogun or other VIP.  Sound becomes a functional wall that deters intruders.

I spoke with a Japanese preservation architect at Nijo Castle about the origin of the Nightingale Floor. Numerous other temples around Kyoto employ the same construction technique, including Nanzen-Ji and Ryo-An-Ji. When this technique is applied to newly replaced sections of floor, they do not sing like the aged nightingale floor does. I walked on some of these newer floors and indeed there was no sound. This result has led the preservation architect and other historians to believe that the sound is an accident and not an intentional design of the castle builders to protect the Shoguns and their VIPs engaged in meetings.

Below the Uguisubari

In this track, we move from the open office space of Indicate into a mandatory fire corridor, where together with artist Bryan Finoki, we installed a hidden underwater soundscape. A piece by Iannis Xenakis is playing in the background of the office before we enter the corridor around the :45 second mark.

Indicate Audio: Into the Corridor

You can never have enough loons in your life. Our client wanted the sounds of loons and other birds in the bathrooms of their office, yet they did not want to see any speakers. We installed transducers in the infrastructure behind the wall to provide a hidden soundscape. In the background, we can hear Iannis Xenakis in the main space's sound wall. Photo by Cesar Rubio.

Indicate Audio : Loons in the Bathroom

I visited Dan Flavin's Untitled Marfa Project in 2009, while I was traveling around the world looking at the spectrum of new uses of former military bases.

The Sound of a Dan Flavin

Batterie Todt, France

Bunkers on the Beach, Il de Re, France

Maginot Line Underground, Alsace Region, France

DMZ Military Base, Korea

On day 2 I spent time listening to the neighborhood waking up. Crows called to each other over a block away. I then went to a convenience store to buy breakfast and walked on the temple grounds of Gyeongbekung Palace. There I discovered a host of young men shoveling the fresh rain out of puddles near the main path, kicking up gravel in the process. Walking through downtown revealed an ambient phenomenon of a political broadcast resonating in the canyon between glass skyscrapers. After a subway ride to my destination of the Dongdaemun Design center, I walked up to the roof and observed the city sound swirling below.

Seoul Day 2

There is a pervasive layer of polite machine voices around the city. The politeness in speech is ironically contrasted by a lack of fidelity in the audio quality, or a jarring disruption in the ambient volume of the space into which the mechanical voice projects.

Seoul Day 3 : Machine Voices

Interstitial - disquiet0407

Taking the cue of insect chirruping -- how a sound evolves to be heard above the din, hitting frequency bands that are sometimes left vacant. And yet the whole can appear cacophonous to the ear not listening for the specific frequency.

Fritted - disquiet0408

Field Recordings from Privately Owned Public Spaces (POPOS) -- co-produced with Bryan Finoki. 

Unless you know where to go, finding breathable, public open space in downtown San Francisco can be an aimless, wandering exercise. The financial district is dense, loud, currently in a monumental state of construction, and—with all this apocalyptic sunshine—beginning to feel more and more like a Manhattanized version of Hong Kong secretly courting Los Angeles. 

Read more on Design Observer. https://designobserver.com/feature/infringe-05-hushed-spaces/38950

Hushed Spaces

Room Tone is the baseline sound in any given room. This recording is from an installation where the room tone was multiplied from different microphones in the Vessel FM workshop and was fed into transducer panels in a second room inside the workshop.

RoomToneRoom

Bicycle Sound Cinema

Continuous Listening is hearing more than two places at once. By default we are able to hear two places if we count each ear receiving a different environment, although the brain collapses the two audio streams into one. Continuous Listening is an inquiry into the human and non-human project of simultaneous hearing. In this track, we hear crickets on a mountainside in Seoul, Korea and the drone of Coast Guard ships in the Oakland Estuary in California. "Now hear this..." echoes across the waterway in one means of Continuous Listening, a military project consisting of the simultaneous monitoring of thousands of miles of US coastline. The crickets chirp whether listened to by humans or not (a series of surveillance cameras monitors activity on the mountain path, though likely without audio). Via the tympanum on the crickets legs, however, the continuous signal of the insect chorus transmits information on the collective to each individual.

ContinuousListening-Disquiet0443

Timbre Architecture & Sound works with developers, community stakeholders, business owners, artists, and designers to imagine the future of the built environment. Founded by architect Nicolas Sowers, Timbre is based in Seattle and works along the Pacific coast on a wide range of project types and scales.

Timbre Architecture & Sound

Popular tracks