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Documentation/Transcription A piercing sine tones sets the pane of glass to resonate. A field recording of a rainstorm bounces around the foyer, transforming it. A viola drone is punctured by the mechanical whoosh of an automatic sliding door. Like sonar, these audible sound waves fill and define an environment invisibly, augmenting physical doors and windows with another - more hidden - language. This layer becomes more opaque as others disappear - as those with limited sight can attest. In his book on traveling, legally blind author and poet Stephen Kuusisto becomes intentionally lost in Venice, "drifting through the unfamiliar atmosphere with only the wind for a map. Was this what happened to sighted people as they wandered in churches and museums?" Connecting with spaces through complex soundscapes unique to each location, Kuusisto moves beyond sound for mere navigation to something approaching poetry. "Even when I listen to Manhattan traffic I'm drawing my own pictures of New York -- the streets are crowded with Russian ghosts and wheels that have broken loose from their carriages." Johnny Chang's project draws it's sound from two other world cities, Los Angeles and London. The field recording genre is known for it's focus on the authentic and the true-to-source, and while Chang supports the notion in some ways, he also subverts it. Avoiding 'iconic' locations in these cities in favour of more industrial or neighbourhood spaces, Chang records full scenes in-situ - picking up the scattered conversation of artists at a cafe, a passing car, or a coffee joint. But these soundscapes are plucked from their context and transplanted into a foyer space in central Auckland, undermining the validity of the source by mixing it with the automatic doors, student footsteps, and ambience of Window's foyer space. This ambivalence is echoed again in a process Chang calls transcription, essentially a set of decisions about how to take 'found sound' or field recorded noise and employ it in more formal compositions. Sometimes this is done literally - a broken doorbell from an Elephant and Castle apartment is lifted intact and played back (relatively) unaffected through speakers. At others, the transcription happens in layers - the sound being simply noted down in a score, which the player executes. Like Chinese whispers, this filtering process produces huge variations from the source. "Scrape ladder" can be interpreted in a thousand different ways, with the resulting metallic waveform reverberating around whichever space is hosting the performance. Sound and space are inextricably linked, often in far less subtle ways. Cyclists on a busy median don't need to look back at traffic, the shifting frequency of the trucks engine tells them exactly when it will pass. The well known Doppler Effect - most evident in wailing police sirens - is inherently spatial, shifting according to the angle of the sound source and the listener. Or as astronomer John Dobson puts it, "the reason the siren slides is because it doesn't hit you." Hardcore video gamers purchase high-end headphones not because they're audiophiles, but for a more concrete benefit - it helps them stay alive. Running through the dark hallways of a shooter, sound is sometimes the only way to tell if those footsteps are around the next corner - or right behind you. s Chang's three day sound project at Window explores this unseen relationship between sound and space, mixing disparate elements such as rocks, viola, streetscapes, a radio installation by Sonya Lacey, and guest performances by Charlotte Rose (electric guitar), and Janene Liefting (viola). A live webcam stream also documents it's psychic effects: the grainy figure of a security guard lingering, the backs of three friends huddled in conversation, a first year student approaching the glass curiously. Like Kuusisto's 'inner' Manhattan based on it's soundscape, this second invisible layer can become more tangible than the concrete and glass housing it.
documentations (3): 30 seconds of ...
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