For the last week of CommLab our assignment was to take an earlier project and improve it. I decided to work on the audio project I made with Paul Paradiso: Music for Public Restrooms. We were inspired by Brian Eno’s intention in making Music for Airports: namely, to make a rotten experience better. So, we brainstormed a little and agreed on a number of public restroom problems we thought might be improved by a little auditory assistance.
We wanted to create a clean and dry feeling room, not fetid and damp like so many New York restrooms, so we recorded ourselves crunching leaves in Washington Square Park (Washington Square Park is far from clean, but the air felt crisp and dry). We added some chimes that sounded cold and clear to us, too. One of our goals was to keep people from talking to us in the restroom, so we decided to make a track that was linguistically confusing. We copied several paragraphs of text in different languages from Project Gutenberg, shuffled the words, and recorded me reading it quietly. Finally, we wanted the track to feel like a narrative without actually telling a story, in order to allow for a little escapism, so we placed everything within a landscape with a stream.
This week I had some trouble with our Audacity files, so I started from scratch and laid all of our tracks within a new landscape, this time without the annoying duck that was in the first version.
Greg Borenstein
This is a funny and cool hack and it has an interesting relationship to Eno Music For Airports. If you ever hear Eno talk about that project, he describes it thusly. He says that he’s terribly afraid of flying. And if you go to airports, all the standard musak has a very strong and clear message: your are not going to die. He found that message terrifying because it just made him think more about dying without really reducing his fears. So, what he decided to make was music that would actually reduce his fears, not by convincing him that dying in a plane crash was less likely, but by reducing his sense of the the importance of his own life: by making dying seem like less of a big deal. The purpose of Music For Airports is to make you value your own life less! And that’s where his interest in the time-extending structures, lack of figure/ground distinctions, and all the other ideas we think of as being key to Ambient music as a genre come from; they are strategies for taking you out of yourself, reducing how much you value your own life as something separate from everything else.
What you’re doing here is different, but interestingly related: you’re using the sounds from one physical context with a different (and much preferred) psychological impact and trying to use them to inject that psychological impact into a different physical context in order to reduce its unpleasantness. It’s like a pragmatic cog sci hack version of his somewhat mystical approach. Sounds like a cool project.
Dec 11, 2008 @ 12:23 am