Madrid had many distinct and bold aspects to its street architecture. There were multiple Tenji blocks, hard stone paving slabs, iron covers, there were striking paint markings on the street for pedestrian crossings…
I walked past flight cases around the large block of buildings where the venue was situated recording as always as I went. The recording looks like this:
The histories of architecture in the city are ‘scrolls’ waiting to be discovered and ‘read’ (Calvino, 1972). While investigating these scrolls through the practice of walking the streets of the city accompanied by wheeled luggage, I have found a ‘stylus’ for reading the pavement topography, the skin of the city. The wheels of the luggage bag connect directly with the built environment, rather like putting the needle on a record: a record that is city-sized and can be played in any direction. This practice presents a way of recording, mapping, and sonifying the streets of the city.
Italio Calvino, Invisible Cities
Put The Needle On The Record was created by Loz Colbert. Find out more about the project here.
Above is the ‘scroll’ I made from a field recording of a dragged street walk in Geneva. This is a visual manifestation of the stylus-based field recording, which is posted below this text section.
Sound diary, Geneva, 5/02/ 2020: Of all the recordings possibly the most regular in terms of the evenly-spaced pavement slabs. There were also more cobble-like areas in the part of the city I was in, which broke up some of this regularity. Also, there were some tram lines like iron girders, laid into the tarmac of the road.
In 2008 Felicity Ford and Paul Whitty set up a project with the aim of recording everyday life in sound – to meet the world and its abundant soundings of vending machines, luggage carousels, toasters, escalators, boilers, garden sheds and wheeled luggage. They followed the writer Georges Perec’s instruction to exhaust the subject, not to be satisfied with a cursory glance, not to be satisfied to have identified what we already know – what we have already heard – but to look again, to listen, to keep listening, long after it would probably have been more sensible to stop. That project was Sound Diaries. The premise has been that the sound made by a dishwasher cycle is likely to reveal as much to us about our society and culture than the sound of the extraordinary.
Sound Diaries continues to extend awareness with regards the myriad roles of sound and listening in daily life by exploring the cultural and communal significance of sounds, and has formed a research basis for projects generated both locally and Internationally, in Beijing, Brussels, Tallinn, Estonia and Cumbria; within local institutions in Oxford including Schools; and within cultural organisations such as Sound and Music and BBC Radio.
Call for participants:
For our second Open Call (to experience some of the work that developed from our first Open Call please visit HERE and HERE) we are looking for participants to document the sounds of everyday life (however this may manifest for them) and to contribute to a public event and publication.
We are interested in everyday sounds and sounding contexts from cutlery drawers to bus stops to self-service checkouts be they domestic, public or private. Potential participants will need to submit:
Projects can take many forms but should focus on documentary recording of everyday sound. This could be sound from your own everyday or from another context that you want to investigate. It might help to look at some existing Sound Diaries and Sonic Art Research Unit projects. For example Get Rid! An investigation of the everyday sounding culture of grassroots football; the audiograft festival, the Berlin Sound Diary a document of the everyday sounds of travel; the on vibration lecture series, the sonic art research unit journal, a row of trees, and the UK Soundmap Sonic Time Capsule.
The deadline for application is August 20th 2023 at 11pm (bst). Successful applicants will be informed by September 15th and invited to attend an informal meeting in Oxford during November (date tbd) to discuss their project ideas. We’ll endeavour to send feedback on all submissions, though this will depend on the volume of applications we receive.
Project Support:
What Sound Diaries will expect from you:
If you have any questions please get in touch with Paul Whitty and Patrick Farmer at the following address: pfarmer@brookes.ac.uk
Final submissions should be emailed to both pwhitty@brookes.ac.uk and pfarmer@brookes.ac.uk by 11pm (bst) on August 20th 2023.
The men’s World Cup ended yesterday, hosted in Qatar, and whilst I would usually have been slowly obsessing about the minutiae of every game and taking joy from the possibility of watching football for 360 minutes a day during the group stages – plus the considerable added time that became a feature of this tournament – this time I didn’t watch. I was against watching. Why? Well, it’s the least I could do to express solidarity with the migrant workers who suffered under the employment conditions in Qatar; and the least I could do to express solidarity with the LGBTQ+ community in Qatar. Was this a futile gesture? Of course it was. Did it create change, no, but I just couldn’t watch. FIFA’s process for awarding the tournament is now widely regarded as a corrupt process. Reasons for looking away were many.
Simon Critchley writes about the contradictions of modern football in his book What We Think About When We Think About Football (2017):
And here is perhaps the most basic and profound contradiction of football: its form is association, socialism, the sociability and collective action of players and fans, and yet its material substrate is money: dirty money, often from highly questionable, under-scrutinized sources. Football is completely comodified, saturateed in sponsorship and the most vulgar and stupid branding…
And this is how we end up with Gianni Infantino front and centre at every match, at the final, pushing himself forward, associating himself and the corruption of FIFA with the beauty of the game. Stepping into the healing waters of football and hoping that they will wash away the stains of corruption.
So, what to do? I started to think about how I could explore the moment of not watching, of turning away. I thought about the spaces in which had usually watched the men’s World Cup. In France ’98 I watched the game v Columbia at a friends house in West London – he was an old school friend and I think that was the last time I saw him; I watched David Beckham score a penalty v Argentina in a colleagues office at Dartington College of Arts during a lunch-break; after that there was a lot of sofa watching. I guess I must have watched some games at the pub but I’ve never enjoyed the collective watching of international football. The last time I watched England play in a men’s World Cup game in a pub was the desolate 0-0 draw v Algeria in 2010. England’s failures accompanied by beer have never been a favourite occasion.
Now, in the house, the lounge is the football venue, on the sofa with a cup of tea, scrolling through twitter. So, well, thats it, I’ll document the lounge, the sound of football not being watched, of gentle conversation in the kitchen heard through closed doors, of the wind lightly sounding in the chimney breast, the dog, footsteps on the stairs, a delivery, voices from the street, the X-Box controller, a car passing, perhaps someone watching the game next door. And when?, well, of course, every England match, the guaranteed watch. Despite being Northern Irish I’ve been in England so long – almost my whole life – that I am a follower of English football so that’s the one, that’s the frame.
Listen without headphones on laptop speakers, bluetooth, on your phone. The sound should be lightly audible, a slight presence, insignificant, without note, the sound of absence, of not watching. Do not adjust the volume. Do not listen carefully.
England v Iran – Monday 21st November 1.00pm (GMT)
England v USA – Friday 25th November 7.00pm (GMT)
Wales v England – Tuesday 29th November 7.00pm (GMT)
England v Senegal – Sunday 4th December 7.00pm (GMT)
England v France – Saturday 10th December 7.00pm (GMT)
This is a visual representation of the field recording I made on the streets of Barcelona while dragging my luggage-bag-as-stylus across them.
Sound diary: The Barcelona streets were made of ornate and patterned tiles, the most beautiful pavement material I have seen so far. In contrast with the huge concrete slabs of Detroit for example, this was like some Romantic masterpiece with aging Catalan Gothic / Medieval buildings, a vibrant street life, muted oranges, reds, yellows all around; while the grooves in the thousands of tiles I ran over gave out an incessant, vibrant street rhythm.
Above, I have made a visual ‘scroll’ from the outcome of the luggage-bag-as-stylus recording in Köln on 30/01/2020. This relates back to the initial premise that the histories of architecture in the city are ‘scrolls’ waiting to be discovered and ‘read’ (Calvino, 1972).
Italio Calvino (1972) suggested that histories of cities are written in their streets as ‘scratches and indentations’, as ‘scrolls’ to be read.
Inspired by works such as Christian Marclay’s (1999) ‘Guitar Drag’, and Francis Alys’ (2004) ‘Railings’ I have been using various styli – including a rolling luggage bag – to read the grooves of the street surface, and make audio records as part of this.
I have recently been experimenting with turning the audio patterns into visual scrolls – and printing them out as posters.
From my sound diary:
Sunday 2nd Feb. Wandering around Berlin again. I am on Friedrich Strasse, the street on which Check Point Charlie used to be. Visually there were focused pavement designs using various surfaces with coherent patterns. I remember the close ticking sound of pedestrian road crossing with the sound of passing traffic. I got to the Brandenburg Gate, where a group of people were meditating next to another group of Arabic-looking people who were having some form of a remembrance or protest rally. Also moving around the city, I saw the marker of the position of original Berlin wall, the marker drew a red line across stones, and all across the pavement…I followed it for quite a while, thinking of the older previous borders and boundaries that have gone, with no markers; the city and the streets as palimpsest…
The histories of architecture in the city are ‘scrolls’ waiting to be discovered and ‘read’ (Calvino, 1972). While investigating these scrolls through the practice of walking the streets of the city accompanied by wheeled luggage, I have found a ‘stylus’ for reading the pavement topography, the skin of the city. The wheels of the luggage bag connect directly with the built environment, rather like putting the needle on a record: a record that is city-sized and can be played in any direction. This practice presents a way of recording, mapping, and sonifying the streets of the city.
Put The Needle On The Record was created by Loz Colbert. Find out more about the project here.
We are in a constant dialogue with the space around us. The ever-changing acoustic switches between inside and outside in a lifelong series of cadences between the two.
This recording is one of the shortest but moves from the inside to the outside of the venue (Gruenspan, Hamburg) on 01/02/2020.
Once the performance is over the inside of the venue becomes reflective and reverberant again, after the dispersal of the crowd.
There are only remnants of the presence of a crowd in the squashed plastic cups rattling around the floor, and other spillages/ marks.
Compare then the outside, which is more chaotic and public, and subject to the weather. The outside is a contested space: for pedestrians, cars, cyclists, skateboarders. Out here you feel the weather, the season, the time of day, the community (or lack of one).
On this occasion when I am filming, the oily urban pavement glistens with sparkles of rain in the sodium glow street lights and headlights of the passing cars. It is wet, but not clean.
All characters, all ages patrol and navigate the streets. There is no entrance fee, or need for proof of ID; the streets are for everyone.
A short Rhythmanalysis:
Think of the activity in the venue over a week as it fills, empties, is cleaned, gets ready to start again. Think of the individual and crowd movements as people arrive over the day, as they disperse at night. Think of the changes in the weather, in the temperature as day and night shift. Expand the timescale and think of the changing fashions in music and clothes over years, and the changing use of the building over time.
The histories of architecture in the city are ‘scrolls’ waiting to be discovered and ‘read’ (Calvino, 1972). While investigating these scrolls through the practice of walking the streets of the city accompanied by wheeled luggage, I have found a ‘stylus’ for reading the pavement topography, the skin of the city. The wheels of the luggage bag connect directly with the built environment, rather like putting the needle on a record: a record that is city-sized and can be played in any direction. This practice presents a way of recording, mapping, and sonifying the streets of the city.
Put The Needle On The Record was created by Loz Colbert. Find out more about the project here.
The Paradiso venue in Amsterdam is a former church in the old district of southern Amsterdam. The venue is placed directly by a canal which is at its rear in the Leidseplein area near the Melkweg, with the front of the venue facing onto a busy street. I recorded a short trip from The Paradiso venue that went onto the streets and into the Leidsplein area.
The streets were busy, flowing, animated, with several modes of transport circulating simultaneously and fairly harmoniously in this area. There are tram tracks on the road, built-in cycle lanes, car and bus lanes, lanes for water drainage, as well as pedestrian areas and various crossings of these tracks. The pedestrian pavement surface was initially made of grey-worn square paving slabs laid perpendicular to the direction of travel. The slabs were all polka-dotted with flattened gum circles. Next to these, some tessellated patterns of older red-brick were visible in the areas closer to the venue that led to the canal by way of side streets.
The pattern soon changed to the design of what looked like granite brick blocks in a diagonal ‘hatched’ formation. At the same time, I also came across some more traditional-looking older hatched patterns created out of the smaller red brick flooring to the left of me, near a small shopping arcade. Curiously all bricks – whether granite or red – switched from perpendicular to hatch at the same time. I wondered was it the original older bricks that set the pattern or rhythm of that area? What changed it?
It happened that also some road works were taking place on the road that spanned the tram and cycle lanes with road diggers and metal fences around them. This represented a ‘disruption’ to the otherwise harmonic and integrated floor patterns and the rhythmic flow of transit in this otherwise busy area.
