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Chicago, the corner of Randolph
and Washington on a hot, Friday afternoon in June:
The Doppler tremolo of
an ambulance siren dominates momentarily, pushing back the
rumbling drone of traffic diffracted by the building faces.
Intermittent strains of the saxophone player as he fades
in and out behind each passing vehicle. The ogre-voice of
the bus engine, neither a gurgle nor a growl, almost remaining
mechanical. Always the thin piercing band of break pads
worn too thin- like a never stopping whistle, or violin
strings played too close to the bridge. The soft sounds-
the quiet scuffling of shoe soles on the sidewalk, a shopping
bag rustling against the leg (similar to the rustling of
the lunch bag in the hand, or a bag of chips, or a newspaper),
the jangling rhythm of keys in the pocket bouncing off the
thigh. A collage of voices deprived of intentions, an assemblage
of ages and genders and personalities revealed through pure
vocality- sometimes even the words come through. The call
and response of car horns like the notes rejected by a melody
(a performance piece by Laurie Anderson comes to mind- "can
your car hit C#?"). The woodpecker echo of jackhammers
reverberating off the glass walls, on its way somewhere,
perhaps. The hiss of air compressors. And a favorite source
of sci-fi robo effects- the nightmarish scream of the pavement
saw. These last sounds a refrain without verses- "the
city is always under repair." But, most significantly
for our purposes- the wind is felt and not heard.
One block away, same summer afternoon, at Washington and
Stetson, in the shadow of the Amoco Building:
The acoustic details of
the city have been reduced to a certain homogenous background
hum. Less detail is perceived. Beeping- somewhere a truck
is backing up. The machinegun prattle of pavement being
split in Millennium Park. But there are new details here.
The rustling of leaves and the white noise of water fountains,
no less than four of them in the immediate vicinity. Finally,
we notice in the tree shade as we're cooling off that we
can hear the wind as it passes over our ears.
And, most strangely, we can hear the wind
as rhythm as it is mediated, translated and materialized
in Harry Bertoia's sound sculpture, sited at this place,
a sculpture probably not named by him (as he never named
them- this he left for others to do): Offering
to the Wind.
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There is no escaping the sounds
of the city, even when escaping the city. What we see in our Botanical
Gardens in the north suburbs is subverted by the overwhelming
fact of its location- the sound of the interstate highway which
forms its western boundary. If you hike to the center of metropolitan
Chicago's largest forest preserve- the 20,000 acres south of the
Stevenson and west of LaGrange Road- where the birds cheep and
the deer wander close- the most prominent features in the soundscape
are the planes passing overhead to or from Midway Airport, and
the freight train air horns along the I &M Canal. Canadian
sound artist Hildegard Westerkamp begins her piece "Kits
Beach Soundwalk" with the following narrative:
It's a calm morning. I'm
on Kits Beach in Vancouver. It's slightly overcast,
and very mild for January. It's absolutely wind
still. The ocean is flat, just a bit rippled in places.
Ducks are quietly floating on the water. I'm standing
amongst some large rocks full of barnacles and sea weed.
The water moves calmly through crevices. The barnacles
put out their fingers to feed on the water. The tiny clicking
sounds that you hear are the meeting of the water and
the barnacles. It trickles and clicksss and sucksss and....The
city is roaring around these tiny sounds. But it's
not masking them. I can shock you or fool you by saying
that the soundscape is this loud. [the volume is turned
up] But it is more like this. The view is beautiful. In
fact it is spectacular. So the sound level seems more
like this- it doesn't seem that loud. [The volume
is turned down] But I'm trying to listen to those
tiny sounds in more detail now. Suddenly the background
sound of the city seems louder again. It interferes with
my listening. It occupies all acoustic space, and I can't
hear the barnacles in all their tinyness. It seems too
much effort to filter the city out. Luckily we have band-pass
filters and equalizers. [The sound of the city is fading
out] We can just go into the studio and get rid of the
city. Pretend it's not there. Pretend we are somewhere
far away. |
Paradoxically, it is only within the sound-proofed walls of the
sound studio, and through the mediation of sound equipment, that
Nature outside the city can be experienced through listening.
Our park spaces change only what we are looking at, but what we
hear stays the same, or is the same only a little quieter, if
a line of trees or an embankment intervenes. We have ozone action
days, but no days for lessening the sound smog which permeates
the city.
Though we have noted the use of
the waterfall as a means of creating an alternative soundscape
within the city, we should be clear that the construction of a
place of urban reverie does not necessarily have to rely upon
the production of sounds which might be classed as "Natural"
over and against sounds of the "Artificial." We need
only to think of such artificial soundscapes as are produced by
the likes of amusement parks or the Rainforest Cafe in order to
hear the limitations of this approach, insofar as it sharpens
and reinforces these oppositions rather than negotiating them.
As the psychologist James Hillman notes:
If God-given and man-made are an unnecessary,
even false, opposition, then the city made by human hands
is also natural in its own right. Surely, it is natural
to human beings to make burial grounds, marketplaces,
political and social communities, and to erect structures
for worship, education, protection, and celebration as
it is for them to gather nuts and berries, trap animals,
or hoe the soil. Cities belong to human nature; nature
does not begin outside the city walls. (1) |
For Hillman, the natural solution for urban design is not to imitate
the forms of nature but rather the processes of nature:
Urban beauty would not draw its standards
from approximation to wild nature, requiring potted trees
and vined interiors, noisy artificial waterfalls that
impede the flow of natural conversation, and plastics
that fake the look of leather and stone....What we now
turn to nature for- inspiration in the face of might and
majesty, wonder over intricacy, rhythms and detail- could
as well appear in our constructions....We would imitate
the process of nature rather than what the process has
made, the way of nature rather than the things of nature,
naturans rather than naturata as the philosophers say.
The majestic, descending torrent of the Fort Worth Water
Garden hasn't a single leaf, a single loose pebble: it
is utterly unnatural- stone, cement, hidden piping plunked
down into the usual downtown wasteland. Yet that construction
completely overwhelms with the experience we expect from
natural beauty- its wild adventure, its encompassing grandeur.(2) |
In The Tuning of the World, Murray Schaefer offered a
chart showing the number of sound pollution complaints and the
sources of noise distress, from which we make the following selections:
TYPE OF NOISE |
NUMBER OF TIMES MENTIONED (3) |
Traffic (general) |
115 |
Construction |
61 |
Industry |
40 |
Radios/Amplified Music |
29 |
Bands/Discotheques |
12 |
Power lawnmowers |
7 |
Vehicular traffic leads the pack as public sound enemy number
one. Interestingly, this may very well have been the case prior
to the industrial revolution as well. Arthur Schopenhauer, in
his essay "On Noise," authors perhaps the most eloquent
invective against the thought-unraveling effects of city sounds:
The superabundant display of vitality,
which takes the form of knocking, hammering, and tumbling
things about, has proved a daily torment all my life long.
There are people, it is true- nay, a great many people-
who smile at such things, because they are not sensitive
to noise; but they are just the very people who are not
sensitive to argument, or thought, or poetry, or art,
in a word, to any kind of intellectual influence...On
the other hand, noise is a torment to intellectual people.
In the biographies of almost all the great writers, or
wherever their personal utterances are recorded, I find
complaints about it; in the case of Kant, for instance,
Goethe, Lichtenberg, Jean Paul... (4) |
Noise is the enemy to serious thought because it thwarts concentration,
inhibits the gathering of thought:
Noise is the most impertinent of all
forms of interruption. It is not only an interruption,
but also a disruption of thought. Of course, where there
is nothing to interrupt, noise will not be so particularly
painful. (5) |
In Schopenhauer's day, the most pernicious sound of the
street was the cracking of the whip, and most of his essay is
devoted to singling out the effects on his mind of this particular
sound:
The most inexcusable and disgraceful
of all noises is the cracking of whips- a truly infernal
thing when it is done in the narrow resounding streets
of a town....No one with anything like an idea in his
head can avoid a feeling of actual pain at this sudden,
sharp crack, which paralyzes the brain, rends the thread
of reflection, and murders thought. (6) |
Offering to the Wind, as the Bertoia sound sculpture
is now known, offers one possible solution to the problem of soundscape
design for the city's places of leisure and reverie. The sculpture
is set within a square and shallow reflecting pool, the bottom
of which is laid out in a grid of red granite. The pool has been
given an orientation identical with the grid-plan of the city's
street, so that it's east and west sides run parallel to Randolph
St., while it's north and south sides run parallel to Stetson.
The sculpture itself consists of two series of long, vertical,
cylindrical bronze rods spot-welded to a brass plate which is
set just above the water level upon two long, rectangular stone
pedestals. One series of rods run parallel alongside the south
edge of the pool, rising to approximately ten feet, while the
other series is offset from the former one, running parallel alongside
the east edge of the pool, rising to approximately eight feet,
the whole forming an "L" shape in plan. However, these
two series of rods on their rectangular plates do not meet at
the intersection of the right angle. Rather, there is a gap between
them, a gap filled up by the water of the reflecting pool. The
offset rectangles are reminiscent of the offset apartment buildings
of Mies van der Rohe's 860 Lakeshore Drive buildings, and there
is a touch of his high modernist play at the intersection of right
angles in the decision to create two autonomous islands of sonorous
rods. In each series there are approximately 120 rods. The gaps
between the rods are of the same width as the rods themselves.
Evident here is Bertoia's "life-long interest in the aesthetic
effects created by identical forms repeated in varying positions
in space," "the beauty of the repetitive line,"
and "the interplay of void and matter, the void being of
equal value to the component material units."(7)
The rods sound by being blown against each other by the wind,
producing a texture of random micro-rhythms articulating a timbre
reminiscent of clusters of metal rebar being lifted off the ground
at a construction site.
There is yet one more element to
the sculpture, a third and somewhat mysterious island. On a square,
blackened steel base, and cattycorner from the water gap at the
corner of the backwards "L," at the northwest corner
of the pool, are two thick rods towering over the rest, rising
to approximately sixteen feet like giant antennae hovering over
the scene. At their tips they "blossom" into wide cylindrical
shapes. These two rods are wind resisters- it would take a strong
gust to knock these two against each other. Thus they are a silent
and imposing counterpoint to the other rods sounding beneath them.
Bertoia's sound sculptures tend
to exhibit a uniformity of geometry that is unlike his other work.
Here we find essential modernist shapes- square, rectangle, grid,
repetitious verticals. Indeed, if the sculpture did not sound,
it would be utterly uninteresting as a form. It is as if, in Bertoia's
sound sculptures, the frenzy of angles and ethereal qualities
of floating mass found in his other structures have been displaced
onto the acoustic-temporal plane.
The rhythm of the piece is fractal,
not metrical. The pure regularity of the rods, analogous to pulse
in music, is subverted by the chaos (in the scientific sense)
of the pattern produced by the subtle and ever-changing action
of the wind. The stronger the wind, the louder the tones and the
more frequent the collisions of the rods. During a light wind,
the sounds produced are quite faint. Even with a fair amount of
wind the sounds still retain certain subtleties- there is always
a "silence between the notes" to be heard, a gap between
the collisions. The sculpture never attains the density and continuity
of noise of the neighboring artificial waterfalls or the surrounding
hum of traffic. It reminds us of non-urban spaces where intermittence
and detail rather than constant hum is still the rule of the soundscape.
As Schafer writes,
The Industrial Revolution introduced
another effect into the soundscape: the flat line. When
sounds are projected visually on a graphic level recorded,
they may be analyzed in terms of what are called their
envelope or signature....When the body of a sound is prolonged
and unchanging, it is reproduced by the graphic level
recorder as an extended, horizontal line.
Machines share this important feature,
for they create low-information, high-redundancy sounds.
They may be continuous drones...;they may be rough-edged...;
or they may be punctuated with rhythmic concatenations...-
but in all these cases it is the continuousness of the
sound which is its predominating feature.
The flat continuous line in sound is
an artificial construction. Like the flat line in space,
it is rarely found in nature. (The continuous stridulation
of certain insects like cicadas is an exception.) (8) |
Thus the sculpture imitates, as Hillman might say, the process
rather than the form of nature, producing sounds with discreet
bodies. The sound source is decidedly artificial- Tobin bronze-
but the manner of their production bears the relationship to Nature
that we want to experience through the work. Furthermore, the
bronze rods themselves exhibit a nice, irregular patina, emphasizing
the elemental rawness of the piece, a rawness which enriches the
modernist uniformity of the work. By placing the two series of
rods in an "L" pattern, Bertoia is not merely siting
the sculpture to be in conformity with the city grid, but also
siting it in an advantageous manner to pick up the wind from whatever
direction it might come. There might also be a pun at work, the
"L" layout of the rods punning on the Chicago "el"
trains constantly shuttling though the downtown streets.
It is worth mentioning that in one
of his earliest sound sculptures, Bertoia created a fountain piece
which was made up of rods of greatly varying lengths, and thus
it was modeled somewhat on the idea of the wind chime, tuned usually
to a Western diatonic, or quite often, the Chinese pentatonic,
scale. Interestingly, Bertoia's later pieces abandon this approach,
and what we find are sculptures with rods all of the same length.
Thus certain aspirations to what might be called "the musical"
are abandoned. The sounds produced by these later sculptures are
instead subtle, rhythmic variations of the same pitch and timbre,
analogous to the sounds of the rustling leaves which shade Offering
to the Wind. As noted earlier, there are two heights to the
series of rods, corresponding roughly to the harmonic ratio 5:4,
or a major third, an "imperfect" interval. The intention
here seems not so much concerned with musical theory as with creating
a layer of difference and variety to the tones produced.
Offering to the Wind reminds us of the wind, the wind
intensified and channeled by the rows of skyscrapers, to be sure,
but also the wind that comes off the lake, the wind that fills
up the sails and makes the parade of white triangles on the lake's
plane of gauzy blue, and the wind that is the aerial counterpart
and negative space of the prairie which has been paved over and
hidden by the city- it generates the wind as acoustic image.
The metal rods are not a wall blocking out the city but rather
a comby screen filtering the city into discreet bands, reminding
us not just of reeds and trees but also of the unseen torquing
of the tall buildings, wind friction and tension. In The Poetics
of Space, Gaston Bachelard uses decidedly acoustic metaphors
to describe the status of the poetic image:
Very often, then, it is the opposite
of causality, that is, in reverberation...that I think
we find the real measure of the poetic image. In this
reverberation, the poetic image will have a sonority of
being. (9)
The resonances are dispersed on the different
planes of our life, while the repercussions invite us
to give greater depth to our own existence. (10) |
Offering to the Wind is such a reverberant image. It
reverses a certain urban deafness, returning the possibility of
silences between sounds, producing a quietude in the midst of
the city roar. It turns the ears inside out, from ears that repress
background noise to ears that tune in and focus, ears that can
attain a certain harmony with the thoughts occurring between them.
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