Innocent Railway Tunnel, now a cycle-way.
We have an innate understanding of the relationship between sound and architectural and natural spaces. Whatever the source of the sound (live or pre-recorded), we have understood that our experience of it depends on our physical position relative to the source and on the reverberant qualities of the surrounding space.
Last summer, I listened to the entire Radio 4 series, Noise a Human History. It begins with pre-history and the idea that ancient people’s carved and painted on the walls of caves and canyons where echoes were most reverberant, most startling. Archaeologists believe this sensitivity towards the sonic qualities of space carried over into early monumental building, and from there into the cavernous religious buildings we know today. I believe, our experience of sound, including the sounds we make ourselves within physical structures, holds as much emotional charge for us today as ever before. Hearing the human voice echoed back within a physical space is deeply emotive and compelling.
It was with this in mind that I began my simple vocal experiments in less obvious places including (listen):
In a multi-storey car park – Castle Terrace car park
Under a viaduct – King Stables Road
In an old stone quarry – Traprain Law quarry
By a reservoir – Bonaly
In a corridor – Edinburgh College of Art (ECA)
In a large main stairwell – ECA
In a large two-storey enclosed (sculpture) court – ECA
For reverberation, the best location, yet, has been the disused Innocent Railway Tunnel, where I shared my experiments with passing cyclists and dog walkers. Recalling my initial ideas for sustaining a continuous note, I brought along a second vocalist. We came up with the following (listen):
Duo in Innocent Railway Tunnel
Today we associate such reverberation with church music. The use of spatiality in Western music goes back to the C16th, when composers were beginning to write works to be performed by multiple choirs and, on occasion, more than one organ. Sonic composition was intimately bound up with our relationship with space such that, by the C17th the relationship between architecture and music was intimately entwined. Baroque composers structured music to capture not only the spacial reverberations, but to articulate the very form and detail of the architectural components themselves – the formal arches, colonnades and decorative detailing of the neo-classical buildings in which sculptural forms and structural forms were, themselves, wholly integrated.
The introduction of recording technology, in severing the link between the sources of sound and where we hear them, has given composers and sound artist an almost limitless means to play with the spatial element of sound encounters. Some, where the sound is entirely out of its original spacial context are without historic precedent. These include, for example, where the industrial or urban is switched with the natural, or the large concert hall switched with a humble corridor.
Using Audacity software I have experimented with simple duplication and repetition (overlaying) of my voice, and reversals and speed changes. Examples include:
Solo hums on ECA main stairwell – duplicated and overlayed
Duet in Innocent Railway Tunnel – reversed
Equally, they may echo older ideas previously realised through the physical dispersal of singers and musicians. By playing groups of sounds through individual speakers dispersed in such a way as to create a multitude of sound encounters for the visitor as they move through the space, a similar spacial effect is achieved.