Sound In Time and Place: Music and Architecture

This is a class created by Diane Moser at the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music in the Fall of 2013

The class was put together for the sole purpose of composing music based on the elements of the New School University Center on Fifth Avenue in New York City. The first part of the semester was spent learning more about the connection between music and architecture:  specifically how musical terms such as rhythm, texture, harmony, proportion, dynamics, and articulation refer both to architecture and to music.

The class also explored Pythagoras’s discovery of the mathematical ratios that make up the overtone series (circa 530 BC), and how architects such as Vitruvius, Palladio and Le Corbousier have used these ratios in their designs, and how composers, such as Iannis Xennakis, have in turn, used architectural design dimensions for their compositions.

About the Artists

Louis Cohen
Noise in the Library (to be performed in the library)

The library is usually associated with having your nose buried deep in their book, studying in solitary silence.  It becomes a passive place.  Nothing happens in the library.  The New School’s new library has a different purpose.  While it still encourages hard work and studying, it doesn’t mean to lock people up in a cell of books.  Instead, it inspires activity, whether that be social or academic.  This sound piece is meant to turn this passive space into an active one.  A place of education, creativity and discussion.  It is meant to be a recontextualization the library.

Musical Chairs (to be performed in the Event Cafe)

The Event Cafe is a lounging area equipped with a stage for performances. Students will be able to sit and enjoy performances, but without the formal occasion that the auditorium calls for.  Because of this, there will be lots of motion in this space.  Students can go there between classes, to eat their lunch, or just to enjoy the environment.  This performance art piece is meant to emulate the hustle and bustle of the Event Cafe.  The conductor gives the musicians cues to begin playing and walking around the tables.  They are given specific instructions based on a system of visual directions.  While it is chaotic, there is an order to the piece.  Spectators can feel free to go down into the cafe to join in.

Mike Robinson
Climb That Mountain (to be performed on the 4th or 5th floor landing)

This piece is a three part representation of the movement in the building. The piece as a whole is an acceleration  from a ballad to a fast ending movement with the second movement being “variable tempo.” The tempo is to be determined by passers by. The faster the passers-by walk, the faster this section is played. This represents the fast moving pace of the building and the culture of New York City that is represented by the building.

Itamar Shatz
Stairwell Conversations (to be performed on the 4th or 5th floor landing).

“Stairwell Conversations” is inspired by and dedicated to the University’s vibrant social life, written specifically to address the atmosphere of the new building’s interactive space located on the stairwell landing between the 4th and the 5th floors.

Where you are standing right now, dozens of students are about to be walking every day. They might just pass by, going from one class to another, or spend more time around the interactive space. Whatever the case may be, they are going to talk with each other. This blend of conversations will create a certain sound, combining all different languages, attitudes and content. This sound is represented through the first part of the piece. The trumpets and trombone represent laughter, while the saxophones bring a rather intellectual talk. The guitar and the bass provide intimate conversations; some tense and some calmer and warmer.

The interactive space is a junction that brings everybody together; designers, musicians, writers, professors, students and staff. To express the unity and joy brought by the presence of all these, comes the second part of the piece. That is an Afro-Beat and Brooklyn style influenced section that involves the entire band and includes written parts as well as improvisation. The transitions between the two sections reflect the various dynamics of the interactive space, considering moments of high traffic and diverse sounds versus the beauty and wholeness of conversations resonating perfectly within the space.

Quentin Tschofen and Joe Vilardi
Glass, 2013 (sound installation-location TBD)

Inspired by the façade of Kerrey Hall, Glass is an interactive sound installation, which at its core, is about movement. As visitors interact with and move through the space, an ambient sonic environment unfolds around them. Using recordings which explore the sonic properties of glass, Glass responds the visitor’s movement through the use of Kinects and a program written in Processing.

Quentin Tschofen
Brass (for Brass quintet-to be performed in the auditorium)

Brass is a composition in three sections that was written for the opening of Kerrey Hall.The first section symbolizes the construction of the building. One motive is explored here, slowly building up until it is finally heard as a fanfare in its completion: the completion of Kerrey Hall. The second section explores the concept of movement within the building, fragmenting the original theme and moving through the instruments. The third and final section is analogous to a benediction. Here, a condensed version of the initial harmonic language is featured, which finally evolves into the main theme and ultimately ends the composition.

8 minutes – 2 trumpets, trombone, french horn and tuba; 5 chairs & music stands (semi circle)

Joe Vilardi
Emerging (for brass quintet-to be performed in the auditorium)

Emerging was written with John Dewey’s words in mind: “Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.”  Inspired by such lifelong study and growth, the spirit of collaboration, and the candid nature of Kerrey Hall’s façade, Emerging is a dedication to the students of all seven of our university’s divisions who will thrive in this intersectional haven of learning. The number seven is thus used often throughout the piece’s melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic content, each use appearing separately until their fusion at the end, representing a balanced coexistence within the university.

4 minutes – 2 trumpets, trombone, french horn and tuba; 5 chairs & music stands (semi circle)

Michael Beckett-Fedarko (to be performed in the auditorium)
The Building Suite

The Building Suite is a three part piece for Jazz Nonet designed to be a sonic immersion of a typical day at the University Center. In the first movement “Morning” we enter the building as light floods in through the windows and slowly we begin our ascent up the staircase as we pass by the quite clatter of people beginning their days. This moderate walk accelerates into the second movement “Noon” in which the building comes alive with the hustle and bustle of midday activity. The multi-colored corridors become vibrant as people pass through them rapidly on their way to and from class. The constant activity finally settles down into the third and final movement, “Night” a slow release of all of the energy built up throughout the day as the last of the lights are turned off and the people exit the building only to return another day,

“The River” is part one of Winters Past, a transmedia storytelling project that grapples with a changing natural world through personal experience, memory and history.  Through the medium of a Soundwalk, a form of site-specific storytelling that integrates oral history, sound design, field recordings and music into a narrative that unfolds in situ, Winters Past seeks to create an experience of “embodied history” that transforms the abstract ideas of environmental degradation and climate change into a physically tangible remembrance of this storied season.

The Hudson River is haunted by the memories and stories of how Wintertime once was – full of snow, ice, and consistent cold. It was also once full of Ice Yachts – meticulously crafted wooden sailboats on skates.  In their heyday, at the turn of the 19th century, these boats were the fastest vehicles on the planet, reaching speeds of nearly 80 miles per hour. The sport regularly drew thousands of spectators to the frozen river to watch races.  Today, in the absence of extensive ice, the sport is carried on by a hearty few.

This soundwalk is meant to be heard on the Walkway on the Hudson, a pedestrian bridge in Poughkeepsie that was once a railway over the river.  (However, if you can’t travel to the Walkway, you can still enjoy the walk.  We recommend listening while walking along the Hudson—or any river.) The Walkway—and the Soundwalk—begin at 64 Parker Ave, in Poughkeepsie.

http://www.winterspast.org/

About the Artists 

Josephine Holtzman is a multimedia and radio producer, an MA candidate in the New School’s Media Studies program and a founding member of Sound@New School. Isaac Kestenbaum is a producer and production manager for StoryCorps, a national oral history project.

This installation, a tribute to Hector Wallace, Coney Island’s great sign painter and raconteur, is also a memory piece about the pre-gentrified Coney Island I loved when I was a child. The audio interview with Wally was done on the boardwalk in 2005 for SIDE SHOW, an exhibition of my biographical installations inspired by the lives of iconic members of Coney Island’s unique culture. This new installation incorporates the original audio with visual images of Wally’s work and my own pieces inspired by him and his wonderful food paintings. A short documentary film of the same title incorporating the audio interview with many of these same images was another fortuitous result of the Sound Showcase call for projects.

About the Artist

Barbara Siegel is an installation artist whose multimedia installations are biographically based. She is a member of A.I.R. Gallery, NYC and has had solo exhibitions throughout the United States including Marilyn Pearl Gallery, NYC, and Nina Freudenheim Gallery, Buffalo. Her work is in many public and private collections including the Albright Knox Art Gallery, The National Gallery of Art, Brown University, University of Chicago, and Yale University. Her work has been reviewed in The New York Times, Art in America, Art News, Art on Paper, and the Village Voice. Barbara Siegel is an adjunct Associate Professor at Parsons, the New School for Design, NYC.

Generally, an audio podcast refers to a recorded sound file made available for download through a digital broadcasting medium, while its process is commonly approached as a mere technical matter or an information and communication technologies affordance following the co-evolution of the internet, personal computers, portable audio players and Rich Site Summary (RSS) feed.

More than this though, audio podcasting crystallizes today transformations to the everyday auditory experience of more and more urbanites, from mobility, appropriation of time and the spatio-temporal division of labor to the ways data, information and knowledge are curated and valued.

The objective of the workshop series at Parsons The New School for Design has been to explore how podcasting can be used as a critical urban technique and tool. Emphasis has been given on how the process of podcasting can amplify local-relevant urban practices, while providing a sensible understanding on the broader ecological dimensions of places.

To achieve this, the podcasting process is approached both as a way of knowing and through its produced output, while technical assistance in recording, sound engineering and broadcasting has been combined with inquiries in listening, bodily awareness, qualitative description of sound events and mapping, psychoacoustics, voice qualities, narrative modes, politics.

About the Artists

Themistoklis Pellas, Urban & Regional Planner

“Deepest Taco Bell” is a sonic exploration into an experience very often looked down upon by the large part of society. Taco Bell is known by most to be a site of sub-par fast food, fluorescent lights, and commercialism. However, what co-exists with these negative notions is a positive: a diverse array of people. Customers and employees come from all walks of life to interact in spaces such as Taco Bell. Many find themselves walking through those smudged glass doors, whether a hipster ironically stopping in, a family looking for a cheap meal, or a couple friends who just really like Taco Bell (because it somehow reminds them of home and is oddly comforting). This experimental documentary sound piece attempts to evoke a wide range of feelings. Aural metaphor and collage are at work, causing the listener to pay attention more closely to what is normally seen as a contemptible, “throw-away” place.

About the Artist

Andrea Kannes is currently an employee and student at The New School pursuing a graduate degree in Media Studies while exploring every single creative outlet that exists. This most recently includes producing, “We Lived Alone: The Connie Converse Documentary,” dabbling in found footage of the 16mm variety, and the occasional stand-up comedy. Her Twitter handle is @ZBogart, if you’re into that sort of thing.

Our collective, Fantastic Futures is a collaborative team of students, artists, doctors, and future leaders from Iraq and the United States. For our recently completed Rhizome Commission, we created a free and open online sound archive that examines concepts of time through the recording, collaging, and sharing of sounds between these two countries. As we are faced with huge questions about their future, the website serves as a platform to subvert unjust structures of power used to divide us by instead supporting each other and offering a means through which our stories might be heard. Our goal is nothing short of social justice and the means of achieving that are slow, steady, and subversively poetic. For the performance event, which took place in the New Museum Theater this past fall, we created a participatory performance of the website, enacted by humans wearing sounds. To further explore shared experiences of time, memory, and trauma between countries in conflict, audience member

About the Artists

Fantastic Futures is a collective that began two years ago as a group of about 20 artists, designers, students, doctors, and activists from Iraq and the U.S. This project developed from conversations about the importance of sharing stories and collectively envisioning the future. To that end, the group created an interactive sound archive (www.fantasticfutures.fm) through which they could collect and share sounds from different locations and collage them together to form chance-based compositions. Since then, wehave created a collaborative performance which we presented at the New Museum and are currently (as part of the iLAND residency) collaborating with scientist Jason Munshi-South and movement-based artist Sonia Finley to 1 investigate the biodiversity and history of Queens Flushing Meadows-Corona Park (as the site of the 1939 and 1964 World’s Fairs and temporary site of the UN) and current changes around its use as a public space.

http://fantasticfutures.fm/

The sound you’re hearing is TNS’ logo in JPEG form, the raw data was then translated directly into sound using a special algorithm in Audacity’s import settings. I added reverb in the style of Tischman Auditorium using a room emulator.

I wanted to explore the hidden sonic signature that can be associated with digital objects, then take that sound and place it into a familiar space. Then the idea is to see what the translation can present, good or bad. So here’s the question then, We are constantly attempting to quantize our art through digital means, and are trying to produce hi-fidelity objects as much as possible. The statements we make, the art we produce, the sounds we record, all of it is quantized into data. Data, not information. Can you translate an aura, an idea, or even a statement without addition/loss when you quantize?

About the Artist

Ben Fausch is a classically trained Tubist, Engineer, Graphic Designer, and Sound Artist at the New School. He has performed with a variety of acts ranging from Burlesque to Punk Marching bands. As an engineer, Ben has worked professionally with a variety of artists, and recently finished working for the world-famous Avatar studios. He specializes in the manipulation of audio for artistic and comedic purposes.