Older and maybe smarter, one part of me is tuned into music without lyric and some people call it the ambient. And when I ran across an album in Beijing's 798 Art Factory called "Favourite Beijing Sounds" by a British sound artist Peter Cusack, I was wondering what are the "Favorite Hong Kong Sound" according to the local.
This week's lecture is partly dealing with the Sound of City--which is also the INVISIBLE dimension of a city, however we should NOT just focus on music of the film (which might belong to another realm), the SOUNDSCAPE of a city is more intriguing when we try to read it as a cultural text.
It is also interesting to see how people react differently to this album, or let's say the soundscape of a city:Numb, or still Touched? When I recommended to you a link of an international sound project and played a little bit of the BEIJING part at the second tutorial, I felt really embarrassed to do so for maybe, you could hardly make sense of a soundscape foreign to yours.
AND I shall not say it is because you are too sensory overloaded to react to any sound in daily life and of daily life creatively and sensitively.
At hand there is another CD called Soundscape China, by a French Laurent Jeanneau. Maybe because it is based on the field recording in my home province Yunnan, the mixture of ambient sounds , TV and electronic procession make this album SOUNDS so dreamy and beautifully, while there is still the ambiguous reference to a socialist regime in its massive transformation.
THEREFORE, I urge you to think of a City in way of how it sounds like: what are you city's sounds? Would you also vote for the representative ones? Why there are novelist and filmmaker so obsessed with the soundscape of the city; when a certain urban culture is aurally represented, what get lost and what could even be manipulated?
PS: When I am writing about Jia Zhangke and his films, I am always amazed at how he could hear, recognize and record the changes China is undergoing nowadays; yeah in the aural way. Upon watching his latest documentary Useless, I was moved to tears not only by the images, but also the sounds/songs/rhythms.
IF YOU ARE INTERESTED, I REALLY THINK YOU SHOULD READ THE ARTICLES ON CITY AND SOUND (THE BRITISH COUNCIL PROJECT); if I am not a PhD student here in HKU, I would like become a sound artist myself: )
http://www.britishcouncil.org/china-arts-music-satc.htm
INTERACTIVE MAP OF SOUNDSCAPE CHINA (ANOTHER PROJECT, WITH PICTURES AND THE FIELD RECORDING)
http://www.pbs.org/kqed/chinainside/soundmap/index.html
WRITINGS ON CITY: IN SEARCH OF CITY IDENTITY AND SOUL
http://www.thecentralcity.co.uk/info/indexfull.html
HERE GOES THE INTRO OF THE Favorite Beijing Sounds
Peter Cusack's mix of marching, knife sharpening and newspaper sellers are some of the sounds the British musicologist collected in China's noisy capital
One of the most enjoyable CDs I’ve found on the shelves in Beijing record stores recently is Favorite Beijing Sounds, a collection of indisputably Beijing sounds compiled by self-described “sound artist” Peter Cusack.
The British field recording maestro came to China last year as part of Sound And The City, a sound art project funded by the British Council. Described by the Council as “leading UK sound artists,” Cusack and six fellow Brits - Brian Eno, David Toop, Clive Bell, Scanner, Kaffe Matthews and Robert Jarvis - “were invited to create new work inspired by the civic sound environments” in four Chinese cities. Crowded and noisy, Chinese cities seem to be breeding a new wave of sound art - see my earlier post on French sounds collector Laurent Jeanneau. What's different about Sound And the City is that locals in Beijing, Shanghai, Chongqing, and Guangzhou were invited to describe their favourite sounds before the men and their mics went and recorded them.
“Many of those favourite sounds are ambient ones, less and less frequently heard as Chinese society changes at its current ferocious pace,” says the British Council in an introduction to the project in a new book. Run by the British Government (rather profitably in China, where it also runs English proficiency exams) the British Council lately came up with the cash for a fine 200 page English/Chinese book that comes with two CDs of recordings made by Cusack et al.
Sound And The City “speaks to the general public, not the selected public,” local sound artist Yan Jun told a wine and crackers reception at Timezone 8 arts bookstore on Jiu Xian Qiao Lu in Beijing’s industrial-chic 798 gallery zone. “They invite us to listen again to our own cities and our lives,” said Yan Jun, whose own electronic and ambient CDs sell next to Cusack’s Beijing Sounds in the Sugar Jar, purveyors of indie and avant garde music in the 798 district.
Aside from the collaborative box set, Cusack, 58, seems to have gotten a very tidy side-project out of his Beijing trip. He edited, and recorded most pieces of (the rest were recorded by local students volunteers and artists). The CD is in the spirit of an earlier Cusack brainchild, Your Favourite London Sounds (2001). Beijing sounds include the mutterings of tourists as the national anthem is played during the flag raising ceremony at Tienamen Square. There's also the familiar rattle of the city's knife sharpeners, bicycle-mounted tradesmen who shout and shake a metal rattler as they pedal through the city's neighbourhoods.
Back home in London, Cusack initiated the 'Your Favourite London Sound' project that aims to discover what Londoners find positive in their city's soundscape, an idea that has been repeated in other world cities including Beijing and Chicago. Cusack earlier produced 'Vermilion Sounds' a monthly environmental sound program on ResonanceFM radio, London, and currently lectures on 'Sound Arts & Design' at the London College of Communication.
The sound artist, who plays guitar and bazouiki in his down time, likes to get out of the city too. Areas of “special sonic interest” which he’s rubbed up the right way with his mic include Lake Baikal in Siberia -"Baikal Ice.” For 'Sounds From Dangerous Places' he recorded soundscapes of sites of major environmental damage, such as Chernobyl, Azerbaijan's oil fields. To get his recordings he's also boated along controversial dams on the Tigris and Euphratees rivers in south east Turkey.
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