Outside Sounds

The Documenter has been thinking about OUTSIDE and INSIDE and how sound does not distinguish between these categories. So some sound OUTSIDE can quiet easily become a sound INSIDE.

It depends how you listen.

Here is a photograph of the surround area of the Webber Douglas Studio, the site of Ross Brown’s workshop. This looking from above, this other perspective, might begin to provide a way of thinking about the OUTSIDE sounds, a way of looking at a site in relation to its wider ecology. You are in here, in the studio, but you can’t forget that there are cars outside, you can’t forget that there is always an outside.

What a noise. Listen to the din, listen to the hissing and hubub, yet hearken to that which this hateful noise assails and battle to drown out.

Listen twofold. But listen even harder to that which is relegated to the background. Yes, listen to that other noise, which is the background, just within earshot.

And what is heard? Indeed, what is sounded?

Answer: the restlessness of the world; the agitation that lies at the bottom of the world; the turbluence that turns the world; the boundless sounds of the world as it perturbs, disturbs and excited itself as it ceaslessly becomes and comes undone. And what a cacophony comes from this, what a commotion. Some would call this chaos. And some would call this disorder. But he says that disorder is the worst word imaginable. Yes, Michael Serres prefers to speak of noise for noise is multiple, and it is the multiple that this philosopher wishes to be fathomed and sounded.

Sounding the Event, Escapades in Dialogue and Matters of Art, Nature and Time, Yve Lomax (London, 2005) p. 11-12.

This recording attempts to acknowledge the multiplicity of ‘outside sounds’ that existed in the room during the workshop. It was made during a short experiment where Ross asked the group to talk out loud and then switch to saying the word ‘rubarb’ – so that a comparison could be made between different sorts of sound beds. The group sit in a circle, which the Documenter walks around in increasingly tight concentric circles – moving from outside to inside.

Here is a link to a set of photographs entitled ‘Silent Tools’ which the Documenter made in response to the noise made by the building works directly outside the Webber Douglas Studio.