IDEAS City Festival Installation | New Museum @ Garis & Hahn
Cities are growing faster and becoming more diverse than ever – putting strain on space, challenging definitions of value in a urban planning context and bringing together rich perspectives. The New Museum’s Ideas City Festival in New York City sought to highlight the challenges and opportunities that come with these new urban dynamics. Streetscape Symphony is an interactive sound installation in the New Museum’s Ideas City Festival exploring simultaneous soundscapes of disparate parts of New York City.
Walking down the street, especially in New York City, our surrounds wash an endless stream of stimuli over us – sounds, sights, smells. If we were to register each consciously, it would be overwhelming, so we tend to prioritize which ones we process and which we ignore. Many of us are visually oriented, not paying attention to the sounds of our environment, what they mean, and how they impact us. A perfect way to appreciate the texture of this city in a new light, I collaborated on Streetscape Symphony, an exploration of NYC’s boroughs by their sounds, for the New Museum’s 2013 IDEAS CITY Festival curated around the theme of untapped capital in our cities.
We told The Creator’s Project and VICE’s Motherboard, “We wanted to explore the way that New Yorkers create, listen to, and interact with their acoustic environments—which, because there are so many sounds competing with one another, we can often drown out and neglect to realize their significance.” The synopsis on the gallery wall explained further,
An urban soundscape is reflexive. It is shaped by its inhabitants and in turn has a profound effect on their daily lives. For residents, this interplay often goes unnoticed; the melodies of voice, footfall, and engine often fade into noises in the background. An aural interpretation of New York City’s untapped capital, Streetscape Symphony explores this dialogue between the city’s design and the people who inhabit it.
Using in-ear binaural recordings, the artists’ parallel journeys through the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, and Staten Island can be acoustically re-experienced. The distinct sounds of the boroughs are an expression of the politics, history, and interactions that make each borough what it is today.
Headphones, typically used to isolate the listener, serve here as immersive gateways into these diverse auditory environments. Loudspeaker playback throughout the gallery reacts to the presence of visitors through motion tracking software. By nearing a borough, its sounds expand and focus, engulfing the listener. As visitors traverse the symbolic thresholds between boroughs, a new ambience emerges, revealing the rich harmonies that exist when the shared potentials of New York’s boroughs are in tune.
Installed at the Garis & Hahn Gallery in May 2013, the work uses geotagged, binaural audio recordings captured by the artists over an entire day from each of the five boroughs. Visitors’ position in the space affected the mix of the soundscapes over a 5 channel audio system throughout the gallery. A binaural station was also setup for visitors to make A-B comparisons of the sounds between boroughs over headphones.
In collaboration with Dave Rife and Gabe Liberti, Kevin Siwoff, and Bettina Zerza, we ideated and strategized the experience of the installation – from environmental design, to art production, to sound emersion. Exploring NYCs transit system through soundscapes, sound design, and a data sonification, the installation offered an alternative look into how design can help create better transit oriented development and a robust public transportation system. Streetscape Symphony sought to represent the vibrancy of the under-valued spaces that connect all five boroughs, stressing that they could become agents for positive citywide change. The exhibit was covered by VICE’s the Creators Project.
