5 minutes in length.
Runs on a loop.
Soundscape consisting of found sounds from around London.
In the modern world there are places of importance where a silence is able to endure. These spaces of huge history have a phenomenal quality like temples, churches, museums, cathedrals, palaces, wharfs and warehouses. Sound here holds great reverence; the echo in a space matched with visual value endlessly impresses me. The silence in these spaces becomes hugely important; it is this silence which gives the space emotion, feeling, its mass and the potential for reverberation. The lack of intrusive sound within the man made structure allows for a place of reflection.
The Library, a place of study, rows and rows of compact knowledge waiting, sleeping until opened. The library is a place to be focused and concentrate our minds. Yet the space in a university can be unthinkably symphonious. The place is a hive of activity. What an exciting venture, to transform an environment with sound. To bring the essence of a space into a zone already filled with sound. Fill in the gaps of sound left over.
In 1948 John Cage had an idea for a piece of music comprising of a constant silence, he had wanted this piece to be played in between the pop music played at shopping malls, changing the conception of what shoppers should be listening to as they purchase from the modern convenience living institutions ‘Silent Prayer’;
"to compose a piece of uninterrupted silence and sell it to Muzak Co. It will be 3 or 4 1/2 minutes long-those being the standard lengths of "canned" music-and its title will be silent prayer"
John Cage’s silent soundscapes were about freedom and space, the freedom to be in a space without the "canned" tunes which resonate in a modern refurbished post war America. Similarly I have created this piece to highlight a stereotype that soundpeices’ cannot exist in institutionalised spaces like a library.
I had wanted to place the sound in a ‘silent space' within an institution. The idea of placing a sound piece in the library was to emphasise background noise we are unaware of. I chose the speakers carefully; they are made from a light brown wood matching the aesthetic of a typical University library. Though they are machines which produce sound which is an offense to the library, a quiet working area.
I was focusing on how sound is permanent in our lives and how ‘background noise’ is a quiet, trance like constant often ignored or endured. My intention with the piece was to keep the sounds subtle, only peaking twice to above the volume of the mundane hum of students working and the power-boards’ drone.
The sounds recorded were background noises common in my day-to-day life; train announcements, the clink of china and cutlery in a restaurant, and the chirping of children in a playground, overlapping. I was recording as if I were on a journey. The main reason to keep the sounds subtle was that, when the noise did peak, as the sound of a train ran close to my sound recorder, the piece no longer remained unnoticed as background noise, but became an alien entity in an institutionalised space of silence transporting each listener, and subconsciously each worker into a different space in time. But the peak lasts only a few moments before it ebbs back into a mundane hum
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