Sound design
by Ross Harley

When was the last time you listened to a good piece of
architecture, or heard an interesting bit of design? Not for a while I
bet. If you’re anything like me, you’re probably too busy looking to
listen.

Of course the sound of an object or a space defines it every bit as
much as its texture, colour or feel. And yet we persist in building
theatres, cafes, domestic appliances and furniture without fully
considering their acoustic properties. At least that’s the way it all
too often appears.

But when it comes down to it, many of us are more attuned to the
subtle differences of sound than we are to other properties
designed into personalised objects and public spaces. After all,
who doesn’t have a friend who swears they can judge the quality
of one particular product over another by the click of its door or the
intensity of its mechanical hum?

A group of artists, performers and sound designers are gathering
in Melbourne from 17-27 November to bring some of these ideas
to public attention. Focussing on the importance of sound in our
everyday lives, “Earwitness: Excursions in Sound” is being staged
across a number of well-known historical sites and public art
galleries. The program of over twenty works from Australia and
abroad (curated by Sonia Leber for Melbourne’s Contemporary
Music Events Company) is a timely reminder of how significant the
manipulation of sound has been in the construction of our
everyday experiences.

Leber has organised a number of performances to be held in sites
such as the Old Melbourne Gaol, The Gasworks, and the Old
Melbourne Observatory. Like many places built during the
nineteenth century to perform specialised functions, these
buildings have a peculiar atmosphere that seems divorced from
the present. But put in the hands of contemporary artists and
sound designers, these buildings are transformed into spaces
appropriate to the sounds of our time.

The “new” cell block of the Old Melbourne Gaol was built in 1859.
It is an excellent example of the influence the prison reform
movement had on the design of places of detention in Australia.
The surviving block is like a sonic equivalent of the Panopticon
(which allowed gaolers to observe all prisoners from a single
vantage point). In this case, silence was architecturally enforced to
keep disorderly inmates in line. No talking was tolerated during
meal times, and coir matting was laid in the floor to soften the
sound of footsteps. The only noises acoustically amplified back to
prisoners in their separate cells were the jangling of keys, the
slams of doors and fastening of bolts in the dark of night.

I need hardly add that reform was not main achievement of this
early “correctional” facility. One hundred and four people
(including Ned Kelly) were executed during the time that the prison
operated. The bluestone building was designed to extinguish all
sounds of life, to incarcerate the wayward within a strictly
regulated space.

Artist Simon Crosbie’s sound performance entitled “The
Architecture of Silence” is scheduled to take place at the gaol on
19 November. One hundred and four people (the same number as
were executed there) will create “mass sounds” using their voices
and the acoustic surfaces of metal stairs, doors and cells, to
conjure the lost refrains and ghosts of the building’s past.
According to Leber, this kind of work is a fitting “model for the
exploration of a site’s history through the use of sound”.

Similarly, sound artist Chris Mann (together with Carolyn Connors,
Jeannie Marsh and Rik Rue) has devised a simultaneous
performance for three vocalists situated in separate buildings at
the Old Melbourne Observatory: the two telescope houses and the
old Weights and Measures building. Creating a triangle of
performers (inspired by Buckminster Fuller’s infamous geodesic
dome design), Mann intends to create a new model for the flow of
acoustic information in space.

Sydney-based artist Joyce Hinterding uses satellite transmissions
of turbulence and weather patterns in her work entitled “Cloud”.
She has designed her own high voltage electrostatic speakers to
construct what she describes as “acoustic architecture”. Installed
at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, the work
encourages the listener to explore a dynamic aural terrain.. The
exact sounds they hear are precisely determined by where they
stand in the space.

Others, like Iain Mott, Marc Raszewski and Tim Barrass, have
created their own sound generating machines. Their quirky
“Squeezebox” is a playable device that “determines the shape of
the sounds, effectively squeezing and stretching sound and
image” according to the interaction of the audience. The public are
invited to play their machine at the Ether Ohnetitel Gallery in
Fitzroy.

If the organisers of “Earwitness” have their way, this won’t be the
last we hear from these creative designers of acoustic space.