[microsound] Exit Through the Gift Shop

[hans w. koch]

actually, you are of course right, about noise pollution in cities.
thats why i choose a spot for the installation, which was not easily accessible.
mostly people from the neighbouring residential area would use the traffic island for a stop while crossing the road to the opposite park, when going to walk their dogs.
i even bought the trashscan to mount it there myself.
(and it wasn´t playing continously, only when somebody threw something in)

but i would also consider, that there are different types of noise pollution. i was in mumbai 2 years ago, where basically everybody is driving by ear, constantly honking.
it is loud, but after a couple of days, it fades into background, except of the modern cars, which have a horns especially developped to surpass the prevalent horns of the old taxis.
high pitched, ultraloud, absolutely killing. it happended to me a couple of times sitting in a moto-rickshaw, that suddenly a new car would pull up on my side and i didn´t cover my ears fast enough and was suffering long after.
the old horns on the other hand, i learned to hear as a kind of spacial composition, made of hundreds of grains of honking.

hans
www.hans-w-koch.net





Am 16.02.2011 um 18:31 schrieb microsound-request at or8.net:

> Message: 4
> Date: Wed, 16 Feb 2011 11:07:12 -0600
> From: David Powers <cyborgk at gmail.com>
> To: microsound at microsound.org
> Subject: Re: [microsound] Exit Through the Gift Shop
> Message-ID:
> 	<AANLkTin_iuD0o3jfhyskrGgJTiVcOsnF=PkJCsftxZYM at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252
> 
> A little food for thought:
> 
> Do we not suffer from too much noise in our cities already? At least
> in Chicago, I am subjected to large amounts of unwanted noise, whether
> it is the dangerously loud sound of elevated trains, or the unwanted
> (and almosty always terrible) background music that plays incessantly
> indoors everywhere one goes.
> 
> So I suggest that the ultimate sonic intervention would not create
> noise, but SUBTRACT noise--creating an unexpected pocket of silence in
> the midst of the city would be fantastic, in my opinion.
> 
> ~David