Prints
Aqeel Akbar
Introduction Pin Lane’s recorded history can be dated as far back as 1747; while this street might seem empty and defined as a back lane, there is still history hidden within its stones. The cobblestones have recorded and show the very history of Pin Lane. As people, go by, often without realising they leave a noisy footprint, sending reverberations across the surface of Pin Lane. This footprint takes form when people walk, laugh, hold a conversation or even drive by. In the similar way a VJ artist tells this story of music through imagery, my approach to the space will exhibit this ghostly sound print as pedestrians transit through Pin Lane. On first impressions, Pin Lane seems to be the schizophrenic link between two worlds. On one end we have a quiet residential area and on the other we have quite a large commercial area.. As I stood here over a period of a couple of hours, I found that the lane was used a lot by people as a link to both worlds. This lane was like vital link to a lot of people even thought they may not realise it. On observation I felt that this lane was witness to history, as in it provided a medium for these people to travel through. It’s almost poetic, because it looks like a quiet solitary lane but in actual fact, it was far from that. It holds the footprints of these people.
As the idea of footprints has inspired me to look at this lane from this context, I started to look at how we record history, or rather what is a more natural way of looking at history. One of the key examples was stone and rocks - for example city walls dating back to the Roman Empire can be found in St. Albans. From these walls, one is able to find out what kind of city St. Albans was, it’s size, and what sort of army was stationed thereby giving an idea the number of people in that city. Using this natural way of showing history, I felt using the stones/rocks on Pin Lane would be a good way to demonstrate or capture time in Pin Lane, especially the road is cobbled and almost one whole side of Pin Lane is dominated by interesting rocks that don’t have a smooth surface.
Process one. I started my investigation into Pin Lane by looking at the rocks of Pin Lane. I took photos each step of the way, firstly looking down onto the road, secondly looking left and finally looking right. I stitched these photos to form 3 panoramic shots, so I could see Pin Lane in different angles. As I scanned through these photos I felt, as there was a story of lines being told through the shapes of the stones/rocks. I decided to draw out the lines that stood out the most through a selection of matched photos. I found that this was quite poetic again - it was almost as if there was a life line, or an aboriginal painting with just lines but no pictures.
I then started looking at ways sound could be depicted through imagery. On the picture on the right, is an example that I produced for Glastonbury 2009. It’s a live camera feed that shows 3D topography of the live feed, and then the spikes would occur according to the sound. This piece was inspired by Radiohead’s Lidar Music Video used for their song “House of Cards”. This got me thinking about how I could incorporate this into my model. The key thing that I would need to make sure is I don’t want just one microphone on the lane picking up the sound. I need the sound to picked up at several different spaces on the lane - as I wanted to look at the lane in greater depth.
Process two. The next step, I observed the Lane’s activity noting down the type of activity that the Lane endured. Pedestrians, cycles, and cars were using this predominantly, and I noted the noise type that was associated with these types of movements. I found at night time the noise levels peaked in line with the opening hours of the restaurants and bars on Southside Street, with predominantly pedestrians. During the day, there was a great number of cars and strollers observed. In addition to this, the restaurants rear entrances were also quite busy when used.
I also came across to this picture on the right, which was made by Karyl Newman, who is an artist and a scenographer. While it is a simple design and shows the oscillation of sound. It almost looks like the New York skyline with reflections onto the river looking onto it from Weehawken. This is quite inspirational as it shows sound oscillations can show striking imagery. To the right, is a sculpture produced by Benjamin Maus called Reflection. This was produced for a festival called Frozen, in Amsterdam 2009. It basically shows 12 successive musical notes analysed by a frequency detector which then goes onto form a mesh and hence the raised peaks in the sculpture shown. In my final piece, I could utilise a similar method and show the topography of the lane and possibly overlay frequency detection over it to form a sound generated visual of Pin Lane.
Having been inspired by how different medias portray sound, I decided to go back to basics and look at paintings themselves and see how they portrayed sound in a more abstract way. On the left is a painting by Walt Blumfield called “Sound of Music”. I like the way he has portrayed the sound as colour coming out of the saxophone. I can see colourful strokes showing how the sound flows through the scene. It’s very fluid and quite emotive in this way. To me this raises the question of introducing colour in my final piece, as rocks and stones are very grey and I find myself asking in the interest of aesthetics, should I introduce the element of colour in this. Or even should I represent certain colours at certain frequencies as you would find in a graphic equaliser? This is something I need to investigate in my next step.
In this process, I started to look at the way sound could be collected. Do I look at frequency of the sound collected? Do I look at the loudness of the sound? Then how do I collect the sound. What equipment should I use to collect sound in Pin Lane. Something mobile and easy to collect would be needed to collect. For this I have decided to look at Quartz Composer and see what effects I could generate based on sound input. To the right are a series of images generated on (right) frequency (far right) loudness.
Conclusion. My final piece will be a sound generated topographic image of a section of Pin Lane. It will show a visualisation of sound generated in Pin Lane, thereby forming the sound footprint - this visualisation will be transposed onto an image of Pin Lane. The image of Pin Lane will correlate to where the sound is collected. I intend to sample the sound over several areas along Pin Lane to highlight the extremities of Pin Lane i.e. the schizophrenic link. The period of time I would like to capture is still undecided, but the options I am considering is a 24hr period, a series of 5 minutes slot throughout the day, or an hour over the course of a week. I will research this further to find out what is aesthetically appeasing and feasible.
Conclusion continued. One of the challenges that I will face is the inherent noise polliution as I only want to collect the sound generated by people themselves. The ways I can overcome this is by setting the base level on par with the background noise, so any sound generated by the background won’t be picked up. There are several influences on this project. One of them is Radiohead’s Lidar music video - a sound affected topographic image of a face - it’s ghostly look and imprint can be seen in the my theme of sound footprints generated by the Quartz Composer Visualiser. Other influences have been mentioned in my processes. The final piece will probably generated as Quartz Composer Visualisation as I am familiar with the patches involved in the developers stage. I would like to make it a 3D interactive piece so people could fastforward time, or move to a particular area in Pin Lane so they can see how particular areas are being affected by sound.
References.
Radiohead - House of Cards Music Video. This video shows a sound generated video - generating Reflection by Benjamin Maus Here he takes sound frequency and generates on a mesh creating a 3D sculpture. Sound of Music by Walt Blumfield His abstract interpretation of sound coming out of the musicians as waves inspires to show sound visually - giving the atmosphere and mood to the scene. Stone history in Scotland Report - http://www.sslg.co.uk/BWSS.pdf This has inspired the whole idea of using stones to tell the story of what is going on in Pin Lane.