New city ways
Oct 06, 2022, 01:29 PM
"Taking the original questions posed in the brief I embellished with a set of automatically written answers in the form of a monologue that was pasted into the Google text to speech app. I wanted to address the concerns I have living in a more urban environment and seeing the impact this has on people's health and wellbeing. I thought about how the urban spaces i walk through could be improved, how we could help people improve and enhance how they experience these Victorian, post Industrial Revolution landscapes through a new lens and not only through the lens of 1960's urban planning disasters (or the hangover of cheap alcohol and fatty foods).
"Could we interact with these spaces differently? Could we bring wonder and curiosity into these spaces. Could we heal people in them and offer hope? Could we urban hike? I used the Soma Labs Lyra 8 synth to create 3 drone tracks. The device was tuned to the sound of the sea organ which acted as guide and conduit for the track construction. I thought of the process this time in a very visual way and took the tracks for a long walk around the town i live in. I then found some very old samples in a 2008 version of Apple Logic of bird call and rain. These are sounds that through the covid pandemic we heard in our towns and cities louder than ever.
"Adding all of the tracks together for the first time, i took these back into the streets and walked with the forming track on repeat. It started to rain so i sampled the rain (much welcome after a long hot UK summer). Finally i added the words, refining the timbre and metre of the monologue but keeping the glitchy rather dystopian sampled voice as is. I took the track back out onto the street where i live and again walked with the track and source material on loop.
"Finally a melody emerged and the track was complete. A glimpse possibly of what could be if we take the time to reflect on how "close we have flown the sun" in the form of the pending (but avertable) climate crisis we now face into."
Zadar sea organ reimagined by Andy Billington.
IMAGE: Ben Snooks, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Part of the Well-Being Cities project, a unique collaboration between Cities and Memory and C40, a global network of mayors of nearly 100 world-leading cities collaborating to deliver the urgent action needed right now to confront the climate crisis. The project was originally presented at the C40 Cities conference in Buenos Aires in 2022. Explore Well-Being Cities in full at https://citiesandmemory.com/wellbeing-cities/
"Could we interact with these spaces differently? Could we bring wonder and curiosity into these spaces. Could we heal people in them and offer hope? Could we urban hike? I used the Soma Labs Lyra 8 synth to create 3 drone tracks. The device was tuned to the sound of the sea organ which acted as guide and conduit for the track construction. I thought of the process this time in a very visual way and took the tracks for a long walk around the town i live in. I then found some very old samples in a 2008 version of Apple Logic of bird call and rain. These are sounds that through the covid pandemic we heard in our towns and cities louder than ever.
"Adding all of the tracks together for the first time, i took these back into the streets and walked with the forming track on repeat. It started to rain so i sampled the rain (much welcome after a long hot UK summer). Finally i added the words, refining the timbre and metre of the monologue but keeping the glitchy rather dystopian sampled voice as is. I took the track back out onto the street where i live and again walked with the track and source material on loop.
"Finally a melody emerged and the track was complete. A glimpse possibly of what could be if we take the time to reflect on how "close we have flown the sun" in the form of the pending (but avertable) climate crisis we now face into."
Zadar sea organ reimagined by Andy Billington.
IMAGE: Ben Snooks, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Part of the Well-Being Cities project, a unique collaboration between Cities and Memory and C40, a global network of mayors of nearly 100 world-leading cities collaborating to deliver the urgent action needed right now to confront the climate crisis. The project was originally presented at the C40 Cities conference in Buenos Aires in 2022. Explore Well-Being Cities in full at https://citiesandmemory.com/wellbeing-cities/