ARTFUL SOUNDS

Listen to Julian Treasure’s TED TALK.  Julian is a sound expert.  I fell into his talk by accident.  This happens to me often and it’s one of the great gifts of our computer age.  I start with a word or two heard on National Public Radio which leads to a Google search and WHAM-O! There’s Julian Treasure talking about sound. Magic!

Julian claims that listening is highly undervalued, that we modern people only retain about 25% of what we hear.  But we move into states of creativity or stress depending on even minor sounds around us.  One test using typical subdued office noises showed a drop in worker productivity; when the workers were moved into quiet, contained offices, productivity skyrocketed 66%.  

So much for “open office concept.”

A petty crime wave (purse snatching, car break ins) hit Lancaster, California, and the locals tried all the usual crime fighting methods until finally, in desperation, someone suggested calling Julian Treasure.  He proposed drowning the 5-6 block area with sound. Hundreds of Bose loud speakers were installed and played “white sounds” - birds chirping, waves crashing, wind rustling leaves -(softly) for 5 hours a day. Immediately, crime dropped by 15%.

O.K., I ‘m a skeptic. I remember the stories circulated in the 1950s about buyer manipulation.  Buried within movie comics or news reels, subliminal messages were embedded (Go buy Good ’n Plenty now!  Go outside for a smoke!) Somehow, just as forever linking school desks with hydrogen bomb drills, manipulating human impulses with sound raises - for me - the Manchurian Candidate and the scariest possibility of mind control.

Julian has confronted people like me and answers the question straight on. Are we equally fearful of mind control as we walk in the woods? wonder through a garden? listen to an orchestra? What about architecture? Unknowingly, we respond - and conform our actions -  to color, shape, quality of light or lack of it, ceiling height and volume.  In fact, a wonderful book - A PATTERN LANGUAGE written by Christopher Alexander in 1977 and based on proven theories of his team - describes why humans are “happy” in environments with certain measurable and repeatable characteristics.  The theory presents 253 “patterns” that form a language that any layperson may use to design optimum architecture, urban and livability spaces. 

Alexander and the unit of scientists included such patterns as ratio of window to wall area, optimum lengths of city blocks, best mixes of business to residential use.  I remember feeling as though I’d opened Hammurabi’s Code for Contemporary Life and Design when I discovered these theories! 

Add Julian Treasure and sound? If successful/fulfilling patterns for livability can be traced back to repeated patterns in nature, then why shouldn’t the same be true for sound?  How about I change  “human manipulation” to "human response"?  I’ll feel better about the discussion.

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JACQUIE'S 4TH FLOOR STUDIO

Jacquie Germanow has a wonderful new studio on the 4th floor of her family’s industrial complex.  She gave us a tour last week.  The windows look over a major still-functioning industrial section of Rochester, dominated by the Genesee Brewery and finally, the river. Light pours into her space on three sides.  I would stare out those windows all day and never get any work done! She is clearly more disciplined than I am.

Here are some pictures. 

JACQUIE GERMANOW/ARTIST

Photography and Tulips

Here is a photograph of the Canada Tulip. It was hybridized especially to celebrate Canada’s 150th national anniversary. Presumably - and I’m only guessing here - anybody can go to Canada and purchase the Canada Anniversary Tulip bulb, plant it in the garden and wait until spring when it erupts into this flower mush.

The 150th Anniversary, Canada National Tulip

I confess:  I don’t much like this flower.  I know something of tulips’ extravagant history. Victorian plant collectors spent their fortunes on tulip bulbs; they were solid collateral in international finance circles. The bottom fell out as all bottoms do. It’s an interesting tale (pardon the pun.)   

But I still don’t care for tulips. They supposedly stand for “elegance and grace” and “perfect love” according to various meaning-of-flowers’ internet sites but in my opinion, a tulip has no nuance. It’s the Kardashian of flowers.

Photograph by Robert Mapplethorpe

Here’s another photograph of a single tulip. This photograph was taken by Robert Mapplethorpe and it is breathtakingly beautiful. In this picture, the tulip is ALL nuance.  No longer is it merely a flower; it’s a metaphor for a kaleidoscope  of human emotion. This is a marriage of a brilliant artist using a tool (the camera) he clearly mastered.

I stood beside an art dealer once looking at a photograph on a museum wall. She represented international art photographers and I was trying to say something not-stupid. 

“Photography may be the most democratic of all art forms. Everybody has a smart phone now and nothing is out-of-reach.”  

She looked like I had reached over and plucked her eyebrow.

“I don’t agree at all!” and she marched away.  (Oops, that did not go well.)

Recently I ordered Teju Cole’s book of essays “Known and Strange Things” and this is what he says about photography:

“Photography is inescapably a memorial art. It selects, out of the flow of time, a moment to be preserved, with the moments before and after falling away like sheer cliffs. It is about retention; not only the ability to make an image directly out of the interaction between light and the tangible world but also the possibility of saving that image. Human creativity, since the beginning of art, has found ways to double the visible world. What photography did was to give the world a way to double its own appearance.

But when the photograph outlives the body - when people die, scenes change, trees grow or are chopped down - it becomes a memorial.”

Today is Labor Day. Go take some pictures with your smart phone.