Ways of Hearing 2 – SPACE

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From PRX's Radiotopia, "Never Post," a podcast for and about the internet. Episodes each week at neverpo.st and wherever you find your pots. I grew up on the 15th floor of an apartment building in Manhattan. Actually, it was the 14th floor. There was no 13 button in the elevator to stave off bad luck. It was an old building and my family kept the windows open year round, even in winter because the steam heat could be overpowering. Which means I heard the roar of the city at all hours and in all seasons, in ocean like white noise, a noise I missed whenever I tried to sleep in the countryside. But other than that roar, it was really pretty quiet. Only a few individual sounds reach an apartment that high off the ground, sirens, hawks, whistles, the occasional dog bark, sounds of warning, sounds designed to rise above the rest. As soon as I took the elevator down and walked outside, though, I was immediately swept up into that ocean of sound. Up close, it was less like a roar and more like being hit by a massive wave of sounds and of people. As a kid, I prided myself on being able to move quickly through those New York crowds. It was like a city version of surfing, anticipating how this wave of people and cars would move, being in a groove and riding through. Now I find the sidewalks in New York harder to navigate. I'm older, for sure, but I don't think my city instincts are so stale. I've spent a lot of my adult life on tours and musician traveling in cities, some twice the size of New York, but the crowds in New York don't seem to move as quickly as they used to. It's like there's a lag in people's movements, a hesitation where I expect action. And it's no wonder, because if you're busy talking on the phone or looking at a screen, are you really in this crowd? Are you here with me on this sidewalk, moving together like we're all in the same wave? Or are you in some other space altogether? In Tokyo, people on crowded trains pretend they're asleep to avoid eye contact. But here, with all these headphones, it's like we're avoiding ear contact. This is Ways of Hearing, a six-part podcast from videotopias Showcase, exploring the nature of listening in our digital world. I'm Damon Krakewski, a musician and a writer. In each episode, we'll look at a different way that the switch from analog to digital audio is changing our perceptions of time, of space, of love, money, and power. This is about sound, the medium we're sharing together now. But I'm worried about the quality of that sharing, because we don't seem to be listening to each other very well right now in the world. Our voices carry further than they ever did before, thanks to digital media. But how are they being heard? Listening has a lot to do with how we navigate space. We use our stereo hearing to locate sounds around us, and to map where we are in relation to the source of those sounds. If you stop up your ears, say with earbuds listening to this podcast, you'll find you aren't as aware of the space around you, or of other people. If you're on the street, you won't hear their footsteps approaching. You won't hear their cough letting you know they're right behind you. You may not even hear them yelling at you to get out of the way. And if you're in New York, that person yelling might be Jeremiah Moss. When I see people walking around with the screens, I see people who don't want to be here. They're not here. They're opting out of the street life of the city. So you're creating a private kind of bubble in which to move through public space. So in some ways, the public has been triumphed over by the private. These little private bubbles that just bounce off of each other. Jeremiah Moss writes a blog called "Vanishing New York." He's been observing the changes in the city since the 1990s, and he's angry. I walk around in a rage a lot of the time. What's making Jeremiah angry is gentrification, the increasing wealth and homogeneity of the city. Jeremiah actually calls what he's been witnessing in New York "hyper gentrification" because it's moving so fast and seems so out of control. I just want to point out this building, it has a car elevator so you can bring your car into your condo. Now, if that's not suburban, I don't know what it is. That is a vertical suburbia. I met Jeremiah in Astro Place, a square that's always been a gateway to the East Village. When I was growing up, it was known as a place you could find things on the black market. Drug deals were happening just out of sight. An in-plane view was a kind of thieves' market. The contents of tourist suitcases, car trunks, burglarized apartments, and simply old abandoned junk all spread out on the sidewalk for sale. There's nothing to look at in this glass tower, you know, smooth, slick surface that if you are on a screen, you can sort of glide right by it and they look like screens and what you know what people do is they'll look up from their screen going by this glass to look at themselves reflected in the glass and then they go back to the screen. Today, Astro Place is what's known by the city authorities as a pedestrian plaza. One of the streets that used to cut through it has been closed off. There are tables with umbrellas and chairs and it's surrounded by new glass towers with chain stores on the ground level. There's a cameart, a wall greens, and a CVS, which means there are still a lot of drugs being sold here. What they're doing is they're kind of privatizing public space in this very stealth kind of way. So this is still public. Everybody's welcome here. And yet you'll see these private security guards walking around. This is a place where people would protest and there would be public dissent in this space. And now you have these signs, no skateboarding, no this, no that. Because it's now a pedestrian plaza. You can have rules. You can dictate how people use the space. Walking through the East Village with Jeremiah Moss is like experiencing two urban spaces at once. There's the one we're in now in hyper gentrifying New York. And then there's the one that's underneath it, a ghost city, a crowded tenements and streets that move to a different rhythm. It's a rhythm I knew well from growing up in New York in the 1970s and from being in a band who played there in the 1980s. Shall we go into what used to be CBGB? Yes. Let's do it. I haven't dared walk in since it's not since it was CB's, no. Oh my God. Jeremiah took me to what used to be the iconic rock club, CBGB's. It's now a boutique. Oh my God. So there's a kind of a fake stage here with a display of shoes and t-shirts for sale. They also amps and guitars and drums, but they're not obviously being played. I'm standing right where the stage was and they've left the graffiti on the walls, stripped back a little bit, but as you can hear the music playing is nothing like what this room represents. Playing gigs at CBGB meant a lot to me and my bandmates in Galaxy 500, not because it was such an ideal space for music. It didn't have the best equipment. People had to walk past the stage to get to the dramatically filthy bathrooms, and there wasn't really anywhere you could leave your instruments safely. But this was where so many great shows happened. This space had meaning because of the sounds that had been shared there. When you got on that stage, you knew who else had been there. Of course the city has always been something like this, a center of commerce and consumption destroying whatever was for whatever will be next. But if you talk to Emily Thompson, a historian at Princeton who knows an earlier New York as if it had never been buried under what came next, you start to see something more than a never ending cycle of development. You start to see a timeline with a very definite story, one with the beginning, middle, and if Jeremiah Moss is right, maybe an end too. For Emily Thompson, that story is about sound and our efforts to control it. The 1920s was a time that was perceived to be uniquely and unprecedentedly loud, and a lot of that had to do with technological changes in the modern city, the rise of internal combustion engines with vehicles everywhere, and you've got elevated trains running above the city streets, but cities like New York are simultaneously excavating to bury those trains and turn them into subways. So it just was hard for many people to deal with this new environment. Hard enough that the 1920s is when the decibel meter was invented, and civic groups put that new measurement of noise to use, lobbying for quiet zones around hospitals, rubber tires on cars, asphalt poured over cobblestone streets, all efforts to bring some kind of control over this new urban racket. And yet, as any corner in New York still demonstrates today, those lobbying efforts didn't really succeed in controlling the sound in the street. But as Emily Thompson points out, they did lead to another more effective set of changes. Looking at campaigns for noise abatement helped me understand the drive to control sound in interior spaces as to create kind of refuges from this environment. A key place for experimenting with that kind of interior sound control was concert halls. Well, maybe if I step here, I can say I was on a stage. It's so big, it's like a gymnasium. Radio City Music Hall opened in 1932 and was a watershed and acoustical design, was the first hall built for amplified sound. It has a huge stage, big enough it once hosted a pro basketball game, because it doesn't matter how sound projects often. Everything that happens on that stage was intended to be mic'd, even the Rockets feet, and heard through speakers built into the architecture of the hall rather than through the natural reverberation of its space. When nothing is being projected through those speakers, the room itself, despite its size, is actually very, very quiet. Only in I visited Radio City together on a Saturday morning when hardly anyone was in the building and sat down to talk in two of its 6,000 empty seats. But as you can hear, it sounded like we were in a tiny carpeted recording studio. Basically, what we're talking about are the criteria for optimum reverberation, you know, how much of a sound of space do you want, and I think that the ideal became that you were really just hearing that signal, the voices, the musicians that you wanted to hear, and everything else. The sound of the room in which you were experiencing this became considered noise, something that was just kind of interfering with what you really wanted to hear. And so auditoriums began to be designed to be more absorptive, to reduce reverberation. In the most extreme statements, some auditorium designers said, "Well, walls are really just a necessary nuisance." You know, they keep the weather out, they let you hang things off of them, but acoustically, an ideal auditorium would have no walls at all. Using reverberation to better control the sound inside of space, ultimately led designers to imitate the sound of the outdoors, where there's no reverberation. And here in Radio City, I think you can kind of approximate that with the luxury of such an enormous space to work with, and the highly absorptive surfaces out of which they built the walls. The arches, the back panels, were all either covered with sound absorbing cloth and fabric or they used special acoustical plaster, which absorbed the sound energy, rather than reflected it back down into the audience. So what they were hearing was really what they had bought the ticket for, which was whatever was happening on stage, just kind of coming directly at them. And in the case of Radio City, actually via loudspeakers. Previously, no one much questioned this new sound of Radio City when it first opened. After endless debate surrounding the best acoustics from music, is it La Scala and Malone? Is it Symphony Hall and Boston? Radio City, without any acoustics, was simply accepted. There were lots of other criticisms of the hall. People had problems with its massive size, they felt it was hard to see what was going on on stage, but people found the sound unremarkable, therefore I assume, unproblematic. You know, it was intended to fit in with the electro-acoustic world of Radio and then sound movies. So it's what people liked at the time, it's how they defined good sound. And I think that Radio City certainly delivered on that level when it opened. The earbuds we're adopting now, so universally, so quickly, also feel like a direct experience of the sounds they amplify. And just like the audience at the opening of Radio City, we're generally not questioning the quality of that sound. On the contrary, based on the evidence all around us, the evidence Jeremiah Moss rails against, we obviously love it. Earbuds are like a dream of the sound that Radio City's designers were after. They are an auditorium without walls. And our digital devices are not only portable, they tap into a seemingly limitless cloud of sound. We can now control and tailor our audio environment to most whatever we desire it to be. In any space we find ourselves. Yet many of those spaces, outside in the street, remain as noisy as ever. The times reports that New Yorkers are lodging twice as many noise complaints as they were just five years ago. For most, hyper gentrification has only made our cities more difficult to navigate, with longer commutes from affordable neighborhoods, more people in cars at rush hour, more crowded public transportation. As in the 1920s, we're using interior sound to create a refuge. But our digital devices have extended that interior space into the street itself. Through audio, we're privatizing our public spaces, just like the redesign of Astro Place, into a pedestrian plaza. Historians don't generally like to speculate about the present. But while we were at Radio City Music Hall, I asked Emily Thompson to consider this 21st century soundscape of ear buds. Headphones are different for me, though, because the sound is inside your head. It's not even outside of your head in the outdoor space. So I would suggest our cranium has become the walls, and all that sound is bouncing around between our own ears. So I would argue that's even more kind of asocial. Yeah, so we need absorptive materials inside our cranium. We're all sorts of reasons, I think that's true. Most people, the ideas bounce off, and then their own ideas just bounce around in the echo chamber of their skulls, but I digress. Because echo chamber seems really crucial, I mean, it seems crucial to our moment right now, which is part of my interest in thinking back to earlier ways that we heard music or that we heard sound or that we shared sound, because that's the thing is, even if you had no reverberation and you were interested in this direct electrical signal from the stage, you still had this collective experience, I don't know. Now I think you're right, and I think I would want to emphasize that it takes a lot of technology to isolate each of us in our respective echo chambers. And I think that's not inherent, you know, I always say sound wants to mix. For a lot of decades in the 20th century, people struggled to control and contain sound. And now we really, in many ways, have that ability. But why we want to do so, I think we need to step back and question that again. In the early 1990s, I had the great good fortune to meet the composer and philosopher John Cage. He received me in the apartment he shared with his partner, Merce Cunningham, an apartment on the top floor of an old industrial building facing one of the busiest avenues in Manhattan. When I arrived, he was sitting at a table by the window, composing music on paper, and the windows were open. The roar of the city was familiar for my own childhood apartment, but Cage and Cunningham lived in a building that didn't reach as high in the air. The individual noises from the street below, the buses, the honking, the shouting were much closer, more distinct and much, much louder. But John Cage said he never closed the windows. Why would he? There was so much to listen to all the time. This is Ways of Hearing. In the next episode, I'll phone it in to talk about how the digital audio processing of our voices may be fooling with our ideas of love. Thank you for listening. Ways of Hearing is a production of Showcase from Radiotopia and PRX, produced by me, Damon Krakewski, Max Larkin, and Ian Koss, with sound design by Ian Koss. Our executive producer is Julie Shapiro. Thanks to Alex Braunstein and the PRX podcast Farage, our theme song is Trickle Down by Robert Quiet, find out more about Ways of Hearing at radiotopia.fm/showcase. Ways of Hearing is a production of Showcase from Radiotopia and PRX, produced by me, Damon Koss. Ways of Hearing is a production of Showcase in Radiotopia and PRX, produced by me, Damon Koss. Ways of Hearing is a production of Showcase from Radiotopia and PRX, produced by me, Damon