Big Room Update

A quick update to say thanks for all the recordings submitted so far. The Big Room collection now contains a large selection of spaces and places: a garbled radio sputtering in a Dunedin studio, dog barks filtering through windows in a Portugese bedroom, echoic washes and bangs as sound waves reverberate in a Brussels workspace, the everyday percussion of a wood carver finishing a piece in Wales, and many more.

I've been reading recently about Vespers, a piece from avante-garde music pioneer Alvin Lucier. Performers were given simple clicking devices, mirroring the activity of bats and other animals that use echolocation, to explore the immediate environment in a sonic way. As each performer moves, the sound emanating from this device appears to change, while actually the near-instant echo coming back combining in the performers ear causes these shifts and bends of sound.

New Zealand architect Sean Monro noted in a recent essay about how these shifts in sonic spaces alter our behaviour: how we lower our voice when we step into an elevator, how stepping from the street into a corporate foyer subliminally affects our perceptions.

While the Metro plays classical music in stations to deter crime, and malls pipe Muzak into spaces to create the right atmosphere, how do we alter our sonic spaces - the opening of a window, the closing down of an iPod headphone soundtrack, and how do they alter us?

Photo: Pip Wilson, Creative Commons