Berlin — A Tuned City
Print by Cia Rinne, downloadable pink noise added by me (download at bottom of post)
There are a few things I really like about Berlin besides walking around with open beer. Dogs have reached consensus to act calm and have achieved independence from leashes. Bicycling is encouraged: there are bike paths, bike lanes, and bike traffic lights. There are lots of bike shops (and there is even one open on Sunday at Alexanderplatz if you need it). In this post I’ll review art and architecture in Berlin, and generate pink noise!
The soundscape of the city is unique with birds. Caitlin says that bugs beget birds. But where are the bugs coming from? Maybe all the green roof subsidies? Speaking of subsidized culture, we’ve visited a lot of museums (Pergamon with Babilonia artifacts, Hamburger Banhoff with the Beuys and fog sculptures by Anthony McCall) as well as artist run centers or ‘producer galleries’ (téte, Grimmuseum, General Public) showing great photography (Julia Kissina), sound installations (Cia Rinne), and interactive installation (Antonia Low). We also checked out a talk by an english acoustician Max Dixon at the Guggenheim Lab.
Dixon inaugurated acoustics-based urban planning. Don’t just remove traffic noise in London because it repeals the drunken arguments! Walk-ways that tune foot-fall so you can hear who’s coming and who is going. When you can’t hear yourself move, it feels like your sound-bubble shrunk to be smaller than the size of your body. I remember walking along a loud highway and feeling so insignificant that I feared the gust of a hurtling truck passing by would toss me into the air like a feather. What about roofs designed for tuned rainfall? In the jungle, every species finds their sound niche. Each animal evolves to locate their sound in a certain frequency and to space their sound out temporally so they can be heard by their kind at a distance. What if instead of volume-based sound regulations we had frequency related regulations too? What if we admitted that the sound environment is an ecosystem?
What if urban environments engaged in call and response? Fountains and waterfalls generate pink noise (noise spaced out by octaves). This is a pleasing noise blanket, much better than the harsh white noise (all frequencies at all levels) which sounds hissy. Fountains mask noise. But some new fountains grow when it is loud and peter out when it is quiet. To show my appreciation, I generated a one minute pink noise track for you to enjoy (two noise sources per stereo channel) so please relax!
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