Scoring For Places

Muzak was a form of "noise" in the sense that it was distinct from "real" music (signal)--in the background filling an unnerving silence. Even classical music was used by many people in offices at low volume just to mask dead silences--an insult to the composer in some ways.

All places are containers for certain kinds of sounds. Nature itself is a container for the sounds of wildlife. In architecture, humans are wildlife. Consider a fast-spreading virus that killed all the wildlife in a forest. The cognitive dissonance would be shrieking, as is a baseball game with no crowd noise.

In order to soften that cognitive dissonance, they are adding soundtracks to empty stadiums. I think this is a really interesting idea.

Back in the summer of 2000, there was an exhibition of the works of Frank Gehry at the Chicago Cultural Center, which included the model of the trellis structure for the Pavilion at Millennium Park, completed in 2004. (It hadn't yet been named the Pritzker Pavilion).

I wrote in my diary: 

"Trellis speaker arrangement giving me ideas for Atmosphere Generation. You can have sets of speakers set to different sound sources and let it run all day and people can come and go as they please, enjoying the varying sound space at lunchtime, etc."

I saw the trellis as being a container or “cover” of sound, as swimming pools are containers for swimming: A fixture in a place (like a trellis covering) determines its programming: Calling it something other than a swimming pool makes it more conceptual/installation art--for example Jaume Plensa's "Crown Fountain" (also at Millennium Park) that wasn't designed to be a water park, but is what it became. 

The pandemic has redefined spaces again. It redefined both the Pavilion and Crown because the crowd noises are missing.

Of course, film music works this way as well: If the first part of the film is heavily scored, and then there is no scoring for the last half of the film, you would wonder why there wasn't music there. If music wasn't included at all in the film, you wouldn't miss it. If a place had a continuous sound, such as a skate park, and then they banned skaters, you'd have a memory of that sound, or it could be "scored" like a stadium.

Keynotes

Keynotes are a sonic fixture of a place (also sometimes called soundmarks), which are continuous (usually pitched) elements. For example, if there is a motor running continuously in the background and its pitch is G-sharp, eventually you could write music on that "pedal point". I did this with a CTA transit station, where the ticket kiosks and the turnstiles tuned the space into F major with an occasional A-Flat for F minor. These beeping sounds are now ubiquitous in most places because most electronics now have some kind of audio signal, which they didn't have, say, pre-1980. Most of us don't remember when alarm clocks and phones had actual bells on them.

Ringing phones used to create a keynote in offices. They were a fixture (soundmark) of the space. Cell phones do the same thing, even if they aren't physically sounding. It's like the phantom limb sensation, sometimes called a “fauxcellarm”, a ghost of a sound--like the sound of skateboards in a closed park. And once a sound becomes obsolete, we can put it back as a "scored" element.