Sonic Psychogeography

What is the sound of a place in an abstract sense? Motown had a sound; Philadelphia had a sound; Memphis had a sound; Glen Campbell "soundtracked" places like Phoenix, Wichita, Memphis, Muscle Shoals, and Galveston. Chicago doesn't really have a sound all its own but it has "scored" my life.

Very often when I went out with my camera, I would make a playlist and let it run in the background as a soundtrack. Once I looked at the images I sometimes recalled the music I was listening to at the time. Music and sound, and even smells, encode places in memory. They then become my audio snapshots.

My forthcoming album, Frontiers, is not a part of the Music For Places series, and has no ambient atmosphere, but the process whereby the album was sequenced is connected with images and the valence of those images in context with the songs. Kharita turned out to particularly cinematic for me because it also encoded other events that were happening at the time I was tracking it. 

When I was sequencing the album, I ran all the tracks in the background, and looked at the hundreds of images that I had collected, and found the image that was the representative frame for all the songs.

Walter Murch used representative frames in the process of film editing. It was the Still that represented the emotion conveyed, or the valence of a particular scene.

"The editor's job now is to choose the right images and make those images follow one another at the right rate to express something like what is captured in that photograph. In choosing a representative frame, what you're looking for is an image that distills the essence of the thousands of frames that make up the shot in question, what Cartier-Bresson--referring to still photography, called the "decisive moment." (In the Blink of An Eye, p. 41)

What does gray sound like?

The minor-second guitar slide in the Smiths' How Soon Is Now is psychogeographic is some ways depicting gray days in industrial Manchester--or industrial Chicago.

They are kind of like the Derives of the Situationists: "Psychogeography was a technique for re-imaging a landscape (usually urban). Walking through Paris using a map of Berlin was a classic example. It is still active today through the work of the London Psychogeographical Association and other groups. ('Pataphysics, p. 70)