Installation in downtown New Haven

The Phoenix was my first attempt at creating primarily sound-based public art works that are radical reorientations of a space’s identity, both constantly reframing and creating an aura of wonderment for the place.
In 2005, myself and Colby Brown (a transportation planner as consultant) won a competitive commission from the City of New Haven to make a new work that would transform a specified site for a period of six months (May- Sept ‘06).

The two of us spent about 40 hours observing the site, experiencing its fluctuations and documenting it’s characteristics under different conditions. I then made audio recordings in and around the site and both created and gathered sounds relating to the observations made. For this piece, I extended the approach taken in *asterisk to include sounds that came to me on-site as elaborations of existing conditions. (This kernel of sound, fantasy, and memory is more thoroughly explored in my most recent work, The End of Safari).

My goal was to create a piece that that could establish itself as an evolving organism that locals and commuters using the site on a daily basis would be interacting with. It was designed to be inviting, while perhaps inscrutable at first, and then more and more transparent over time while never losing it’s ability to surprise. It would operate twenty-four hours a day for the entire six month period, not making sound constantly but rather varying in its type and degree of site transformation.

The history of sound as a material for art in public space is primarily gentle, ambient, on the border of perceptibility. Part of this has been due to regulations governing noise in public space, but even more due to a prevalent drone-as-beauty aesthetic in sound art coming out of Max Neuhaus, LaMonte Young, Pauline Oliveros and the Acoustic Ecology movement. I’ve taken a different angle, which is to consider recorded sound as a public object that contains history, meaning, and values— a cultural artifact that can operate as a shorthand for many aspects of contemporary society. The way I’ve been composing invites the listener to hear sound not only for it’s musical/temporal value but for how the sounds within a work relate to each other as fractures and facets of cultural objects, bits of identity.

Colby Brown helped to conceptualize what information was knowable about the site in terms of traffic patterns and bus ridership, and assisted in gathering and structuring the data we could obtain. Together we devised how to gather and interpret long-term patterns of use via on-site motion sensors.
I wanted to create a piece that was not only site specific, but temporally specific, a work that would evolve in relation to the time-based phenomena that was already giving the site it’s temporality. While the sound material for the piece was composed intuitively, I expanded the approach to the score/software taken in *asterisk to include additional layers of information, some hard coded from observation and some gathered on-site via constantly activated sensors.
Seasons, traffic, bus schedules, time of day, day of week, where people were currently located in the site, where they had been most often, ambient loudness, and other factors were taken into consideration. In the final score, micro- compositions or what was called a “state” in *asterisk, were correlated to site conditions.
For example, there were pieces that only played on Sunday afternoons (one piece was composed entirely from bell sounds recorded all over New Haven) and some pieces only played in summer when the temperature reached above 80 degrees. After observing a woman who came and fed birds every day after lunch, I gathered many calls from birds common in New Haven and on occasion, at the normal time of her arrival, the site would erupt in an extreme aviary exuberance, timed as a kind of excitation of this existing use. Upon gathering that the bus schedule was astonishingly accurate, we realized that bus arrival and departure points constituted a dramatic change in site population. Depending on the time of day, these populations could be commuters, children going to school, or more difficult to pinpoint groups. Bus departures would become near-cadences in the sound piece, an opportunity for dramatic transformations. There were also a series of stop lights that would affect the ambient noise level dramatically — as a way to engage this dimension, I installed a shotgun microphone that would inform my software of how loud the Church St. facing was and adjust the piece to be in the appropriate relationship (usually the site was about equal, with both disappearances and stronger overlays possible). All of these factors were used not in the interest of establishing a quantitative artwork, but rather to inform my subjective relationship to the site.

About the Score
What follows the general description above is a series of pages that detail the structure of the score. The documents were created to communicate with a computer programmer who helped me to realize the score as software.

Overview of Score Structure

Planets

Continents

Events