Todd Kitchen and Dr. Steven Ricks, School of Music
My goal was to expose the musicality inherent in urban environments through a musical composition involving sound recordings made in New York City. Specifically, I used the sophisticated software available to me in the BYU Electronic Music Studio to identify the specific frequencies (pitches) and rhythmic patterns found in my field recordings. Afterwards I would present my findings with electronics and live instruments in a way that exposed these musical traits present in my recordings.
My trip to New York was a great experience. Along with doing recordings throughout the city I was able to visit the Juilliard School and the Manhattan School of Music and visit other places of artistic interest. I spent 4 days in the city and traveled primarily by subway or on foot. While outside I used a pair of microphones in a stereo setup to record my environment. These were on the end of a boom pole that allowed flexibility in where the microphones were positioned. For example I was able to get the microphones 15 above the surface of the Brooklyn Bridge to get a mixture of foot traffic and vehicle traffic underneath. When in enclosed spaces I used a handheld digital recorder for convenience and a bit of stealth. No matter how I recorded, though, I got lots of funny looks and questions (you would think that a man holding a microphone would be commonplace in New York). Despite the occasional wiseguys and job offers I did get lots of recording done. I planned out 12 sites to record that covered most of Manhattan and a bit of the Bronx. These sites included the financial district, the Freedom Tower, Brooklyn Bridge, Times Square, Grand Central Station, Rockefeller Center, 5th Avenue, Central Park, the Lincoln Center (home of the Juilliard School and the Manhattan Temple), Harlem, a New York Yankees game (both outside the stadium and inside during the game) and a collection of recordings on various trains throughout the city.
I learned a lot about recording in the open with this project. I had previously done some minimal recordings of this type and my goal was to capture specific individual sounds instead of a greater sound whole. One aspect to this recording that I did not take into account was inclement weather- I was delayed for parts of two days by rain and I didn’t have a good solution to recording in the rain other than finding cover. I did take wind into account by using wind screens on my microphones. Fearing that this wouldn’t be enough, I also used a filter that removes low frequency sound from the recordings. Looking back I think this was overkill and I likely lost some interesting sound material in the process. One other aspect I would have liked to have changed was my conspicuous presence in the city. My holding a microphone in plain sight made people consciously or unconsciously react to me, thus altering the environment more than I would have liked (the questions and cat-calls were also annoying). A stealthier setup would have helped this but perhaps at the expense of sound quality in the recordings. I did feel like I got a lot of things right, however. I used my ears to find interesting and musical sounds and I was very pleased with what I found in my recordings.
When I got back to Provo I immediately got to work sifting through my recordings to find what exactly made these environments musical. It was interesting in that there was a blend of natural and man-made sounds that often played off each other in interesting ways, for example birds chirping over the sound of a siren or air-conditioner as in Harlem. Continuous sounds (e.g. car horns, engines) were usually very complex, having very strong overtones of 5ths and octaves, and others having curious overtones of stacked 3rds. When sounds like these overlapped, they created lots of jazz-like harmonies, quite appropriate for one of the major centers of jazz in the 20th century. There were many underlying rhythms in the city, for example the rhythmic bumps of cars on the Brooklyn Bridge or steps on stairs at Grand Central Station. There were also some droning sounds that were a base on which the sound environment was built, notably one emanating from a grate in the sidewalk at Times Square. These are just a few examples of what I discovered. All of this material has been found documented with the help of specialized software in the Electronic Music Studio at BYU.
Moving forward: I wrote a sort of “study-piece” that shows how these musical elements can be exposed via a musical composition. Seeing as it is only a study, I will be expanding on the ideas developed in it to write 12 pieces, each based on a site in the city. These pieces will be for a small ensemble of musicians, and with the visit of a professional piano trio (piano, violin, cello) to the composition studio, I am considering such an ensemble as my target performance medium. When working with my original idea of resonating piano strings with speakers, I learned that sounds in the upper 2 octaves of the piano were nearly impossible to resonate at an audible volume. This has led to my undertaking, with the help of a piano technician, the creation of a device called the electromagnetic prepared piano. It’s purpose is to use magnets to resonate the piano strings and essentially turn the piano into a speaker through which sounds can be played. This will help create more ways to realize the goal of this project.