If you lived in the United States in 2010, your presence can literally be heard in this three-and-a-half hour long piece of sound art that reveals what our cities may sound like if Earth were played like a slowly-spinning orb of cosmic vinyl.
The program ‘Photosounder’ is a standalone piece of software developed by Michel Rouzic that sells itself as the Photoshop of sound synthesis, allowing users to directly manipulate the spectral images of a sound sample or, conversely, harvest the sonic information of any image. The latter of these capabilities was the method I used to achieve my goal of representing the sound of cities in a way that was both interesting and consistently meaningful.
Without question, there are a myriad of ways in which one can interpret the idea of “the sound of cities” – a series of location-specific field recordings, or a genre developed by the effect of local artists on one another for example. But while these qualitative representations are valuable and speak to us on an immediately human level, there exists, if only slightly out of reach by abstraction, a more quantitative representation of cities where sound is concerned.
Photosounder’s Interface
A city is a city insofar as its size, location, and relation to other cities. Unsurprisingly, these variables correlate quite directly with the patterning of human populations; larger cities are home to higher densities of people, geographic elements define the shape and limits of their gradient borders, and the specks of intermittent habitation between these metropolises delicately dot the connective highways that weave across the land.
This patterning is no more readily apparent than in the 2010 US Census Dot Map, pictured partially above. Originally developed by programmer and data visualizer Brandon Martin-Anderson, the fully zoomable map has been updated by U.Va. researcher, Dustin Cable, to include racial data and is freely available online.
I fed an image of the original census dot map into Photosounder and set the playback speed so it would scan the country coast to coast at the same rate as the earth’s natural rotation. The brighter a pixel is in the image, the louder it will sound, and the closer it is to the top-most edge of the image, the higher its pitch will be.
The result is haunting, alarming, unbearable, occasionally harmonious, and oddly beautiful in all the various moments during the 3.5 hour passage across the country. Beginning in Maine with a steadily foreboding whistle, crawling down the east coast with a rattling, slow dive into lower and lower frequencies, striking Miami at its bellowing 50 Hz, dissolving away to the sparse, eerie expanse of Oklahoma and onwards, and finally screeching to a finish in the high frequencies of Washington’s Pacific Coast. Sorry Alaska and Hawaii, you guys exceeded the range of human hearing (and patience)!
It’s an aural snapshot of the US, a symphony heralding the dissonance of our 300+ million member orchestra. There’s plenty of things a zealous philosopher might have to say about it, so it’s worth admitting that any other country would sound essentially the same.
But make no mistake: image to sound, and thus sound back to image- the frequencies are true to the data. So if you were counted in the 2010 census, your presence is indeed heard, and whether or not that counts for much of anything…in my opinion, it’s at least pretty damn cool.
By Mark Wincek