Auditory Memory of the City, as the Main Subject of Hearing

A city is where I found nothing but human-made products, and the sounds in the city can be heard only because of humans and due to the repetition of the generated sound pattern.

Sound patterns that can be heard as an every-day experience transform into normal invisible sensations that – once maintained in people’s memory - gradually become the identity of a region. This collective memory tends to repeatedly define itself from generation to generation.

Now, I am facing a tremendous collection of sounds, flowing in the memory of a city, and having a history as rich as that of the city itself.

Auditory Memory as a Basis for Creating an Audio Product

Even though auditory memory mostly implies an abstract of the city sounds and their repetition along with people’s presence, but in my opinion it is not restricted to the physical presence of people. Because our memory of the city is entangled with numerous objects, materials, and shapes that despite being silence themselves, but each induces an auditory quality in our minds (for instance, metal sculptures, stone buildings, and the empty fountain in the main city square, each imply a sound quality). Consequently, during the creation of an artistic audio piece, applying the audio potentials of objects in different places, and combining them with the collective auditory memory of the region, leads to a realistic depiction of the city in the specified time, as well as providing different audio timbres.

Moreover, utilizing regional and traditional musical instruments and familiar tones in the collective memory of the city, when considering the musical background of the city from a historical cultural perspective, and its concurrency with unpredicted occasions at the moment (as in the definition of coincidences by John Cage) are among factors which I always take into account.

The auditory memory can be regarded as a tool for organizing the flow of time, in order to create rhythms and timely patterns through concurrency and synchronicity.

The presence of silence and its role

Since the memory of a city always points to a certain time and space, the silence can be introduced when dealing with the feeling of timelessness and non-spatiality. In my opinion, the feeling of silence in a city can only be realized with exiting the dimensions of time and space (after the definition of time and space) (with regard to the definition of silence from a mystics-philosophical point of view, a perspective that has always been deemed remarkable in this geography).

Therefore, this project with a successive narration of time that alternates between the past and the present, and with regard to the flowing memory of the city , in one region (as artistic work). It consists of three steps:

A) Preproduction:

1. Selecting the proposed locations and preparing the sound maps from them.

2. Evaluating the spaces in terms of acoustics

3. Field research for the introducing the social memory, region identity and individual memory (generational) of the region and the auditory potential of the objects in the region.

B) Production

1. Designing the layout of the microphones and how the sounds are acquired, taking into account the acoustic structure of spaces, with regard to the objectives of the project.

2. If necessary, reproduction of the sounds that belong to earlier times, that can no longer be heard, but still playing a significant role in the social memory of people.

3. Presentation of a proposed audio design, based on the recorded sounds and the research, and built on the perspective of the artist.

(The audio design can go beyond the acquired sounds, and include recordings of different instrument groups, electronic tones and even an audio installation with regard to the objectives of the project).

C) Postproduction:

1. composition

Defining the output format, based on the available facilities for the presentation