| As a part of my interest in ambient music and documentary sound, I started Music For Places as a network of audio and visual artists interested in composing pieces that combine music, video and field recording.
If you have not yet noticed, hearing something for the second time will evoke the place you heard it the first time, similar to the way that smells are encoded with specific places. For instance, people that have been in a fire can recall the event when they smell smoke. I still recall specific places and events when I hear certain pieces of music. The more emotionally charged the event is, the more salient the memory.
Now that so many people have mobile audio players, and listen to music or other audio programs in the background, audio has become a type of aural mnemonic device, coupling things we hear to the places we first heard them. Music For Places is an attempt to combine foreground audio (the audio you are listening to with headphones), with ambient sound in the environment. Many times background elements that have pitch, such as screeching brakes, car horns, etc. fit right in with the music. Critics of the iPod contend that wearing earbuds in traffic is dangerous. It can be if the background sound is completely blocked out. My objective is to combine the two, where environmental sounds are still audible.
If you would like to become involved in the network of audio artists, here are some excellent resources.
Tony Schwartz
City of Sound
The Freesound Project
AUDIO SNAPSHOTS
Like a photograph, an audio snapshot is document of a specific place or sound that encodes our memories and archives the sounds of an era. The sound of the turnstyle in "Chicago Elevated Station 2007" will one day be a relic of a by-gone era, as may be the big noisy buses in 50 years.
The Crown Fountain audio was recorded on a hot summer day. This will be an interesting sound to play in your headphones while in the same place in the middle of winter!
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