Sheri Fox

I work from home. Alone. I´m not one of those people who turns on the radio or TV just to have some sound and on the rare occasions I feel the urge to dress up the silence, it´s about like pulling on a grey cashmere sweater to avoid a chill – discreet, soft and gentle. Anything with words, drums or familiar harmonies is out of the question. That does not leave me with a lot of choices. Most music is meant to be listened to, enjoyed, appreciated, or even intensely disliked. I am looking for something peripheral, but music demands my attention.

This is when I discover that I can listen to the sound of a Prague intersection. Not just any intersection in any city, but in Prague. If I didn´t know what I was listening to, my iphone would probably sound like I had called a blow–drier, but I know I´m listening to a true urban environment, which was, in fact, once the seat of the Holy Roman Empire and now a UNESCO world heritage site. Despite the fact that I work from home in the country surrounded by birdsong and wind–ruffled leaves, I prefer to listen to traffic.

On the iphone application Ambiance, intersections, cracking wheat fields, rain under an umbrella, a Hong Kong tram, a coffee maker, a vent duct, are just a sampling of the thousands of sounds you can choose to decorate your periphery. Sound designers in the entertainment industry have long had access to sound libraries and have paid attention to the particular characteristics of noise. But most of us have had to make do with the sounds and noises around us, something that we usually don´t even notice until there´s an incongruence or an unusual silence. Of course, ever since gramophones and boom boxes on shoulders and the walkman, we __________________________________________________________________________

listening to a boat breaking ice helps you concentrate, then perhaps knowing that "an icebreaker uses its great momentum and power to drive its bow up onto the ice, breaking the ice under the immense weight of the ship" will help launch you into the hostile world of the winter sea, and make you forget all about the airport terminal where you´ve been waiting for hours. Although, alternatively, you could always listen to "airport terminal" for an entirely different experience.

With the open availability of thousands of sounds we can use to change our surroundings, or even incorporate into other personal projects like films, presentations, or music, we have the ability to be extremely creative with sound and space. I contacted Jesper Norda, a professional artist and sound designer, to hear his thoughts about working with sound, and where he felt we were headed as the tools for working with sound become ever more widespread.

Jesper uses his works to help make us aware of our relationship with our own listening skills, and he is currently exploring this with a special exhibition, "Shelter" at Kulturhuset in Stockholm. There he has covered a portion of a large glass wall overlooking a central part of the city with blue photo filter to first give the viewer an unreal visual experience. Then, using small metal plates with a ceramic or crystal surface, he is able to implant sound into the actual material, where it takes on the qualities of the glass to become a wall of sound. One of his intentions here is to explore how sound is conducted through its surrounding material – a hard sharpness for glass, a warm scratchiness for plywood. For an earlier project, he created a play space in a hospital care unit for children with multiple disabilities. Being outside and exploring the the woods was quite difficult for the children, so Jesper was able to capture the same sense of adventure, using plywood and filtered light and then bringing the space alive with the outside sounds of wind and rain.

Jesper Norda likes the idea of using sound as a way to juxtapose our intellect and our emotions. In a 2009 exhibition, Tystnadens Mittpunkt (The middle of silence) created for a specific room in the Kalmar Museum of Art, he uses the space and spoken text to make the audience aware of their own listening role. However, aside from ambient sound applications and artistic spaces, we tend to assume __________________________________________________________________________

that our sound environment is no more than a result of the actual activities occurring around us. For instance, the sound of traffic is a result of real traffic, or the sound of recorded traffic that we have chosen to play in our living room.

But it appears that we may soon begin to notice, from a consumer perspective, other ways that sound is being used more strategically. Even things like the turn signal in your car (a click or a pling?) have been engineered for the optimal driving experience. Jesper recalls from his time working as an artist in residence at Volvo, that such things are not randomly selected, but carefully chosen based on a behavioral science and safety perspective: "a lot of thought goes into how we perceive the world around us in different situations, and how we distinguish sounds and signals from other information."

So it is not surprising that commercial brands are finding smarter ways of using using sound, not just as music for advertising, which we´ve already seen, but as a fundamental part of their brand identity. According to the survey Sounds Like Branding, brands are only just beginning to explore their distinct sound identity, even though they have always understood the importance of a strong visual identity. For many of the surveyed companies, acknowledging the importance of a sound identity is the easy part, but when it comes to making the budget, sound is still under–prioritized. Despite the fact that many brands believe that music and sounds will be a key identity element of the future, very few have actually begun making significant investments in this area.

It is exactly these kinds of clients that Jesper Norda works with through his day job as sound director at Kokokaka Interactive Agency, and he can attest to the fact that interactive media is making sound a greater priority for clients. "The clients who come to us already understand that the future is interactive, and they are looking for the most creative and outstanding ways to communicate. Sound and music used to be a later part of the planning stage, maybe because the starting point of a project was a film or image, now it can just as well be a unique sound." Kokokaka took advantage of all these elements in their award–winning campaign for the spring/summer 2010 collection for Wrangler Blue Bell.